Seth Woolf is writing a blog entry about Dr. Phil

Tonight’s Dr. Phil was all about women posting “inappropriate” pictures of themselves (i.e. sexually provocative or evincing extensive drinking or illicit drug use) on facebook and myspace. Even more than usual, today’s episode exhibited Dr. Phil’s proclivity toward using sweeping generalizations and blatant logical fallacies as the foundation of his analyses, which might better be characterized as arguments, if not Philicies. The good doctor was especially fond of Ad Hominem (“Okay, but you drink and you’re seventeen!”), appeals to tradition (“You think most people see this as liberating?), false dilemmas (these girls either don’t know what they’re doing, or are making stupid decisions), guilt by association (“You don’t post the pictures, but you do run the facebook group!”), slippery slope (“you’re not gonna be able to get into any colleges, or get any jobs!”), biased sampling (“so, you went into a coma after hitting your head from drinking?”), and the straw man (“I don’t look at these pictures and see Susan B. Anthony”). Beyond these simple, generally theory-less critiques, there are also deep, philosophically disturbing problems with Dr. Phil’s contentions. First of all, there is a large thematic and circumstantial problem with Phil’s approach. For one, though occasionally advised guests and viewers to refrain from participating in wild, compromising behavior, his focus was much more on simply restraining oneself from posting pictures of such behavior on popular internet forums. As such, his argument is not, in fact, about ethics, aesthetics, or everyday behavior as such, but rather the mouthings of a tragically unhip Luddite. A Marxist analysis of this strange parsing is very elucidating. If an individual of relatively simple means and power posts such a revealing picture or written omission, it is quite damaging to job prospects, the social order, and even the rituals of courtship. If, one the other, a major corporation or commercial power (i.e. Harpo productions, CBS, etc.) reveals selective information or negatively portrays someone it is not only said to be permissible, it is in fact lauded as being beneficial. Consider this simple hypothetical: you are an employer combing through candidates to fill a position in your company. You have settled on two candidates. The first, Ms. A, had a strong interview, resume, and references, but she has a picture on facebook of her clearly intoxicated, and vomiting. The second, Mr. B, also had a strong interview, resume, and references, and though he has no facebook account, he did appear on the Dr. Phil show in an episode that focused on spousal abuse. If you had to choose one of these two candidates, you would probably choose Ms. A. Similarly, one could imagine a website where users can communicate with others, view pictures and even movies of dubious social behavior, and learn potentially sensitive information about a variety of people. Is this website facebook or myspace? Yes, quite possibly. On the other hand, it might just as easily be Dr. Phil’s website. I do not intend to mirror Dr. Phils Ad Hominem thesis with and Ad Hominem antithesis of my own, however, one must realize that transference and projection are both very valid and significant issues in Freudian, Marxist, and postmodern thought. Indeed, a more positive antithesis to Dr. Phil’s thesis would be not to criticize people who are honest and open about their personal life, while embracing technology and feeling psychologically at peace with themselves, but to instead chastise those who behave deplorably and yet hide their authentically human actions and attitudes. It might be more accurate to say these people—and we could even include Dr. Phil among their ranks—are the ones in society who are antisocial and plagued by a certain psychotic tendency to admonish their own faults visible in the more economically and socially exploitable positions. To delve into another area of theory, there are a great many places to go in terms of gender, sexuality, feminist, and queer theory. Along the lines of my previous reasoning, one could take a lot from Luce Irigaray’s essay “This Sex Which Is Not One” where she writes that “woman is traditionally use-value for man, exchange value among men. Merchandise, then.” Particularly as Dr. Phil tried to show that the pictures he found so distasteful made employment opportunities scarce and possibilities of relationships with people like the audience member Roco impossible, it seemed more and more like the argument had less to do with one’s mental state, ethical value, and aesthetic well-being and far more to do with value as a lifeless commercial object. Other feminists, such as Susan Moller-Okin see sex as biological while gender is performed, claiming that “public policies and laws should generally assume no social differentiation of the sexes” (Justice, Gender, and the Family 175). Clearly, this is not Dr. Phil’s way. It is, to put it mildly, offensive and deeply biased to ask Roco if he would want to date women he only knows through “inappropriate” facebook pictures. For one, it reinforces a societal emphasis on the female exterior, only caring about a woman’s interior when it’s being vomited up in plain view. It also fails to ask these individuals—and one cannot forget that they are individuals—if they would ever consider dating someone like Roco. While this could be characterized as a double standard, it might be more realistic, and more inhumane, to interpret it as the male gaze and the lack of a female voice that is so often criticized by feminists. Lastly, there is also a very real questions pertaining to queer theory here. In “Imitation and Gender Insubordination” Judith Butler writes that “gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original” and that “the psyche is not ‘in’ the body, but in the very signifying process through which that body comes to appear.” These women are most assuredly not displaying themselves as women being taken advantage of, and women who are basically disgusting outcasts. That is the act of interpreting their actions, it is the “fantasy” as much as the “gender presentation,” and it is a potentially damaging, not advantageous, to closet that which desires to roam free, despite consequences. When one really looks at the topic with a postmodern gaze, rather than a male or Bourgeoisie gaze, the question is not why these women have facebook and myspace pages with pictures detailing their life, but rather, why doesn’t Dr. Phil? If it isn’t clear already, the simple point is, it is Dr. Phil, not any guest, who is in a position to really hide something significant, serious, and horrendous.

