If there was ever an example of just how poisoned and delusional the harmful world of women’s lifestyle media is, surely this is it. Last month, Marie Claire, which has always had a knack of dressing up trash as credible infotainment, surveyed their readers and found that only a dismal 12 percent were “happy with their bodies”. Of course, the irony of the women’s lifestyle industry is that this is, far from an alarming figure, a comforting picture of the very anxiety that fuels sales. If women weren’t happy with their bodies, sex lives and wardrobes, they… well…. wouldn’t need to fork out money for cokehead hacks from Potts Point to tell them what they should be looking like. But Marie Claire cares – it wants Australian women to know that even though it’s 200 plus pages of dribble are almost entirely devoted to aspirational material, whereby the ideal is offered as a solution to its readers’ anxieties and doldrums – completely reaffirming every facet of the modern body-image crisis – we’ve really all missed the point, and it is simply trying to do its bit to help its female readers feel better about themselves. Today, it stated its case via a publicity stunt that is neither fresh nor meaningful, but rich in hypocrisy and calculation. It has begun a tiresome “debate” that will all end exactly where they want us to be – finding the image in question in our supermarkets and newsagencies, and putting our money in its pockets. Let’s consider the many good reasons not to.

The issue of digital enhancement is an important one in today’s media, as it’s the most obvious example of technology enabling 21st century propaganda. Unlike political propaganda, its agenda is not to persuade or control social ideology, but to manipulate consumer behaviour; but it is, nonetheless, propaganda. It began, years ago, when models suddenly started to become perfected through the magic of photoshop – their skin tone evened, their blemishes gone, their stomachs trimmed – soon extending to popstars who are all a little more fetching (or younger) on their album covers than they are in real life. This clearly had a major impact on the cultural problem of body-image, for it raised the ideal even higher beyond the select beauties who were naturally ideal enough to comprise the modeling and entertainment industries – it was now crafting a kind of super-ideal that was utterly impossible to attain. Before too long, we arrived at a very dangerous point in our collective cultural consciousness: a population of modern women who have actually bought into the notion that this ideal is a “norm”, when, in fact, it is a tiny minority – in the case of digital manipulation, not even an actual possibility, at all. This was a deliberate coup, happily engaged without one scrap of a social conscience, for commercial marketing and advertising, where the endless chase for the dangling carrot needs to be just that – endless. If we ever attain something that is suffice, we stop buying. Jump, little people, jump!

In the last few years, this has extended to appease the inherit sadism that has manifested within our modern celebrity obsession. When celebrities and models are used as aspirational figures (be it in advertising, or for magazines like Marie Claire), digital technology is used to perfect them. Quite logically, this eventually creates a resentment in the society that cannot attain such heights of perfection – something comforting, at least, in what it says about our innate nature and sensibility. It should be a good thing – and would be – if only we then responded to this correctly, by… say… rejecting the entire industry, altogether. Instead, that industry has cunningly created a co-existing mindset that is now also used by some of the very media that also capitalises on the perfect ideals: a sadistic thrill in seeing these celebrities and models fail – and we happily indulge this, still consuming these very channels, instead of rejecting the channels through which the distorted and dangerous ideals are facilitated. And photoshop has also come in rather handy for the crucifixion, too. Five minutes on photoshop and Britney Spears’ pupils can be dilated and drugged, Madonna’s arms can give the wicked witch of the west a run for her money, and Posh Beckham can have legs as thin as your index finger. “Oh my God – look how ugly she really is!” we scoff, hoping to feel better about our own insecurities that have been triggered on the page preceding that one. These images are used for mindless quick fixes of sadism that give us a kick in the checkout line or tearoom. But just like the perfected variety, they are not real – it is simply a state where technology has meant that what editors and brand managers would always have liked to do, if only reality would allow them, is now possible. Kaching.

This has brought about the issue of digital enhancement as a question for government, in their role as cultural overseers, to address. Thankfully, our current government has done just that. Many of Rudd’s cultural ethics manoeuvrings have enraged thousands; but whatever you think of the controversial net filtering plans, Labor’s efforts to slap the media into shape should, on the whole, be applauded – particularly, their proposal to force publishers and editors to clearly state where a photograph has been digitally manipulated. This has already been used in the case of advertorials, and, sadly, I’d say to little affect; but, unlike advertorials, this one is already a hot topic socially, and will surely make its mark (literally) on the way we consume and interpret the images that are forced down our throats by the people who make money off us.

Just as it was the same industries that eventually used digital enhancement to offer thrills of our resentments as it was that triggered these resentments in the first place, there has already been a move to capitalise on this social topic from within the very industries causing it. Truth be told, the growing awareness of the body-image crisis is frightening editors like Jackie Frank, because it (rightly) points the finger firmly at the decision-makers of the beauty industries, like herself. But, ingeniously, the response has been to create material that still co-exists with all the pages of guilty aspirational imagery, media and (what it nearly all boils down to, at the end of the day) advertising, but that not only tries to wipe its hands clean (see them doing their bit!? They’re not like the others, heavens no!), but that actually uses the growing public consciousness as a PR mechanism to place their latest stunt into press and (therefore) into the minds and, ultimately, pockets of consumers. This is exactly what Marie Claire did this week.

In days of old, a figure such as the atrocious 12% that has now become the supposed catalyst for this stunt (which is, in itself, unlikely – it’s just a great story in the PR manufacturing of this – if anything, the idea for the shoot would have preceded the survey) would never have been flaunted. But they create the spine, playing into the social topic du jour, on the traditional journalistic terms we generally know them through – the mighty social survey. Hence, Marie Claire themselves present the dilemma, complete with findings, and then – you go girls – set about in doing something to “solve” them.

