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Socially acceptable bullying?
By RickMeasham | June 1, 2008
OK, let’s start by getting one thing out of the way: I’m watching Big Brother again this year. I didn’t watch it last year and only glanced at it the year before. Each year it got more and more tawdry in the hope for ratings gold in catching two twenty-somethings in a drunken tryst. But this year it’s a little different. It’s been described as a ‘freak show’ in having a dwarf (sorry, little person), grandma, and a guy with a squeeky voice. But at least there’s some people who can talk about serious things.
If you’re still with me, you’re probably going to leave after the next confession: We’re watching Australia’s Next Top Model on Fox8: “Ahh! We got Jody mail!”.
Still with me? OK, that’s the end of the confessions for now, but feel free to leave your own confessions in the comments section.
What’s disturbed me about these two ‘unscripted television’ (there’s nothing ‘reality’ about it really now, is there?) is that they both show bullying between participants. Of course the hosts, producers, judges and commentators all feign horror (as well they should) but the problem is that it makes it to the TV. If they’re really so horrified, why do they show it? Apparently because it’s ‘real’. It’s ‘what’s going on’. They don’t want to hide any of the ‘journey’ (puke!) from the audience.
I had to laugh at the absolute cynicism of Jhodi Mheares when she started a program with a studio direct-to-camera piece a week after a group of girls taunted another participant until they got a reaction. She wanted to assure us that she was horrified also and that we should call some organisation or another if we were the victim of bullying. All of a sudden we’re supposed to laud them for ‘talking about it’ rather than pretending it didn’t exist.
On Big Brother, we’ve seen the constant bullying of Travis-of-the-squeeky-voice. The so-called Spa Mafia enjoy picking on him and leading him to the point where he makes a fool of himself. They then claim they’re trying to ‘educate’ him and that they’re really his friends.
We’ve seen this same group of bullies decide that blonde bimbette Bridgette should not receive any of her clothes back from Big Brother as some sort of punishment for being upset that he took them in the first place. Hello? What sort of moron-logic is this? She was upset she lost them so she doesn’t deserve to get them back? Dixie put it well: Whatever Bridgette’s reaction, Dixie would rather see someone happy than sad.
Now on Friday, the Spa Mafia broke into the toilet where Travis-of-the-squeeky-voice was having a poo and doused him with shower gel. Apparently this sort of bullying is called a ‘Poo Party’, like a few years back the bullying was called a ‘Turkey Slapping’. Travis ended up in the hospital overnight with an eye infection, and the Spa Mafia just shrugged it off.
Enough is enough! If society shuns bullying as much as they’d like to claim, then it needs to be stopped. In all these cases producers were watching it happen, cameramen were filming it, editors packaged it, directors approved it and television channels screened it. I first lay the blame at the feet of the producers who told the cameramen to just keep filming. Bullying must be stopped at the very first instance. It is not acceptable in any situation. I then lay the blame at the television stations who chose to air it: how dare you use bullying to make your television shows interesting?
So do we tacitly approve of bullying after all, so long as it makes for ‘good television’? If it happens on the television, are we so used to thinking of the world-in-the-box as being constructed that we lose sight of the fact that on these shows, they are real people being bullied by real people?
It’s time to enforce some rules: Bullying is out, or you’re out. There’s no second chances or forum for excuses. If you’re bullying someone in one of these unscripted television programs, you’re evicted, eliminated, kicked off the island, handed a rose or whatever. Zero Tollerance. ZERO.
Anyway, I’m off to watch Gordon Ramsay lambast some poor shmuck on Hell’s Kitchen.
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