Do we live in a celebrity-dominated consumer culture Essay

Do we live in a celebrity-dominated consumer culture - Essay Example "They should not be treated as fodder." But that's exactly how they are treated. MTV executives deny it, but when their young subjects vie for space with J-Lo and Jolie on the covers of People and Us Magazine, it's hard to say the shows aren't glamorizing teen motherhood. At a time when poorer, less educated teens in the U.S. are statistically more at risk of having children out of wedlock, this drive for market share feels predatory and seedy and feeds right into an American culture beset by narcissistic, self-destructive behavior† Tafaro, E. A., & Zuccarello, F. (2012, July-August). Chopped Chef: Celebrity Chefs Have Become Big Business. Not Having Adequate Disability Insurance for Them Can Be a Recipe for Disaster. Risk Management, 59(6), 16+. "If you are a Baby Boomer, you probably remember the cooking show The French Chef. Filmed live and uncut, you could hear the pots and pans bang, oven doors squeak, and chef Julia Child's singsong patter about life in the kitchen. It wa sn't terribly exciting, but Child became a pop-culture icon and was in many ways the first true celebrity chef. But somewhere along the way that tiny kitchen on Julia Child's low-budget set became "Kitchen Stadium" on Food Network's popular Iron Chef series. It became a place where chefs enter a culinary arena like gourmet gladiators, accompanied by blaring music, blinding lights that could illuminate an airport runway and the almost surreal sight of a man hoisting a $100,000 camera on his back while zooming in on the perfect close-up of a stick of butter melting in a frying pan. Today's celebrity chefs are treated like rock stars because they get paid like rock stars, led by Gordon Ramsay... This "Do we live in a celebrity-dominated consumer culture?" essay outlines how media change our values and our consumer needs. "Blum notes, however, that critical demands for "more realistic" media images are ineffectual: "To imagine that there are people who could change the images if they wanted to is to misunderstand the embeddedness of the image producers in a cultural machinery that they don't run but instead merely service. For them, as well as us, the linage and beauty are coextensive" (p. 65). Feminist calls for resistance to the beauty myth are no better, for there is no way to step outside the cultural frame and distinguish between genuine desires and those that are merely distortions of consumer capitalism. Blum cautions that in fact, "[w]e need to transcend feminist criticisms of body practices that can wind up being as shaming as the physical imperfections that drove us to beautify in the first place" (p. 63). I find little to disagree with in this analysis, as fer as i t goes, but find it strange that there is so little explicit consideration of the role of patriarchal structures in the increasingly high demands for feminine beauty. Although it's true that more men seek cosmetic surgery than ever before, Blum offers little discussion of how the need for male approval may influence women's choices to seek surgery. (And having recently read several devastating feminist critiques of the popularity of "labia reduction" and "vaginal rejuvenation" surgeries, I can't help but wonder what Blum's take on those procedures would be.)"