Next, bring in the most staple emotive disclaimer there is: the charity stunt. I mean, how could anyone suggest they’re doing harm to this debate, when they’re doing it all for charity?! It’s not to sell their magazine, heavens no – it’s for the poor girls, I tell you!! Because all this, let us not forget – they sure wont – is “for”… wait for it… The Butterfly Foundation, which is… yes… a charity organisation for young girls with eating disorders. A charity stunt for eating disorders featuring the ideal – perfectly thin – Aussie supermodel, whose entire career is off the back of being firstly a footy cheerleader and then, secondly, Miss Universe?! Jackie Frank, you are truly vile. The parents of girls with eating disorders, the nation over, should lynch you in a slow and painful manner. And they should run pictures of it in New Idea for us to laugh at, waiting for our turn in the checkout lines. And who the hell is running the PR at The Butterfly Organisation? Sure, these organisations are desperate enough after a year of an uncharitable recession, but some consideration in their opportunities wouldn’t go astray. Did anyone at the organisation have the common sense to say, “Um, guys, I think this isn’t such a good idea”? before it was rolled out?

Well, if they did, nobody listened – which, considering the size of a deal with the likes of Marie Claire, I suppose isn’t too surprising (certainly, nobody is going to be allowed to break from the deal now, the organisation will be forced to support its unfortunate decision). Out went the press releases and calls for interviews to help promote the stunt – sorry, I mean, important social issue. These featured some truly mesmorising bytes of sheer absurdity, as Hawkins (or the copywriters pretending to be her) desperately tried to convince us that her untouched image is a cultural revolution. “I’m not a stick figure,” she assures us. “I thought it would be great to tell women to be themselves and be more confident.” Thanks, Jen.

And what does this ideal-shattering image all come down to in the untouched revelation stakes? Just in case any of us had difficulty finding it, Frank pointed it out: the “crease in her tummy”. Go on, have a look at the image again. Have a look at poor, fat Jennifer Hawkins, and do note the crease in her stomach, just to the right of her hand. I’d suggest it’s because she’s twisting and, well, even the skin of a stick figure tends to, you know, move. But I wouldn’t want to spoil the revolution and douse the psychological shift that seeing this image will surely have for Australian women.  Never mind her perfect makeup, perfect skin – hello, people, perfect figure – they could have photoshopped that crease out, and yet – glory be to Marie Claire – they didn’t.

By lunchtime, the detractors had surfaced. Yes, many of them are questionable, because they are, at the end of the day, mostly representatives of – what a surprise – Marie Claire’s competing magazines. They know how to spot a press opportunity too, after all – they’re just not as clever as Frank at making their own, so they’re left to ride others’. In the end, that’s the tragedy of the media industries, and the problem with the propagandist culture it has well and truly become – because, when it’s all said and done, everyone has a buck to make, and nothing that gets airtime or print coverage is motivated by much else, or given for much else. Still, comedienne Bianca Dye – who, whilst still having benefits to make from any publicity, is at least more removed from the transparent squabble of magazine editors – has come out, guns blazing, against Hawkins’ shoot.

Dye featured in Madison Magazine’s own attempt to capitalise on the social issue, last November, when it ran a nude shoot of her size 14 body. Dye fails to mention one obvious difference that does not exactly absolve Madison from the culture both it and Marie Claire are a part of and perpetuate – unlike the more ideal Hawkins, Dye was not used as the cover image for the issue (that was given to a thin supermodel) – but, regardless, her comments begin to offer some sense in the middle of very little sense at all.  “Yes, she (Hawkins) is lovely, but does that make her a poster girl for a positive body image?” she asks. “It’s just not right. She was born beautiful. She has never had to go through any stress to look like that. Jackie Frank is one of the most respected editors in the country, and I am in shock that they would say Jennifer Hawkins is a natural role model. It’s like we’ve taken 20 steps backwards.”

Here, she makes an important distinction that needs to be made, when understanding the connection between these images and the body-image crisis (leading to problems such as eating disorders). I personally have no problem with Jennifer Hawkins being used by magazines – there has to be some point where neither are we discriminating against people who were born closer to the ideal. The difference here is the context of the stunt – placing her as a role model and, furthermore, as some kind of saviour to women facing a body-image problem (88 percent of their readers, if their survey is accurate). The front cover alludes to it instantly – “The Naked Truth – Jennifer Bares All For Charity”, and everything therein is about Jennifer’s image tackling this issue. The major dynamic in the body-image problem is the distortion of perception that occurs when a culture industry presents a repeated image that becomes absorbed as a truth or seen as “natural”. The truth is that most women do not look like Jennifer Hawkins; but in thinking this image is more attainable and part of our reality than it is, an anxiety is created that really shouldn’t be there. The result is a dissonance between reality and pop culture fantasy that is literally killing young women across our country. The message is “You should look like this” – more to the point, magazines such as Marie Claire offer the misleading notion that women actually “can” – which creates the crisis that can only be resolved with the message “It is okay not to look like this.” Hawkins, as Dye rightly points out, is by no means indicative, and, therefore, as Toowoomba editor Liz Hamilton noted, the image “does more harm than good” when placed in the context of the message it has the audacity to think it is giving to Australian women.

We are going to see more of it in future, too. As it is, Frank has not created a fresh gem here, but simply a formidable extension on this kind of stunt, already tried by Woman’s Weekly (who used an untouched Sarah Murdoch to obliterate the ageing myth) and the likes of Madison (who used Dye). As the topic of digital manipulation continues to heat up, fashion and women’s lifestyle editors like Frank will find more ways to using it to their own advantage. Our advantage will come when the government finally passes its new regulations and makes them clearly state what images in the magazine are touched (the 300 others, no less, that fill the current Marie Claire issue, beyond Hawkins).

Until then, ignore the competition between these magazines that will erupt – each coming out to claim that they are the most socially conscious, the most in touch, the most honest. Bla, bla, blaaaaaaaaa. Even Dye, for all the good in her sentiment, was herself caught out. She wants to put herself, and Madison, forward over Hawkins and Marie Claire, as a positive image for women being comfortable with their bodies. But she was then forced to admit she uses Botox. Oh, Bianca.

If you want to know you’re clear of the evil clutches of that industry, you’re best leaving those pages well and truly on the shelves, and looking in a mirror – or maybe just the streets around you – instead.

