Friday, July 13, 2007

The Stanford Prison Experiment Hits TV

With a gendered twist (via Feministing):
The participants will be brought to a remote, primitive location where the women will have the opportunity to “rule” as they build a newly formed society – one where there is no glass ceiling and no dressing to impress. For the men, their worlds of power and prestige are turned inside-out and upside-down. And for these women, turnabout is fair play!

In order to win, the men must accede to the women’s every demand, 24/7. Here, women command and men obey. Over the series’ duration, the men will be eliminated by the women until one last man is standing.

How will the men react? How will the women treat the men? Can women effectively rule society? Will the men learn what life is like for some women in today’s world? Will this new society be a Utopia or a hell on earth? And in the end, who will be man enough to succeed in the new social order?

And since the whole thing is being run by Fox, you know that it'll be classy.

The show is called "When Women Rule The World." In actuality, it sounds more like a modified repetition of the Stanford Prison Experiment, only without scientific planning. Reality shows that try to examine human behavior from a psychological standpoint rarely do a good job at it. The danger is to extrapolate from whatever happens on this show to make any real-world conclusions. I'd also note that any implicit claim that this even remotely resembles the feminist vision of the world is a gross mischaracterization of feminist theory and advocacy. I'm not talking about the results here, I'm talking about the set-up--feminists do not desire female "domination", indeed, the more radical you get, the more likely you are to see deconstructions of the entire concept of dominion.

Gag.

1 comment:

Flinger said...

Ah yes, how quickly the concept of female empowerment devolves into an S&M bottom fantasy in the minds of the cultrual right