Freaks Talk Back

Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity

Joshua Gamson

• Editorial: University of Chicago Press
• Año: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780226280639
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Sociology

Using extensive interviews, hundreds of transcripts, focus-group discussions with viewers, and his own experiences as an audience member, Joshua Gamson argues that talk shows give much-needed, high-impact public visibility to sexual nonconformists while also exacerbating all sorts of political tensions among those becoming visible. With wit and passion, Freaks Talk Back illuminates the joys, dilemmas, and practicalities of media visibility."This entertaining, accessible, sobering discussion should make every viewer sit up and ponder the effects and possibilities of America's daily talk-fest with newly sharpened eyes."— Publishers Weekly "Bold, witty.... There's a lot of empirical work behind this deceptively easy read, then, and it allows for the most sophisticated and complex analysis of talk shows yet."—Elayne Rapping, Women's Review of Books "Funny, well-researched, fully theorized.... Engaged and humane scholarship.... A pretty inspiring example of what talking back to the mass media can be."—Jesse Berrett, Village Voice "An extraordinarily well-researched volume, one of the most comprehensive studies of popular media to appear in this decade."—James Ledbetter, Newsday

1 WHY I LOVE TRASH

One can only imagine what this constant attention to the fringes of society, to those who break rules, is doing to our society’s ability to define and constrain deviance. One thing seems fairly certain: law-abiding, privacy-loving, ordinary people who have had reasonably happy childhoods and are satisfied with their lives, probably won’t get to tell their stories on Phil, Sally, or Oprah…. Television talk shows are not interested in adequately reflecting or representing social reality, but in highlighting and trivializing its underside for fun and profit.

PROFESSORS VICKI ABT AND MEL SEESHOLTZ¹

Nobody wants to watch anything that’s smarmy or tabloid or silly or unseemly—except the audience.

TALK SHOW HOST SALLY JESSY RAPHAEL²

Doesn’t she look like a weird, scary drag queen?

FILMMAKER GREGG ARAKI, ON TALK SHOW HOST SALLY JESSY RAPHAEL³

Let’s begin here: talk shows are bad for you, so bad you could catch a cold. Turn them off, a women’s magazine suggested in 1995, and turn on Mother Teresa, since watching her “caring feelings” radiate from the screen, according to psychologist Dr. David McClelland of Harvard, has been shown to raise the level of an antibody that fights colds. “It stands to reason,” reasons the First magazine writer, “that viewing threatening, confrontational images could create an opposite reaction.” In fact, given that talk shows “create feelings of frustration” and fear, “shatter our trust and faith” in our expectations of people’s behavior, and “give us a false perception of reality,” it is perhaps best to watch game shows or soaps while nursing that cold. Watching daytime talk shows could conceivably send you into a decline into pathologies of all sorts: scared, angry, disgusted, convinced that you are abnormal for not fitting in with the “cast of misfits and perverts,” susceptible to both perversion and more colds.

While the Mother Teresa versus Jerry Springer matchup is out there enough to be camp, the hand-wringing it represents is only an exaggerated version of the many criticisms and political rallying cries aimed at talk shows over the last few years. Experts of all sorts can be found issuing warnings about talk show dangers. Before bringing out Dr. McClelland, for instance, the First article quotes George Gerbner, dean emeritus of the Annenberg School for Communication (“These shows are virtually destroying the goodness of America”), Harvard psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint (“It does not bode well for the future generation of young people growing up on a steady diet of this drivel”), and Fred Strassberger, once chair of the media task force of the American Psychological Association (“It’s now becoming alarmingly clear that talk shows are adding greatly to the fear, tensions and stress in our society”); later, TV critic Tom Shales joins in (“These shows are portraying Americans as shallow monsters”), along with psychologist Robert Simmermon (“cruel exploitation of people’s deepest wounds to entertain viewers who could very well wind up believing such aberrant behavior is normal”).⁴ Goodness, normality, and stability, if we buy these arguments, are all threatened by the drivel, exploitation, and monstrosities of daytime TV talk shows.

One person’s trash, though, is another person’s gold mine. Sure, I sometimes hate these shows. What’s not to hate? They can be among the most shrill, mean, embarrassing, fingernails-on-the-blackboard, one-note, pointless jabber. But I can’t help it, I love them just the same. In part, I love them because they are so peculiar, so American, filled with fun stuff like “relationship experts” (who are not actually required to have any credentialed expertise; it’s almost enough just to declare “I’m a people person”) and huge emotions, and hosts who wear their hypocrisies on their tailored sleeves, shedding tears for the people whose secrets they extract for profit while attacking them for revealing secrets on national television, riling up their guests and then scolding them for being so malicious. Silly as they can be, daytime TV talk shows are filled with information about the American environment in which they take root, in which expertise and authenticity and rationality are increasingly problematic, and in which the lines between public and private are shifting so strangely. And they embody that information with Barnumesque gusto. I like what talk shows make us think about.