Uh-oh, he’s about to speak about a dead celebrity. Michael Jackson fans, run, run away! Now! But the thing is – hear me out, here – my fascination and condemnation of the frenzy that follows the death of a celebrity has nothing to do with the actual celebrity. Everybody carries on in this bizarre state of delusion – one that pretends to be about the dead celebrity in question, but is nothing of the kind. And it is no more illustrated as such, as when someone dies who has had, let’s just be real here, as questionable a life as Jackson’s. I pointed it out with Irwin’s death, because he was simply unremarkable and largely unimportant until his death. Ledger’s neared closer, as we all chose to romanticise a damaged Hollywood heart-thob who partied just a little too hard. But now, we have the death of Michel Jackson. It seems bizarre to write it. But he’s dead. And when he was alive – for the longest while now, at very least – he wasn’t the kind of man we rejoiced the merits of. He was one of the most hated celebrities of the last decade – and, beyond that, for the last few years we had basically forgotten him (although it would seem he did not forget us). Every now and then, he would pop up (on places like Australian Idol – of all things!) to be indulged as nothing more than a fleeting symbol of yesteryear – we would consume him with a fondness every bit as self-indulgent and meaningless as symbols of yesteryears are for us. But now, he’s dead. And open up any paper, and you’d think it was one of the most shocking turning points of modern civilisation itself. I mean, really. Michael Jackson, the tortured, fucked up monster that we made – the guy who had all but mutilated his body in a manner that wasn’t anywhere near as amusing as we so viciously exploited him for – died. Go figure. If anything, that he made 50 astonishes me.

And it’s not that his story has no cultural significance, whatsoever. It’s a vivid portrait, the story of Michael Jackson – but it is his life, not his death, that is the tearjerker. It is everything so horrible about modern culture – a brutal irony that shows how unmodern we are. His well-known obsession with The Elephant Man was justified and understandable – as well as evidencing a painful awareness – for he was, indeed, the functional freak in the core of our darkest fears, aggression and sadism. He is the quintessential posterboy for the damage of celebrity, and the way in which it destroys those it moulds for our entertainment. Because we are raised to yearn such celebrity for ourselves means that we justify their destruction; truth be told, it makes us feel better about the insecurities our affection for them is intrinsically bound with. We feel even with them, because even though we will never get to be one of them, at least in our numbers we can break them and enjoy their pain.

We enjoyed the breaking of Michael Jackson. And he was broken from the very minute he was born into the cruel hands of a ShowFather who literally beat his children into celebrities. We thought that was wrong and all, but the inescapable irony was that it did, after all, work. The bruises of that man’s belt did produce, as the media now likes to remind us, one of the “greatest talents who ever lived.” This has all sorts of magical implications about the origin of that talent – that it was a bizarre alignment of some sort, a natural gift from who knows where (maybe God?!). But this is a boy who was shoved on a stage no sooner than he could walk, and beaten with a belt, or with fists, lest he do anything other with his childhood than build himself into such an Amazing Talent™. Sure, he had something about him that clearly left him more talented than his brothers and sisters (though they were produced as talented, themselves), but would Michael Jackson have been Michael Jackson without the brutality and pathology of his crazed father? Highly unlikely, and you and I know it. God knows how many of the world’s great talents slip by, simply because it has never been nurtured by an abusive, psychotic parent!

And we were more than happy to consume those results – it resulted, after all, in an Amazing Talent™. And, sure, who was to know that he was so broken, at first? Nobody knew, after all, that the little boy who danced and sang so magically was doing his gorgeous little dance after pleading with his father to let him do something else with his childhood, and then subsequently being beaten. Nobody ever stopped, mind you, and wondered if maybe it was wrong for children to grow up in such a spotlight; toured around like circus monkeys. Many damaged men and women manifest pathological expressions of infancy and adolescence – as indeed Jackson did – because something has stunted them during their childhood. Part of them never grows beyond it, leading to obvious problems in adulthood. And it’s a long considered factor of pedophilia – that the problem is that they do not psychologically commit the crimes as adults with children, but as inner-children with other children (one of the problems sighted of the way Christianity developmentally stunts its priests and nuns). But Michael Jackson is a bizarre case – an incredibly rare occurrence, really – for his is a different manifestation of infancy, altogether. It’s not that he didn’t move beyond his own; it’s that he never had one to begin with. And he knew it, too. “Have you seen my childhood?” he asked us. Sure we did. We thought it was great! What a bummer he hated it so much!

As it turns out, his adulthood would – oh my God, what a surprise – reveal an incredibly damaged figure. He could still sing. He could still dance. He was, let us not forget, an Amazing Talent™.  We certainly seem to be able to remember that, now. But let us also remember how our love affair with that cute little boy turned so very sour.

First, there was his pathological racial self-loathing. Tres American. Oh, that’s right, that Amazing Talent™ is black – we almost forgot, because it’s okay to be black when you’re an Amazing Talent™. Then, you get to be treated white. And you can’t say he didn’t try to accommodate that, the best he could. I mean, he did literally turn himself the best colour. He did it for us, of course – because, as he would later admit, he felt a great resentment – real or projected – from the entire concept of his own people, because he had been so logically disconnected by the experience of being so unfathomably famous in the white world.

And boy, wasn’t that good as a resource for an entire decade of comedy?! Cheers, Michael, that’s… kinda funny that you would be so self-loathing and culturally dispossessed in a surreal white world that you would start to medically destroy yourself in order to be like us! ROFL!!!

But Michael didn’t stop entertaining us there, heavens no. The white jokes would be nothing in comparison to the cultural comedic icon that would become Michael Jackson’s Nose™. Wow, look at that fucked up amazingly talented black boy go! Now he’s addicted to mutilating himself beyond recognition! He must really hate himself, that fucked up amazingly talented black boy. ROFL!! ROFL to tha max!!

