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Promoting promiscuity SOON after The Bold and the Beautiful was aired on Indian idiot boxes, a colleague made a pertinent observation—the storyline could be summed up by saying that everyone was sleeping with someone other than the person he/she was legally supposed to do so with, i.e., their respective spouses. Other shows followed, even in Hindi for mass effect. Many featured stars in revealing costumes and you wondered if it could get worse. It did.
As if exposing physically to the audience was not enough, along with baring emotions, they stuck a ‘reality’ tab on it. You have Star TV airing Fox Television’s Temptation Island, a show in which four unmarried, but long-steady couples are taken to a Caribbean island, split into two gender groups, surrounded with 26 specially selected, scantily clad, attractive men and women, chosen specifically to entice them, for two weeks and asked to…well, resist temptation. Why do they do it? Well how about fun and profit, so what if there’s disgrace also in the process. The thrill, hope the
TV people, will be in seeing how the partners react when subjected to
this form of temptation. This is meant to be reality television,
though it is better termed as voyeurism of sorts, with seemingly
insatiable audiences watching the relationships go through the kinds
of ups and downs that were simply not realistically expected. Putting
the Devil where it doesn’t exist. |
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What’s wrong in that? Everything, one might say. It is simply not fair to subject people to situations where they have to make such choices. Besides, the basic motive behind it is not to subject the couples to a fidelity test but to drive up ratings, no matter how low you hit below the belt. The show has raised a storm even in America, but in India, it has not yet attracted too much negative attention, yet. This is a pity, because it certainly deserves it. This kind of shows cater to voyeuristic instincts and are certainly not about "a deeper look into relationships," as a Fox executive claimed when the show aired in America. There may be nothing profound about scantily clad men and women frolicking around the island, while being enticed by specially selected persons who have the kind of characteristics that appeal to the potential ‘seducties’. It does, however, profoundly affect the value system of a society dominated by what are normally called middle-class values by making it so very normal to do what would otherwise be unthinkable; by giving an air of respectability to activities that would otherwise be condemnable; and by pandering to promiscuity. Is there a causal relationship between break-up in marriages and the extra-marital affairs that dominate soap operas these days? You could argue either way, but there is a degree of acceptability, born out of familiarity as related to television viewing, that such affairs enjoy today, as opposed to the widespread condemnation they would attract earlier. If the TV characters are doing it, why can’t we? True, social reality is far from ideal, but mass media has often had a role in shaping society. Lowering the standards of acceptability in an ever-enlarging search for ratings is not an acceptable social model, neither does it make sense. In any case it is not also practical, since according to one report, it did not make it to the top shows anyway. They call such shows reality
television. Reliving oneself is also an actuality, yet one does not do
it in public. There is reality that we watch, discuss and cogitate on,
and then there is this other kind. To coin a Confucianism: "Man
need not step into excrement to know he should avoid it." Yet
audiences will. We are well on our way to becoming a more sick society
in which reality is what is produced for us to consume through the idiot
box. |
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