But there’s more to my affinity. Although you might not know it from looking at me, and although in many ways my behaviors and tastes are embarrassingly conventional—a good story, a comfortable pair of jeans, hugs—I identify with the misfits, monsters, trash, and perverts. From that perspective, talk shows look rather different. If you are lesbian, bisexual, gay, or transgendered, watching daytime TV talk shows is pretty spooky. (Indeed, it must be unnerving and exciting for pretty much anyone whose behavior or identity does not conform to the dominant conventions of goodness, decency, and normality.) While you might get a few minutes on national news every once in a while, or a spot on a sitcom looking normal as can be, almost everywhere else in media culture you are either unwelcome, written by somebody else, or heavily edited.

On television talk shows, you are more than welcome. You are begged and coached and asked to tell, tell, tell, in an absurd, hyper enactment of what Michel Foucault called the “incitement to discourse,” that incessant modern demand that we voice every this-and-that of sexuality.⁵ Here you are testifying, dating, getting laughs, being made over, screaming, performing, crying, not just talking but talking back, and you are doing these things in front of millions of people. The last few years have seen shows on “lipstick lesbians,” gay teens, gay cops, lesbian cops, cross-dressing hookers, transsexual call girls, gay and lesbian gang members, straight go-go dancers pretending to be gay, people who want their relatives to stop cross-dressing, lesbian and gay comedians, gay people in love with straight ones, women who love gay men, same-sex marriage, drag queen makeovers, drag kings, same-sex sexual harassment, homophobia, lesbian mothers, gay twins, gay beauty pageants, transsexual beauty pageants, people who are fired for not being gay, gay men reuniting with their high school sweethearts, bisexual teens, bisexual couples, bisexuals in general, gays in the military, same-sex crushes, hermaphrodites, boys who want to be girls, female-to-male transsexuals, male-to-female transsexuals and their boyfriends, and gay talk shows—to mention just a few. Watching all this, be it tap-dancing drag queens or married gay bodybuilders or self-possessed bisexual teenagers, I sometimes get choked up. For people whose life experience is so heavily tilted toward invisibility, whose nonconformity, even when it looks very much like conformity, discredits them and disenfranchises them, daytime TV talk shows are a big shot of visibility and media accreditation. It looks, for a moment, like you own this place.

Indeed, listening closely to the perspectives and experiences of sex and gender nonconformists—people who live, in one way or another, outside the boundaries of heterosexual norms and gender conventions—sheds a different kind of light on talk shows.⁶ Dangers begin to look like opportunities, spotlights start to feel like they’re burning your flesh. Exploiting the need for visibility and voice, talk shows provide them, in distorted but real, hollow but gratifying, ways. They have much to tell about those needs and those contradictions, about the weird and changing public sphere in which people are talking. Just as important for my purposes, talk shows shed a different kind of light on sex and gender conformity. They are spots not only of visibility but of the subsequent redrawing of the lines between the normal and the abnormal. They are, in a very real sense, battlegrounds over what sexuality and gender can be in this country: in them we can see most clearly the kinds of strategies, casualties, and wounds involved, and we can think most clearly about what winning these kinds of battles might really mean. These battles over media space allow us to get a grip on the ways sex and gender conformity is filtered through the daily interactions between commercial cultural industries and those making their lives within and around media culture. I watch talk shows for a laugh and a jolt of recognition, but also for what they can tell me about a society that funnels such large questions—indeed, that funnels entire populations nearly wholesale—into the small, loopy spectacle of daytime talk.

Defecating in public

It is a long, twisted road that takes us toward insight, but the controversy over the talk show genre in general—a genre itself largely composed of controversy and conflict—is a promising first step. On the one side, cultural critics, both popular and scholarly, point adamantly toward the dangers of exploitation, voyeurism, pseudotherapy, and the “defining down” of deviance, in which the strange and unacceptable are made to seem ordinary and fine. On the other side, defenders both within and outside the television industry argue that talk shows are democracy at work—flawed democracy but democracy nonetheless—giving voice to the socially marginalized and ordinary folks, providing rowdy commonsense counterpoints to elite authority in mass-mediated culture. Beneath each position, and in the space between them, is a piece of the puzzle with which this book is playing.

The list of dangers is well worth considering. There is, to begin with, concern for the people who go on the shows, who are offered and accept a deal with the devil. They are manipulated, sometimes lied to, seduced, used, and discarded; pick ’em up in a limo, producers joke, send ’em home in a cab. They are sometimes set up and surprised—“ambushed,” as critics like to call it—which can be extremely damaging, even to the point of triggering lawsuits and murderous impulses, as in the case of Scott Amedure, who revealed his secret crush for Jonathan Schmitz on a never-aired Jenny Jones Show, including his fantasy of tying Schmitz up in a hammock and spraying him with whipped cream and champagne. Amedure was murdered several days later by Schmitz, who, after receiving an anonymous love note, went to his admirer’s trailer home near Detroit and shot him at close range with a 12-gauge shotgun. Schmitz complained that the show had set him up to be humiliated. “There was no ambush,” a spokeswoman for Jenny Jones owner Warner Brothers said; “that’s not our style.” Amedure, Schmitz proclaimed, had “fucked me on national TV.”⁷