And then, well, it took a decidedly dark twist. Self-mutilation is all very amusing, but Michael wanted to test our limits of sadism, I suppose, because boy did he pull a rabbit out of his hat, next. Just when you think the fucked up amazingly talented black boy couldn’t possibly get any more fucked up, it turns out he might be… drumroll… a kiddy-fiddler. At first, we didn’t find that so funny. Okay, Michael, the joke’s gone far enough. If you could just stick to entertaining us with your Amazing Talent™, far out dance moves, funky songs, and self-mutilation, that’d be great.

But he didn’t stick to that, of course. The momentum rolled on, and before we knew it, we were lynching Michael Jackson for being a pedophile.

Was he? That’s the question that will probably never be answered. In the end, we never actually found that out. And it should be noted that the lynching of Michael Jackson, in the legal courts of our most official kind of lynching, was ultimately proven to be a flawed process. Whether there was a real case or not, the case that was made turned out to be not only shallow, but corrupt. We decided he was guilty, but there was never, it tuned out, any real basis for that. It was just conjecture. It still is.

The potential validity of that conjecture is a little obvious. You can’t say he didn’t, but, well, you’d be hard pushed to say with much certainty that there wasn’t a chance. That damage, as he grew, just became so increasingly obvious, and it was always quite clearly connected to that childhood the beaten little monkey was never given. Peter Pan’s a charming little fairy tale – but it’s rather… well… off, as a real apparition in a grown man. And here was a grown man, mutilated beyond recognition – so fucked up that even his voice somehow froze in time (unless that was helped by the darker side of the medical industry, too) – strolling through his personal fairground, Neverland, in his pyjamas, surrounded by the sick and helpless children he was clearly obsessed with. It aint a pretty picture, let’s face it.

I, for one, always believed there was a strong chance that the exact symptoms of that damage – as very damaged as he was – did not include sexual impulses or behaviours towards or with children. I’m not saying that with 100% certainty, don’t get me wrong. I don’t know, at the end of the day – I’m left with conjecture, as much as the next person is. But my belief is not because I’m such a Jacko fan (we all know it’s the Queen of Pop who has my heart, and not the King!), or because I just can’t tarnish the function of Jackson as a symbol to myself, with the hard reality of the real manchild. It’s because I think his damage originates in a place so very young, sexuality of any kind wasn’t even part of the picture.

That’s different if he was sexually abused as a child – but from what we know, he was simply a victim of physical violence without any sex. He was fairly honest, I think, by admitting that he was beaten but not molested, and I personally believe that story. The only one who has ever negated it is Latoya – but it’s quite possible that with Mr Jackson being, as far as we know, a red blooded heterosexual, that while one gender was beaten, the other was treated to a very different kind of experience. I also felt sorry for Latoya, too – for she was treated even worse by us, than her brother was – because we simply shrugged her off as a lunatic, without ever acknowledging that far from this invalidating her accusations, perhaps they explained her lunacy. It’s chicken and the egg stuff, and we tend to fuck that up all the time (because we don’t really grasp human psychology). I suspected that she was, however, projecting upon Michael, by announcing that he was molested also. I think she was. But I think he was only beaten. It’s conjecture; but it’s my personal analysis, anyway.

Michael himself would state his case – the case that while he was obviously a damaged man in some ways (he said he would become so terrified of his father, he would literally vomit at the thought of him), it had not manifested sexually – in his infamous interview by Martin Bashir. Fresh from the courthouse circus, Jackson foolishly fell for Bashir’s journalistic aspirations disguised as sincere understanding. Bashir spent months convincing Jackson he was an admirer who felt moved to help him right the wrongs done against him by a naïve and unforgiving society. He offered Jackson an interview special, to supposedly give him a vehicle to explain himself to us. But he was lying. He wanted the golden moment of his career – nothing more – and he knew he wasn’t going to get that by providing the peanut gallery a portrait of Jackson with a halo above his head. No, no, we wanted blood. Bashir was going to sell it to us. Uh-oh, fucked up amazingly talented black boy – you’re about to get fucked over, once again.

That, it would seem, was the final straw for Jackson, who quickly retreated from the world; Peter Pan now seeming more like Willy Wonka. And slowly but surely, we started to forget about him.

Until, somewhat ironically, quite recently, when out of nowhere it was announced that Jackson would return to the stage, after all these years, to give us one final blast of his Amazing Talent™. It was consciously designed as his farewell to us. Jackson had already decided that he was about to leave our horrible white world of celebrity. He actually wanted us to know it, too. He needed to.

I think that’s because, underneath, the most horrible irony of all was that Jackson, as hard as he tried, could never be anything other than a product of that white world of celerity and the belt of his father who fashioned him for it. He was raised for our affection – he existed only as a product we consumed. Without it, who the fuck was Michael Jackson? In the last few months, it appeared he was somewhat of a hypocrite, for the contradiction is obvious: if you wanted to leave our world, and our minds, and everything, and just be left alone and forgotten about, then why oh why, Michael Jackson, did you need to mount the most expensive world tour ever planned? We’d pretty much forgotten about you, as it was. I had no idea where he was, or what he was doing, before the press conference announcing The Last Time Tour. Did you? I doubt it.

He didn’t want us to forget about him. He wanted us to remember him. He couldn’t let our love go. He couldn’t live, knowing that he was ultimately destroyed and tossed aside by us – by our culture, by history. Like the little boy he ultimately remained, he cried, “I don’t care what you think”, when, naturally, he cared very much. You can’t blame him for that, I suppose. I’m sure all of us have experienced the nagging lack of resolution, from a situation where the people who think so poorly or wrongly of you never end up realising their error and repenting and asking for your forgiveness. I’ve no doubt it was hard for Michael Jackson to – no pun intended – fade to such a black as his recent obscurity. He wanted his happy ending. Don’t we all?

“I just want to be left alone,” he said, only weeks ago, in what would be his final interview. “Why is that so hard to understand?”

I understand it. And it’s not that I think that’s a complete lie. I just think his need for resolution with us was so strong, he could not properly fulfill his other desire to retreat, without first having known that resolution. It was stopping him from moving on. I wonder if he had have actually received it, if he would have then been able to let go as planned; or if the temptation would have been too great, not to simply resume his place in the spotlight and hang on for dear life?

