Body Image in Popular Culture, a new class that the ASU English department is offering in the spring, will examine how popular culture effects people's perception of beauty and self-image.
It's about time.
My only gripe is that it's not a mandatory undergraduate class. Young people in our shallow society can use all the education they can get on the subject.
Hopefully a major topic in the class will be the corporate interests (designed to separate young people from their money), which drive so much of popular culture.
As it stands now, corporations overwhelm young people with aggressive, ubiquitous and unscrupulous advertising designed to make money using one strategy: getting people to feel bad about themselves for not looking good, for not being cool and for not having enough.
This advertising is pervasive in many forms beyond TV commercials and magazine spreads. Ultimately films, television shows and popular music all share this common commercial goal, and they don't care what kind of damage they do to young psyches.
Of course, this corporate strategizing affects all of us. Just drive around the Valley on the weekend to see that a lot of people in this town can't think of anything better to do with their time than spend money. And they seem to have no idea that corporate masters manipulate them like puppets.
Take for example the recent opening of the IKEA furniture store in Tempe. Consumers were so obsessed by the prospect of dumping dollars in the new place in town that they created a freeway jam on IKEA's opening day.
Never mind that the furniture is cheap-looking and not of particularly great quality. Advertising made the place all the rage, and people -- probably for no rational reason that they could articulate -- felt like they had to have their product.
And the advertising was relentless. In one week IKEA sent me three separate catalogs in the mail. Maybe they thought I'd buy three of everything. Someone probably did.
So advertising affects us all, but young people -- already uncertain of their identity -- battling raging hormones and desperate to find a place to fit in, are most susceptible to messages that sell the fantasy that spending money will make them happier and more desirable.
And the sellers of this fantasy have only gotten better at selling it. Certain businesses that traditionally have targeted the teenage market -- movies, music, clothes, makeup, fast food and video games -- have found that they can massively broaden their market if they extend the life of the American teenager.
So they've stretched their net as wide as possible, making young people oblivious to history or concerns of the adult world. Corporations want an immature, narcissistic, selfish, shortsighted, needy culture because such people buy things, even if they don't need them or can't afford them.
Often, men and women who are 18, 19, 20 and even older, continue to lead essentially the same lives and have the same interests they had in high school, instead of moving on to a serious sense of responsibility, a broadening of horizons and more mature interests.
When I was 18, I had a wide array of interests and a decent grasp of the culture -- popular and otherwise -- of my parent's generation. I knew about history, about the films and music and books that had come before me.
But the generation gap has shrunk incredibly. Where I once could find common ground with someone even 10 years older than me, now I have a hard time making associations with people justfive years younger than me.
This is partially because corporations push new products so relentlessly. They don't want young people to learn anything beyond what's in front of them. It is completely against their interests to have a society of smart, mature, critical thinkers. Thinkers of that nature might see through the manipulative facade of cynical advertising that relentlessly tells them how worthless and unattractive they are.
Hopefully, the Body Image and Culture classes will address these larger issues along with their planned topics of diet, weight, self-esteem and eating disorders. A big part of the problem with body image issues is that young people aren't conscious of the corporate powers aligned against them. But you have to know who your enemies are before you can start your revolution against them.
Michael Green is pursuing graduate degrees in creative writing and film and media studies. Send him invitations to Thanksgiving dinner at michael.b.green@asu.edu