Although most survive without bodily harm, guests often do considerable damage to themselves and others. They are offered airfare and a hotel room in New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago, a bit of television exposure, a shot of attention and a microphone, some free “therapy.” In exchange, guests publicly air their relationship troubles, deep secrets, and intimate life experiences, usually in the manners most likely to grab ratings: exaggerated, loud, simplified, and so on. Even more disturbing, perhaps, it is those who typically do not feel entitled to speak, or who cannot afford or imagine therapy, who are most vulnerable to the seduction of television. This is, critics suggest, not a great ’deal for the guests, since telling problems and secrets in front of millions of people is a poor substitute for actually working them out. Not to mention, critics often add, a bit undignified. “Therapy is not a spectator sport,” says sociologist and talk show critic-at-Iarge Vicki Abt. Telling secrets on television is “like defecating in public.”⁸

While it is worth challenging the equation of talking and defecating, all this, we will see, is basically the case. But it is also the easy part: talk shows are show business, and it is their mission to exploit. They commodify and use talkers to build an entertainment product, which is then used to attract audiences, who then are sold to advertisers, which results in a profit for the producers. Exploitation thus ought to be the starting point for analysis and not, as it so often is, its conclusion. The puzzling thing is not the logic of commercial television, which is well documented, well understood, and extremely powerful, but why so many people, many of them fully aware of what’s expected of them on a talk show, make the deal.

Yet it is not really the guests, generally dismissed as dysfunctional losers on display, who concern talk show critics most centrally. It is the audience, either innocent or drawn in by appeals to their most base interests, that preoccupies critics the most. For some, the problem is the model of problem solving offered. Psychologists Jeanne Heaton and Nona Wilson argue in Tuning in Trouble, for instance, that talk shows provide “bad lessons in mental health,” offer “bad advice and no resolutions for problems,” and wind up “reinforcing stereotypes rather than defusing them.” “Credible therapeutic practice aimed at catharsis or confrontation,” they point out, “is quite different from the bastardized Talk TV version.” Indeed, they suggest that viewers avoid “the temptation to apply other people’s problems or solutions to your own life,” avoid using “the shows as a model for how to communicate” or as tools for diagnosing friends and relatives, and so on.⁹ The advice is sound, if a bit elementary: talk shows are not a smart place to look for either therapy or problem solving.

Beyond the worry that audiences will adopt therapeutic technique from daytime talk, critics are even more troubled by the general social effects of talk shows. Here and there, a critic from the Left, such as Jill Nelson writing in The Nation, assails the casting of “a few pathological individuals” as representatives of a population, distracting from social, political, and economic conditions in favor of stereotypes such as “stupid, sex-addicted, dependent, baby-makers, with an occasional castrating bitch thrown in” (women of all colors) and “violent predators out to get you with their penis, their gun, or both” (young black men).¹⁰ More commonly, though, critics make the related argument that talk shows indulge voyeuristic tendencies that, while perhaps offering the opportunity to feel superior, are ugly. “Exploitation, voyeurism, peeping Toms, freak shows, all come to mind in attempting to characterize these happenings,” write Vicki Abt and Mel Seesholtz, for instance.¹¹ “For the audience,” Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz adds in Hot Air, “watching the cavalcade of deviant and dysfunctional types may serve as a kind of group therapy, a communal exercise in national voyeurism.”¹² These “fairground-style freak shows” are just a modern-day version of throwing Christians to the lions, psychologists Heaton and Wilson assert: in place of Christians we have “the emotionally wounded or the socially outcast,” in place of lions are “psychic demons,” in place of blood there is psychological damage, in place of crowds yelling “Kill, kill, kill!” we have crowds yelling “Why don’t you cut his balls off?”¹³ Even if such events serve to unite the Romans among us, offering what Neal Gabler calls “the reassurance of our superiority over the guests and over the programs themselves,”¹⁴ they do so at significant costs. “Perhaps the sight of so many people with revolting problems makes some folks feel better about their own rather humdrum lives,” Kurtz argues, but “we become desensitized by the endless freak show.”¹⁵ Talk shows are pruriently addictive, the argument goes, like rubbernecking at car wrecks: daytime talk shows are to public information what pornography is to sexual intimacy.

I will have more to say about the ceaseless characterization of talk shows as “freak shows,” but for now it is enough to note that the lines are drawn so starkly: between Christians and Romans, between “deviant and dysfunctional types” and “some folks,” the guests and “us,” between “the fringes of society, those who break rules” and “law-abiding, privacy-loving, ordinary people who have had reasonably happy childhoods and are satisfied with their lives.” These are important lines, and plainly political ones, and the ones critics most fiercely act to protect. And as one who falls both within and outside the lines, I find the confidence with which critics draw them in need of as much careful consideration as the genre’s alarming exploitations.

In fact, the lines of difference and normality are the centerpiece of the arguments against talk shows: talk shows, critics repeat over and over, redefine...