We’ll never know. The fact of the matter – so obvious – was that Michael Jackson was clearly in no state to perform at the level required for those kinds of shows. He was not Madonna. He was a frail man drowning in a sea of pharmaceuticals: thin (now under 10 st), gaunt, weak and sedated. The thought of him spending 50 nights in a row on those amazing dancing legs was… well… completely implausible. Everyone around the tour – from the crew, to the directors, to the publicity agents – are now happy to admit to press that Jackson was clearly in trouble. But nobody said anything before, of course – they rolled off their PR copy, as expected, and were no doubt happy to be paid so highly to witness what must have clearly looked like the train wreck it would ultimately be. This week, a few hours after a grueling rehearsal, his frail body gave in. It’s anything but surprising.

Nor is it a surprise that we are intoxicated with the self-indulgence of our very selective sentimentality. And those who are not in the throws of this, are mostly still in the enthrall of his enabling of sadism. One of my colleagues received a viral text, no more than three hours after his death, with the first of what will be many, many jokes to come:

Boom boom! But the media, needless to say, is taking a different route, by milking the sudden affection (albeit, with the occasional sordid twist, to emphasise the Tragedy™ of it all). We talk about what an Amazing Talent™ the world has lost. Poor world!!

But I think, instead, of poor Michael Jackson. Not because he left our world in a physical, literal sense; but because the brutal plot-twist of all this is that, on the verge of his planned escape of that spotlight, he would never get to leave it. Not psychologically, at least. He died in the throws of that spotlight, as the fucked up amazingly talented black boy – as our fucked up amazingly talented black boy. We never got to give him his resolution. He never got to experience the release some anguished part of him must have so desperately yearned for. He was never free.

It is one of the more confronting facets of life, that not everyone escapes their damage. Despite our seemingly innate concepts of justice, or “fate”, etc, etc, not everyone’s a winner, baby – that’s the truth. Certainly not Michael Jackson. He was, from the very beginning, to the very end, an unfathomably damaged soul who was nothing more than our (at times, vicious) consumption of him. And boy, are we consuming him now. We won’t stop, I imagine, til we get enough.

Goodbye, Michael Jackson. You’ll certainly be remembered, now.

I only drop in on The Chaser, sporadically; but the decline in their quality has been notable over recent series’. That’s not particularly uncommon when a group of young, arrogant men become Stars™ – their heads finally reaching such depths of their asses, they can hardly see what’s in front of them, let alone write a decent show. Living in the same area, and socialising with many of the same scene, I’m constantly cringing at the way they are forever treated as royalty – the boys at the bar everyone wants to end up talking to. Of course, it’s mostly because we’re trying to forge a career, and who you know, in the television industry, is everything; but I’ve endlessly watched them milk it – especially with the ladeez – and I can’t say it has endeared me to them any further.

This week, the boys may have finally hit a pothole that, unlike previous scandals (which only upped their cool factor), may do more harm to their careers than good. Certainly, the Make A Realistic Wish sketch will be championed on the playgrounds of teenage boys – but that’s hardly the fandom of searing social portraits and left-winged ideological crusades. And the most telling thing of all about this pothole is how very empty it is. I mean, really, what can you say about it? If anything shows up the vacuous truth about The Chaser, it is surely this. Their emerging statements are predictably placing it in the arena of valid social discussions as freedom of expression, political censorship, the place of satire to make intelligent statements, yada, yada, yaaaaawn. But it’s all rot. The boys say the piece was “misinterpreted” – but what, exactly, is there to interpret? I’m with the Twitterer who sharply responded to this defense; “Don’t insult the viewing public’s intelligence”. Perhaps the Bogans aren’t that dumb, after all. Nor, I would hope, are many of their more cultured fans.

So, if you’ve missed the hoo haa, let’s acquaint ourselves with the skit in question…

It satirises nothing; says nothing. It’s a cruel joke – nothing more, nothing less – and the irony of this article following the attrocious popularity of The Chk Chk Boom Girl is that there’s really little difference in the level of comedy here. It’s just tasteless, arrogant, superiorist sadism. And you can defend tasteless comedy, if you so desire – but don’t suggest there’s anything more to defend in this scandal. If the boys had any guts, they’d make a real statement, defending the rights of upper class law students turned comedy act to make fun of whomever and whatever they like for the empty amusement of others. It makes fun of charity organisations for terminally ill children and, yes, terminally ill children themselves. But it doesn’t satirise them. To satirise them, it would be making a statement that reveals a dark truth about both these things – the comedy would have some actual insight – but it doesn’t. The only thing this shows up is The Chaser. For that, I am glad. It’s long overdue.

The twist that too many people have yet to catch onto, is that it also shows up another not so endearing trait of their work that has been known for quite some time amongst inner circles: it’s not exactly original. For me, the most infuriating aspect of all this is that these boys have such ludicrous amounts of funding dollars thrown at them – because they’re supposed to be the innovative creative geniuses of Australian television, bla, bla, blaaaaaa – money that could go elsewhere, to people who are truly doing something cutting edge – and what do they do with it? They recycle the work of others.

This is a sketch from Comedy Network’s The Mansion (aired last year)…

Um…. yep. And the irony is that this is actually a much better piece that, yes, does actually make a case as satire. It doesn’t stoop so low to target the actual kids; keeping the focus firmly on the organisation, as a send up of the funding problems of the lower spectrum of the charity circuit, and the often bizzare charcaters it takes to steer them. It’s hardly earth-shattering, either; but it’s much better than the recycled version that would create waves, all these months later. It’s better scripting, it’s better acting, it’s even better production. Where are all those ABC funding dollars going, exactly?

And it’s not getting any better for the boys, as this thing rolls on. Yesterday, a friend of The Chaser team came forward to express her disillusionment with those she now called “former friends”. Her daughter, who also knew the boys, has been battling cancer for two years. Needless to say, she didn’t find the skit very funny. She revealed that the actors in the sketch are the twins of the shows’ producer, and that to see them dress their kids to mimic an ordeal they have, through her daughter, personally known, was beyond belief.

