NPR: The New Perfectionism?

[FaxModem1]

http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2013/03/1 ... ourselves?

The New Perfectionism: Why Can't We Just Be Ourselves?

by Alva Noë
March 17, 201311:29 AM

My kids and I like to watch TV together before bedtime. Baseball, if I get to decide; The Big Bang Theory, or Star Trek: The Next Generation if it it's up to them. Our favorite commercial is this one for Applebees. I can't see it without smiling. Just check out the way the men dance! It's very good.

Like millions of others, another TV moment I enjoyed was Mrs. Obama's star-turn dancing with Jimmy Fallon.What these two spots have in common is that they put "the dancing common person" on display. And the thing about the dancing common person when she dances: she's beautiful!

But that's not all they have in common. The Applebee's ad is directed at selling a low-calorie special. And the first lady went on TV in order to promote the importance of mothers moving with their kids in order to stave off obesity.

Applebee's has every right to hawk its wares, and I certainly don't want to criticize Michelle Obama's efforts.

But there is something else going on and we need to notice it.

How sad to link dancing to self-improvement! Dancing isn't for weight loss. It's for ecstasy, or play, or display, or romance and courtship. Dancing is for pleasure.

It's actually awkward to watch television with the boys, because almost every commercial presupposes the imperfection, inadequacy and misery of adult human being. We are targeted as overweight, as lonely, as unable to perform sexually, as depressed, as unable to stop smoking. We are displayed to ourselves as unhappy.

What is going on here?

It has a lot to do, I think, with the New Perfectionism that holds sway in our culture, something I wrote about a few weeks ago. Somehow it is not enough to be. We need to be perfect. Perfectly lean and muscular. Perfectly healthy. We need perfect sex lives with our perfect partners. And we need perfect kids too. And we need to figure it all out and do it by ourselves, in the setting of our private little start-ups we call families.

The New Perfectionism, probably, is a perverse extension of a trend that goes back to the Enlightenment, with its unbridled individualism and rejection of tradition and religion as a source of value. We carry the burdens not only of living, but of deciding for ourselves how we ought to live, what sort of life counts as good.

In 21st-century America this finds expression in the quest for "Abs of Steel" and the urges of the "Tiger Mom."

You can keep up with more of what Alva Noë is thinking on Facebook and on Twitter: @alvanoe

The two vids in question:
Applebees:


Jimmy Fallon and Mrs. Obama 'mom-dancing'.

Now frankly, I think the writer has a point about our quest to be perfect being present all over TV. But in these two vids, I just don't see it. In both vids, they look exceptionally goofy, and don't prove his point.

Course, there's also the perspective that TV watchers are a bunch of couch potatoes who do nothing but eat McDonalds and pizza as well as drinking gallons of coca-cola and beer, so maybe they should feel bad for not looking their best.

Thoughts?

[Ziggy Stardust]

I don't really see what his problem with these two commercials are, to be honest. Though to be fair I am always of the opinion that hyperanalyzing things like advertising trends is a fairly pointless exercise that isn't as revealing as some social psychologists seem to believe (you can be attracted to the hot girl in a Victoria's Secret ad without hating more normally proportioned women). Though I do admit that this is more of a "gut feeling" argument than anything I've extensively researched.

As for the wider point of the article, I'm a bit divided. On one hand, I think he does have a bit of a point. On the other hand, I think he is overstating it, and cherry-picking examples that he thinks feeds it. Even if he IS right about there being a "New Perfectionism" movement, I am not entirely convinced this is, or would be, a bad thing.

[Crazedwraith]

The arguement seems to be 'adverts make us seem to be unhappy'. Well no shit. An adverts purpose is to convince you, you won't be happy unless you buy the product. Of course they're going to be like that.

It's not some giant conspiracy. Just marketing.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

It doesn't have to be a giant conspiracy to be something that is causing negative effects and should be changed.

[Crazedwraith]

I'm not sure how you can do that without just banning advertising. Like I said they've got to make you seem bad now, if they tell you you're perfect, you don't need to buy their product.

[Ziggy Stardust]

On one hand, there are some instances of definitive negative impact from advertising: smoking, for one, though outdated. Another would be the link between the prevalence of anorexia and other feeding disorders among teenage girls as a result of certain norms advanced through marketing imagery. On the other hand, and there is no argument that feeding disorders are bad mind you, how do you differentiate between imagery that is simply promoting a healthy lifestyle and one promoting being "unhealthily" skinny? That is, do we overcompensate by showing slightly plumper models so kids don't inadvertently get "too" skinny?

[Junghalli]

I was thinking as I was reading that that a lot of this culture is probably driven by capitalism and its institutional incentive to create new consumer "needs". "You are inadequate, but thankfully there is a solution: buy this product and/or service I am selling!"

The point about it being an outgrowth of the Enlightenment parallels some thoughts I've had too though. I'm not sure I can articulate a coherent thesis about it at this point, but I think there might be a connection there with the idea of the progressive improvement of the human condition, especially with this becoming a kind of biomedical project.