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Airheads | page 1, 2
There's no difference, of course; Oxygen and jokily
chauvinistic shows like "The Man Show" and FX's "The
X Show" are niche programming at its most nakedly
opportunistic. And Laybourne is unquestionably a
niche-programming genius, having invented
Nickelodeon, the arbiter of all that is cool, hot, funny,
gross, smart, dumb and, above all, desirable in the
pre-teen world. On Nickelodeon, with rare exception,
girls and women are portrayed as smarter than, more
resourceful than and generally superior to boys and men.
And that "girls rule, boys drool" brand of schoolyard
feminism makes its nyah-nyah presence felt all over
Oxygen and Oxygen.com. (Actually, the young-skewing
"Trackers" and "X-Chromosome" might have made the
core of a more viable cable network than Oxygen -- a
network for young, post-Nickelodeon women.) For example, the "People" page of Oxygen.com, which
contains press bios of Laybourne and her partners, looks
like the high school yearbook blurb you'd write in a
daydream about being queen of the world. The bio for
"Gerry" tells us that we can "trust her" because "She
gets it," and quotes Laybourne's vision for
Oxygen: "The center of women's lives isn't expensive cars
and designer clothes. The center of their life is managing
all their roles." Mandabach's bio flatters her thusly:
"Famously wacky. Vivacious. Intense. Fast. Long
committed to yoga. A great dresser." As for Werner, we
are assured that "he loves women and knows they're
smarter than men."
Joyce Millman Joyce Millman's column appears every other Monday in Salon Arts & Entertainment. That vanity-plate page crystallized something I'd begun to suspect watching Oxygen's clueless programming. For all its "we celebrate you" crap, Oxygen is a monument to conformity. Laybourne pays lip service to the many roles women play, but Oxygen is really only interested in one of those roles: shopper. Oxygen commiserates, in sisterly clichés, with a phantom woman-consumer, telling her over and over that she's in charge yet stretched thin, strong yet in need of a place to collapse, appreciated yet taken for granted. The network is like a pep rally in reverse, exhorting women to give three cheers if they're miserable. And what do women do when they're miserable? Shop! In its own way, Oxygen is as separatist as "The Man Show." Can't we all just get along? But more damning than that, it's superfluous. "Who is the most underserved audience?" Laybourne asked rhetorically in a recent New York Times profile. "Women, of course." In what universe? Lately, it seems as if TV is serving no one but women, morning ("The View," "Later Today"), noon (Oprah, the soaps, Rosie O'Donnell) and night ("Providence," "Judging Amy," "Ally McBeal," "Once and Again" and the rest of the flock of chick shows). In all my hours of Oxygen viewing, I saw almost nothing that surprised or engaged me -- no domestic insight as harsh and true as what's offered every week on "Everybody Loves Raymond" or "The Sopranos" (one woman posted on HBO's "Sopranos" bulletin board that, "It's the only show my husband and I sit down and watch together"), no contemplation of female power as complicated and daring as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," no girl-talk show as witty and audacious as "Sex and the City." I did see plenty of earnest Oprah-style confessionalism, though, and designer spirituality, and teeny-tiny morsels of news you can use -- this is women's culture as advertiser-friendly and passé as "I Am Woman" (which, tellingly, was used as the theme song in Oxygen's TV commercial). And everywhere, everywhere on Oxygen, I heard the
same divisive, battle-of-the-sexes bull they use on "The
Man Show," except without the humor. On Oxygen,
clichés about men are repeated as if they're undisputed
gender fact: Men don't listen, men don't talk, men fear
intimacy, men are slobs, yada yada yada. If this is
Oxygen's idea of evolution, give me ESPN.
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