“They tied a scarf around one of the heads pretending she’s lost her hair, which of course my daughter did,” she told radio. “They put dark circles under her eyes, which my daughter has had for two years now, and they knowingly put them on after everything we have been through…. I think probably that mother who I know well will probably be dying at the moment at what’s happening, well she should be… There are some things that there is just no coming back from and that they are not being pulled off the air is a disgrace because they no longer deserve a platform in which they can inflict so much pain, especially on a community of people who are potentially dealing with one of the hardest things a parent will ever deal with… That they bring pain to that group, that I am unfortunately a part of, is extraordinary to me.”

Today, it was announced that the show would be suspended for two weeks, while an inquiry and decision was made.

They’ll probably be back, mind you. They’re worth far too much money. But one has to wonder where that money will come from in future, and how much, in comparison to the astronomical sales they have generated (from DVDs, books, shirts, etc, etc) that will be. It may not end here, this week, for The Chaser. But it may be the beginning of their fade to black. My, how fast the Stars™ burn in la la land.

Laughter can be cruel. We all know that – I’m sure every single one of us, at some point in our life (for some, many points) have been laughed at. To remember it, is to remember the emotional wound – whether brief, or that lingering, subconscious kind. And it really does come down to that cliché conceptual division, between laughing “at” someone and laughing “with” them. Truth be told, we don’t laugh with each other nearly enough; but it’s lovely when it happens – a true empathetic kind of joy, and decidedly healthy. Very different, of course, to laughing at someone. That is sadism. We find it first in young teens, who, in their evolving socialisation, take a brutal, blatant pleasure in the misfortune and chastising of others. Some would say it’s a kind of developmental phenomenon, a by-product of the mechanism of empathy being something we are not born with but grow into – as if sadism should become slowly eradicated, as we learn it is “wrong” on the basis of understanding how it makes its victims feel. Or, perhaps, it is a reactionary phenomenon, a kind of cornered or threatened mechanism, a way to attack those who we feel attack us in some way. At times, it’s probably either or both these dynamics. But human beings are, there’s no doubt about it, seemingly challenged when it comes to empathy for others, as well as rather territorial. And “comedy” – the process of eliciting laughter – has long been a favourite weapon for threatened societies who are unable to transcend the divides of that perception of threat. In the war years of my Great Grandmother, beautiful everyday Aussies sang the most horrendous comedy songs about the Asians they fought against in the war (cultural or otherwise). “I like Chinese” – bizarrely destined to be rewritten as the commercial theme for an electronics retail giant owned by Chinese Australians (“I like Bing Lee”) – was a crass tune punning the advent of the Chinese restaurants (how bizarre to think that these symbolised the perceived invasion) with literally eating Chinese people. Racism meets cannibalism – charming. And this week, all these progressive years later, we had the Chk Chk Boom Girl™. Wogs of the world, beware; we’re not that much further than 1955 as you would think.

I’m not going to spend time retelling the narrative, most of us know the scene. The Nine News cameras rush in to scavenge the crowd of drug-fucked Kings Cross revelers who have gathered round the “excitement” of someone getting shot. It’s just like Underbelly, but real. They find some young intoxicated girl (a waitress named Claire) who is more than happy to get her face on the camera and, in the process, “have a laugh”. They ask her what she saw, and she gives a chilling witness account.

It’s racist. I’m not sure how anyone saw that video and thought it to be anything else. I’ve got years of weekends spent in the Cross, in Oxford Street, in the club scene of the inner city – that this is perceived as in any way extraordinary makes me feel somewhat more exciting than most people must be. This is nothing. It’s the kind of racism that elicits chuckles all amongst the drugged white late-teens and young adults who stumble, in packs, through the streets where the beats roll til dawn. It’s not remotely clever. It’s just crass highschool breed racism. It’s just a video of some dumb, trashed, white Aussie, sqwarking her debasing ethnic generalisations for the validation of the other dumb, trashed white Aussies. Yawn.

 

Someone was shot. Sorry, I just thought I should say that, because nobody else seemed to. It made worldwide media. And that’s not the shooting in the middle of the street – no, no, the world plugged into the funny girl mocking wog stereotypes as a response to a shooting.

 

While the victim lied in hospital, hundreds were remixing and re-editing the video into a variety of techno and hip-hop versions. “Shake shake shake shake the room…. Chk chk chk chk BOOM!”

ROFL, as they say.

Eventually, some clever journalist made the obvious leap to sticking a microphone in the victim’s face, post-surgery, and asking him what he thought of the whole thing. Funnily enough, he didn’t like it. And we didn’t like that. Some columnists – and hundreds of forum fanatics – thought he should really just “get over it”, and stop unfairly victimising poor, lovable Claire. How dare he suggest our laughter was somehow wrong? That wog really can’t take a joke. Not taking a joke (translation: not allowing the greater to make fun of you with debasing ethnic generalisations) is sooooo UnAustralian™.

In the end, the gig was up for Claire. It turned out she was lying. She saw nothing. She just happened to see the cameras arrive, and, being Gen Y, she knew exactly what to do. Perhaps the most amazing thing in all this is that most people actually needed someone to confirm that they were not watching a truthful account. Because surely, that would have happened, right? That’s what those wogs do, after all. Angry wog, shot wog… you can fill in the blanks, surely. Claire did. And it all seemed to fit for most of the country.

Tonight, she arrived on exactly the show you’d expect her to: A Current Affair. The “Journalist” (yes, I put that in inverted commas) did occasionally put it to her that maybe what she did was offensive and – just maybe – a little racist; but it was all set up only for her to respond and ultimately quash that very viewer perception. She flippantly refuted everything, the “Journalist” smiling – charmed by her Everydayness™, no less – adequately convinced by such as explanations as:

“It’s not racist. I understand how the word can be racist to older people. But in my generation, those words (like wog) don’t mean anything anymore.”