The (wo)Man Camp Which Is Not One

On today’s episode, “The Dr. Phil House: Man Camp Newlyweds, Part 2,” we were introduced to 3 troubled, recently married, couples as they enter the Orwellian Dr. Phil House. Though it was advertised and continually referred to during the show as “Man Camp”—which seems to suggest that it’s the men who are the delinquents needing to be trained—most of the attention, including criticism, was actually given to the three women. This leads me to believe that the most appropriate resource in an interpretation would be Luce Irigaray’s essay This Sex Which is Not One. Irigaray exposes many key ideas, starting with the observation: “Female sexuality has always been theorized within masculine parameters.” Already, this might help to explain why an episode largely devoted to the problems of women could retain the title of “Man Camp.” Irigaray continues by pointing out that “women and her pleasure are not mentioned…the penis is the only recognized sex organ of any worth.” Though critical of Freud, Irigaray seems to hold onto the general notion that sexuality and libidinal desires are at the core of all human interaction and psychology. Women’s genitals relate to their use of language and on neither level can they communicate with man’s desires because their logic and sex are both omnipresent and non-existent. Dr. Phil seems to embody this model perfectly. He orders the husbands and wives to be separated, and lets the men into the house first. Not only are the sexes (or we might more accurately say genders) not aloud to communicate, but they aren’t even coeval or ontologically present. One need not deny that the women—particularly the alcoholic Karla who the episode revolves around—have problems. There should be a degree of suspicion, though, that instead of offering concrete, systematic alcohol abuse treatment, the phallic Phil takes a great deal of time to expose and humiliate Karla for having an equally phallic bottle of vodka hidden in her purse. Even when he gives advice that could be viewed as more constructive, he seems unable to communicate with Karla as a women, exactly as Irigaray hypothesized. Dr. Phil claims that she’s “out of control.” Women don’t talk; they “whine.” Irigaray writes that “the vagina is a flaw” and, at times, Karla’s womanhood seems to be a problem that is as serious, or more problematic, than her drinking. When Dr. Phil and Karla’s father eventually shift their gaze to John, the husband, the only criticism is that he has anger issues and “a man who would hit a woman is a poor excuse for a man.” Though this chastisement is apparently meant to criticize John, instead it is saying he is a poor man (i.e. a woman?) and that the problem is not hitting people, but rather women. In this sense, too, the woman—not the man’s violence to overcome the communication gap and find material substance—is the root of the problem. Karla, it seems, is not being helped at all. In fact, as Irigaray writes, she is “more or less [a] complacent facilitator for the working out of man’s fantasies.” We learn what her husband, Dr. Phil, her father, her neighbors, and the other guests feel about her, but she remains one who is “indefinitely other in herself” with “no ‘proper’ name.” The great mistakes and abuses that Irigaray (a psychoanalyst who Dr. Phil apparently hasn’t read) warns about have become true. John, the husband, may be at fault for masochistically choking Karla to control her actions, but Dr. Phil does the same when he tries to “trap women into giving an exact definition of what they mean…mak[ing] them repeat (themselves) so the meaning will be clear.” Dr. Phil can put women in his house and observe and reconstruct their every hidden movement, but when he watches their lives go by in home videos, he still refers to himself as “an outsider.” If Irigaray is right, this means that, no matter how the existing order is toyed with, history will simply have to repeat herself without being understood.