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.