No, no, not at all a derogatory label and descriptive of an ethnic other – it meant absolutely nothing. That’s why we use words – because they have no meaning. Silly me! Do go on, Claire.

“We say things like wog, skip and bogan, to each other, all the time, and we’re just joking.”

But I’m guessing she uses “wog” to denote Lebanese, Greeks, Italians, etc; “bogans” to denote white trash Australians; and “skip”… well… I’m a little skeptical of her use of the word “skip”. Me thinks she knows to throw in a word that we know ethnic minorities use about us. Maybe she’s not as dumb as she seems. Or maybe the mechanics of racism are adapted for so long, even stupid people know how to be smartly racist.

Not to mention that the only other two words she gives as an example are words referring to white Australians – which Claire is a part of. Only one refers to an ethnic – the one she just happened to use (but not for any reason – “it didn’t mean anything”, after all) in her video using a shooting incident to make fun of wogs as gun-touting criminals who kill each other over promiscuous women.

Claire was backed up by Experts™, too. In fact, ACA didn’t bother to find a single expert offering anything as a counter-argument – all backed poor innocent Claire’s defense.

“Wogs, themselves, use the word to describe each other!” one Academic™ scoffed.

What? Like the word, Nigger, perhaps?

For all we may say about America (and I don’t take much of it back), they at least have a very sound cultural ideology in regards to the division between dubious lexicon being used by those it labels, and being used by others in reference to them. There’s the odd blow up, every now and then (hello, Michael Richards), but it’s just that – a blow up. It creates a furore. The Chk Chk Boom Girl™ has this week’s biggest fanclub on facebook.

“I don’t know why,” smiled Tracy Grimshaw, returning from the story, “But I have a feeling we’re going to be seeing more of that girl.”

That’s probably because the exclusive was part of talks Nine are having with her. Hmmmmmm, now how can we capitalise and exploit her Fame™?

I have a feeling they’ll find a way.

The question must be asked: how deep does this publicity bonanza go? Is Killeen’s slaughter the execution of a well-laid marketing plan? Or, like any smart business, are they simply riding the opportunities that have arisen from their would-be mistake of giving poor Gretel the spotlight? I’m a tad suspicious, I must say. For all that can be said badly of Killeen, as her career evolved over Big Brother (and I’ve always been the first to say it, after all), there’s no denying her talent (and I’ve always said that, too, mind you). Killeen’s demise in BB world had nothing to do with skill – it was a matter of creative direction, it was almost ideological in some respects. In the end, as the woman beneath the facade became starngely intertwined with her onstage persona – and as she clearly began to struggle in some weird neo-celebrity existential identity fugue – the house of cards came crashing down for Killeen – but she remains a great talent… partly what made her demise such a shame (I once thought quite highly of her – enough to often feel quite unpleasant about coming to despise her work so much).

Another week, another high profile, overpaid, male superstar allegedly abusing another woman. This site’s beginning to look like it’s devoted to nothing else; but if only this cultural disease would go away, I could get back to laughing at bad television. But, it’s not going anywhere. Far from the idealistic, convenient notions many harbor about our “progressive” society – where women being an oppressed gender and subject to a range of ill behaviours manifested and accepted within the misogyny and disrespect of men, is a thing of that past we (oh, good) don’t have to deal with (because that’s just so much easier) – here we are. Again. And this one involves… oh, my… a footballer?! Who would have thought?! But, lucky for us, Catherine Lumby, God’s gift to academia-slash-media-slash-humanity, has come forth with her corporate funded pearls of wisdom, to remind us that the issue of sexual abuse of women is by no means confined merely to football. Thanks, Catherine, ’cause, you know, it never dawned on me that it happened, any place else. For a minute there, I almost made a valid observation that threatened the publicity of the people who pay you.

So, she was hired to – “officially speaking” – develop and help implement a programme that would supposedly “educate” the show and its contestants on what is acceptable behaviour and attitudes towards women (sounding familiar?). Of course, this was a token activity the show was never going to take seriously, nor (realistically) one that would have any real effect. By her own admission, the problem is so huge – so rooted in the very depths of our cultural lives and psyche – that a couple of hours of some routine guides on how to treat women nicely, was going to be taken about as seriously as OHS videos are in employment inductions. But that was never the point, and not what the show was really paying for. Again, I know a couple of people who would interpret this as the black comedy of a woman so deluded, she actually thought her services would have an impact, and that the subsequent media appearances she made, defending them, were a sincere reaction that (perhaps, desperately) clutched to her work and beliefs. But is Lumby – a woman who has spent her life following the machinations of media and pop culture business, and who has proven herself savvy from the way she, herself, has rode them to success – really that naive? I find it impossible to believe.

Surely, she knew. I do concede that, potentially, the money is less a factor than one may think – it’s important to also remember that Lumby’s profile is increasingly raised by the countless public appearances she makes off the back of these deals (but this, in turns, brings her more lucrative contracts). Big Brother touted her around the press, kicking in the real point of her connection: to inform the general public that everything was sorted (translation: let’s all get back to generating our revenue). Every time she made such an appearance, regardless of the pay for that particular appearance, her career benefited from the profile boost – something that has a trickle down effect on almost everything she does: increasing book sales, making her more relevant for more media appearances, marketable for parents deciding which university to send their child to, and so forth. And, yes, other businesses would have noted the impact, too. When the very first turkeyslap scandal broke out, who was it that was splashed across our media, to tell us all that there was nothing to worry about and that Big Brother was (oh, dear) “good” for young people, and caused advances in social attitudes of acceptable behaviour to women? Catherine Lumby. It seems a ridiculous notion, for anyone with a brain between their ears, to propose that Big Brother actually helped the cause of changing these cultural attitudes; yet, that’s exactly what she did. As she was supposed to. And did anyone ever mention that Lumby was on the BB payroll? Usually, no. And when it was mentioned, she was put forward as an independent authority who was supposedly representing the BB critics, by making sure our concerns were properly dealt with – someone who was, as The Age likes to refer to her as, “an activist on issues of sexual violence against women and children” (a functional dynamic of her image that would be repeated, as we will soon discuss, by the NRL). But it wasn’t activism. It was a PR campaign. Nothing more. Nothing less.

