Weight, Clothes, and Looks

By way of more productive procrastination (I really should be finishing up an article draft now--it is in fact due to the editor soon, but I don't wanna) here I go on a half-baked discourse analysis that lazily throws in a few undeveloped theory references so I can feel like I'm doing something scholarly. Ladies, and gentlemen, I give you "Kymaro's New Body Shaper":



I am not an infomercial watcher (is anyone?)--but I was so struck the other day by the opening statement of that program--"Stop suffering everytime you look at yourself in the mirror"--that I had to sit up and take notice. What you have here is not a mere suggestion that your appearance (though surely pleasing as it is now, perhaps just needing a little help) could maybe be improved by this apparatus. No--what we have is a foregone conclusion that you, audience member, whoever you are, are so hideously deviant in some way that you are undoubtedly reduced to tears by the sight of your pathetic self. I ask you--is this really the best way to begin a thirty minute ad in which you hope to convince people (ugly and freakish as you believe they are) to buy something from you?

And in mulling over the unexplored warrant of Kymaro's rhetorically misguided imagineers, I began to feel rather uneasy about programs that have a similar subtext--where the aim is to get people to stop embarrassing themselves, their families, and the general public with what they wear. Consider, for example, a show like "How Do I Look?"--I actually watch this one because I find Finola Hughes far less shrill and abrasive than the duo on "What Not to Wear". In this clip, Finola and the fashion victim's buds verbally shred her wardrobe:



I'm not sure what my problem is with all that--it's not that I necessarily think that people shold not dress in manner that does not fit some system of propriety. For example: women my age just should not wear Hello Kitty anything. But at the same time there's a really Clockwork Orange kind of thing going on in these shows--a sort of "let's foribly re-indoctrinate you into the world of the sane through fashion. And let's do it under the guise of helping you find the 'true' you." And sometimes, the makeover-ees (generally female) rebel, making it clear that they are going to keep on wearing their green corduroy bellbottoms and crocs to work. I applaud them.

Oh, yeah, I forgot about the apathetic theory references that I won't bother to tie into this in any effective reader-based way...ummmm, Foucault and the Panopticon. Discuss :).