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.