The trouble with our perception of "reality"

December 14, 2011

I’m beyond wondering how we got here. That just doesn’t seem as important now, considering the fact that the tide has risen above our heads and we seem to be drowning. Sometimes, you have to get out of prevention mode and get into finding a solution. You have to break down and go to rehab when you can see that it’s gone too far. All I wanna know now is where is it going to end? When do we finally stop it? How can we finally stop the madness?

As I’m writing this piece, the music playing in the background is Prince doing a live version of the James Brown classic “Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Nothing”. This is where I see so called “reality TV” for women. There’s a lot of talking, enough bravado to make most men cower, a lot of name calling, a lot of catty behavior, a lot of backstabbing, a lot of sex and a lot of violence. Especially on shows featuring and even produced by black women. It seems that not only is this how society sees us, but it’s also how we see ourselves. Yes, women have finally gotten their moment in the spotlight. And they’re talkin’ loud, and sayin’ nothing.

Anyone that knows me knows that these shows are the bane of my existence. I literally can’t stand them. My hope is that they’d all be banished from our screens forever. However, having worked in television for 7 years, I know that no such thing is happening. This is the American way. There’s too much money being made right now. All I can do is turn my channel when I see them all in a bar or a club in a circle with drinks in their hands. In two minutes, someone’s throwing a drink in someone’s face and there’s gonna be hair pulling and punches thrown. Classy.

What’s crazy is I hear from women all the time about men not taking them seriously and society not understanding that they're human beings with feelings and emotions. They tell me to keep writing pieces and books that educate men on how they wanna be treated. They tell me that all they want is a man to treat them like the queens that they are. But some of those same women, women of some intelligence, mind you, refuse to turn off their televisions and not support foolishness like Basketball Wives, Love and Hip Hop, The Housewives series or The Kardashians. They wanna be seen in a positive way, while refusing to disallow the negatives from those that our young women are looking up to.

Women are either oblivious to the fact or just accepting of it, but 90 to 95% of reality shows devalue women. It makes them seem evil, desperate, horny, man crazy, money chasing, and at times, whorish. It paints the picture that they have an eternal jealousy of one another and an inability to get along. All in front of the entire world! From The Bachelor to The Bachelorette or something like Jersey Shore, where is the empowerment? Where is the display of pride? Where are the positive role models? Where are the women that they claim they wanna be seen as?

The game that’s played on these women is they have the power because they choose to be on the show and no one makes them. No one counsels them on why they’d make such a choice. At the same time, the women that watch these shows see nothing wrong with their support. They justify this in their minds be either saying something like” just because I watch it doesn’t mean I agree with it”, “just because I watch it doesn’t mean that I would act that way”, or my favorite, “at least she’s getting her money while all these other people just hatin’ on her”. It’s just entertainment, right?

Our women are unaware that shows like this are dragging them down, weave by weave, in spiral of destruction. Just as the father that’s in and out of jail tricks himself into believing that he’ll be able to provide his son with a set of morals that will keep him from following in his path, these women believe that they’ll be able to explain away this behavior when they have daughters. Seems like a logical thought until your 7-year-old is kicked out of school for fighting over a boy or because she’s wearing the wrong outfit.

Knowing that negative influences in music and on television are greater than they were in days past, you would think that we’d be more vigilant in protecting our children from these things. Instead, we’re watching this crap and not understanding what it’s doing to our psyche. The image of the beautiful black woman has been reduced to something that’s merely physical. We no longer wish to show the mentally strong black woman that would never allow the disintegration of all of their hard work to happen by their own hands. That strength has been redefined to be based on an outfit, a car, a house or which athlete you can get to leave his million dollar seed in you. We’re no longer fooled by some outsider. We’re doing it to ourselves.

The black women that see a real value in being a black woman have been shoved to the background by women that will trade their very dignity for a pair of red bottoms from a man that will call them “bitch” on national television. Shaunie O’Neal, ex-wife of former NBA star Shaquille O’Neal, was the “brains” behind Basketball Wives. The trick is she was smart enough to never be seen in any of the physical altercations that you see on TV. After all, she’s got kids to raise. She can’t let them see mommy acting this way. Nevermind what you’re doing to the village, just take care of your hut.

She’s even gone so far as to decry the violence that she sees in the show. But I’m sure she continues to cash her checks. If she were really outraged, she would’ve disassociated herself from the show. She has more than enough money, so she doesn’t need it. If she really cared about these women, she’d send a counselor to their condos rather than a camera crew. Instead, she furthers a practice that is as old as the day is long among black women: They sometimes destroy one another in order to elevate themselves. I guess the moral is, if you’re willing to give your race a black eye, you too can be like Shaunie.

The damage stretches from girl in the ‘hood all the way to celebrities. Even as we watch singer Fantasia give birth to a child that she conceived by sleeping with another woman’s husband, people will tell you that you’re a “hater” if you question the circumstances in which this child came about. Disregard the fact that someone like Fantasia, with her celebrity, could’ve chosen from plenty of men, but she instead chose someone else’s husband (before anyone questions, he had the commitment, so the responsibility to the marriage is his, but I think you get my point). Disregard the fact that this child was born to a woman that had already aborted one child and attempted suicide. There are greater issues that someone like Fantasia needs to consider before she brings a child into the world. Thank God the child was born healthy, for sure, but why don’t we want mama healthy, too? Why do we call anyone concerned about her choices and her well-being a “hater”?

The crazy thing about all of this is men used to love nothing better than a catfight. Watching two women rolling around and beating the crap out of one another used to give us some sort of sick thrill. However, with this “reality TV” thing, men are actually more turned off than the women. Some men have figured out the stupidity of it all while women have thrown their arms around it. They follow these people on Twitter and like their Facebook pages based on who beat up who for ratings and for the joy of those that don’t see value in black women. Where black women used to see their strength in being the backbone of their families, they now see it in being “that bitch”.

You even find women rooting for one woman to beat up another woman like we used to root for Mike Tyson to beat up other boxers back in the day, as if we’re all in high school in that circle as two kids fight. Why haven’t we grown out of this mentality? How is it that women don’t look at these people and realize that there is some psychological damage already done to these women that would have them putting their obvious flaws on display for profit?

I’m always saddened by the fact that women can’t see just how miserable all of these people are. Spending their days living off of the fortune they got from a man, while chasing another man around to keep it all going. How can any man take you seriously after seeing you on shows like these, behaving like this? Even if you convince him that it’s all an act, how can he not look at you with skepticism considering the fact that you’d “act” this way in an effort to portray it as who you really are? And how could he not be concerned about the fact that this may actually be who you are?

Just as it is when our young men walk around with their pants hanging off their behinds, we need to remember why our people fought so long and hard for equality. It wasn’t so we could go out and embarrass ourselves and call it power. Women like my mother didn’t push for equality so that we could do this to ourselves. Our people fought because we were tired of being thought of as “less than”, not so we can have the right to control it and do it to ourselves. Where is the dignity?

I’m very well aware that whenever I get on this particular soap box, a lot of women ignore me. They see me as just another man trying to tell them what they can’t have. They’d rather not look at the fact that they’re being portrayed as animals, tapping into some primal part of who they are, placed on TV to fight for whatever they feel the prize is.

They lose sight of the fact that if a female animal fights in the jungle, she’s fighting to protect her babies. It has nothing to do with shoes, money, fake weddings or rumors that are started and maintained by the people that brought you all together in the first place. Unlike the women on these shows, a female animal fights to preserve life. All I see on these shows are women that are fighting for the right to kill the very image of what they should be. Strong, beautiful and intelligent black women. Slowly, but surely, they’re succeeding.