Susan Douglas

Subject: From: Holland Wilde - Enlightened Sexism

From: farmer@culturalfarming.com

Date: May 19, 2010 2:33:43 PM MDT

To: sdoug@umich.edu

Susan Douglas,

Greetings.

I've read two of your books and listened to you twice more on McChesney's Media Matters... as I have done with Susan Linn, Renee Hobbs, Alice Quart, etc. I think your work is important and should be further supported. And yet, I have a few questions for you... because your simplistic, subjective methodologies prove incomplete.... besides your preference not to watch TV on TV, thus also ignoring HOW we typically watch what we watch.

Regardless, why, after six decades of so-called critical media scholarship, does television production continually worsen? Why has education/research utterly failed to ebb this tide? Might it be because we remain fixated on only one end of the rope: INTERPRETATION? We lack healthy body images because we ignore how body image is controlled. It's not about mixed messages alone, for both power and emancipation reside in MIXING messages.

The media icebergs we navigate are not merely the chilly bits we can see above the water line that you contest. The problems below the surface are massively more dangerous. In short, it is not simply the image content that corrupts.... it is the production of production, that is, both our intentional and unintentional usage of newly unleashed, ungovernable technologies, which conflate to vilify well before dissemination.

Paralleling, say, an off-shore drilling rig explosion, your work would simply fixate the problem of despoiled nature onto those nebulous nasty oil corporations (sic, “THE mass media”?). This is a tiresomely incomplete approach to critique... always a day late and a dollar short. To wit, does the University of Michigan, in any department, at any level, teach students HOW to create critical communication with today's media tools? How exactly does one go about making new, critical media? This is the focus of my work.... not the images alone, rather the imagineering... as witnessed throughout all contemporary media practice.

The "irony" you claim to have found is double edged. Both you and McChesney speak with the very same (academic) "superior wink, nod and chuckle" for which you chastise "THE mass media". Lest we forget, all media is made by people (marketers?) not unlike us... recognizable folk. So then, why do "we" do it? It is partly because of simplistic, ineffective finger-pointing critique; but mostly because of sheer ignorance of how to make critical media (stymied further by the seduction of money and celebrity). And the "how" I am speaking of comes through critical reflexivity, critical theory, and critical craftsmanship. Academia does not yet understand this and industry refuses to slow up enough to consider it.

Contemporary TV/media craft is an anonymous, unaccountable docent (guide/lecturer), which aids in the ritualization of all cultural production. It is this “ritualized cultivation” of media communication which whets Cultural Farming’s projects. "We fashion our tools, and thereafter, our tools fashion us". If one cannot master critical methods of media production one cannot gain inoculation to its power. Likewise, if you have not "learnt/felt" the punctum of personal exploitation, of the ethics inherent in image production... you fail media (nipple) critique, and remain media illiterate.

And so, I made a quick example to help illustrate the first, important counter-step to Enlightened Sexism: Leaning to see the "other equality" though oneself and ones tools. Your good work begs for my good work, Susan. I hope you will understand... if not, proof enough. This video, made in good faith, is the shock of awareness via theoretical potlatch wrapped in surrealist provocation... For what it's worth:

CLICK IMAGE, below, for video :