It appears, however, that the NRL has failed to properly interpret her track record. It should be noted, that the ultimate irony of Lumby’s Big Brother relationship was that, the following year after she first hailed the show as free from such problems (thanks to her diligent work in advising and educating the producers and contestants), two boys held down a female housemate on their bed and, well, we all know the rest. Bit of a turkeyslap in the face of Lumby’s assurances, you would think. If I were truly looking for someone to implement a successful programme to alter an internal institutional culture diseased by sexism and misogyny, I’m not sure Lumby has quite put her money where her mouth is. But, needless to say, this matters not, if the point of contracting her services is, as was the case with Big Brother, not to actually make changes, but to develop a publicity campaign to give the impression of making changes. The public have short attention spans, and nobody is ever going to stop and say, “But, hang on – didn’t she tell us she was changing Big Brother, right before it all deteriorated, even further?!” Regardless of how Big Brother eventually went down, Lumby is still irresistible for the purpose of PR: she has the right contacts, the validation of academia, a list of published work, a public profile, the ability to effectively communicate to the public through media channels, and – let’s not underestimate the importance of this – has proven herself loyal to those who do deals with her. No matter how horrendous Big Brother would become – no matter how much one would think, “Surely, that woman can’t sit there and tell us this is good for this issue, anymore!?”… she did. She kept up her part of the deal. Sure, her actual programmes don’t seem to do… well… anything, at all. That is hardly the point.

And so, deja vu. The NRL appoints her to advise and educate them on changing this terrible affliction within the institution. And what does the work of Lumby and her colleagues actually result in? Just 10 hours per year of this so called “education”, with these “how-to” lessons also incorporating “responsible drinking” into the lightning flash curriculum. Are we really supposed to take this seriously?! As it is, the idea of top tier, spoiled little footy players seriously incorporating the work of an academic on “how to properly treat and perceive women” (not to mention the irony in it coming from a female – surely, an apparent problem, when looking at how little respect these men give to the female gender) is laughable. I can’t help but imagine a bunch of grown imbeciles, impatiently sitting through some painful 10 hour seminar the coach has (on orders from above) begrudgingly made them sit down for, til they can escape and bitch about how ridiculous it all was, while getting pissed again. We’re talking about a complex, subconscious problem that extends god knows how far back, made all the worse by god knows how many factors of being a celebrity footy player, and they end up slotting in 10 measly hours, in which to change it. It’s a joke. Yet, she has the audacity to write; “NRL is a male-dominated organisation that is actually working for change”.

And why is she getting the spotlight, to assure us of this? Because, this week, after a season launch function, one of the NRL’s star players allegedly came across a 17 year old girl, on his way home, and decided to sexually assault her. All day, the press has been filled with the testimonies of key NRL figures, who assure us that Stewart is “a good kid from a good family”, “a great guy”, and on, and on, and on. Not to mention that the details handed to media (gee, I wonder where they came from?) falsely painted the scene to have happened in a stairwell, implicitly with a young girl perhaps trying to seduce him – later denied by the girl’s devastated father, who wanted to make it clear that his daughter “didn’t know him from a bar of soap”, and just happened to be outside, when Stewart arrived home in a cab (turns out he’s their neighbour). The only senior members of the NRL who have in any way conceded that something is very wrong with the incident, have done so in a way that then passes the buck, and all firmly refuse to consider calls to ban players from binge drinking. And are they suspending Stewart? Of course, not. I’m hoping this will change – it will depend on how volatile the public reaction becomes – but, at this stage, he’ll take to the field, as planned. The club – the brand – can simply not afford to lose such a major attraction and talent. This is an “organisation that is actually working for change”, Catherine Lumby?!? Why? Because they enlisted you for one of your proven “educational programmes”? In the last six months alone, we’ve seen Greg Bird smash a glass into his girlfriend’s face, another incident in a nightclub toilet involving three players, a reported gang rape of a Cronulla girl by five Balmain Tigers, and now, this alleged attack from Stewart. Gee, that educational programme you were a part of sure seems to be working, doesn’t it, Catherine? Just like your last one.

And where does Lumby come out to publish her contradiction-ladened PR article? LeagueHQ.com, official online branding venture of the NRL. There she is, rolled out in a matter of hours, to assure the league’s fans that everything is okay, because a leading feminist and cultural expert says so. Well, then, if even those bitches are saying it’s not the league’s fault, then it can’t be! It’s a cleverly penned campaign (let’s not call it journalism): a most abhorrent exploitation of the work and ideas of real crusaders and workers for this problem, taking a handful of valid ideas, and then twisting them to suit the corporate image of the business who now enables her profile. Lumby perfectly walks the PR line of appeasing a dual function, siding herself with anyone who might be negatively affected by this latest scandal, reminding us that she, herself, is doing everything she can to prevent this terrible problem – “As someone who has worked on education programs for league players about their off-field behaviour, I have to admit I feel like punching a wall every time the front pages light up with fresh allegations” – whilst, at the same time, playing into the hands of the fans who are hardly going to be phased by the notion that something is wrong with NRL culture, giving them all the ammunition they need to bitch about those who comprise the brand’s growing PR problem, down at the local pub or around the watercooler. They will spit out her words – the words of a supposed crusader of women’s rights – in order to justify the sexual assault against women that clearly has diseased NRL culture. Grasp that, for a moment. And the brand will be protected. Catherine Lumby, on behalf of the NRL, wants everyone to just stop that silly notion that a sustained, blatantly obvious, problem of sexual violence from NRL players has something to do with the actual NRL, and start blaming… you know… everything else. Anything else, I guess – just leave the poor NRL alone. Priests and school teachers abuse women, too. Why not pick on them, instead? What relevance do these high profile role models have to social ideologies?! Let’s play ball!

Catherine Lumby, mind you, has been playing ball, for quite some time.