On Wednesday, Christina wrote a confessional post — and now it’s my turn: Ladies and Gentlemen, I must confess that sometimes, after a long Thursday, when I just want to kick back, have a beer, and relax in front of the TV, I watch Bravo’s The Millionaire Matchmaker.

OH I KNOW — you can stop throwing tomatoes at your computer screens (seriously, STOP – your computer will crash and I want you to read the rest of this post!)… I admit it, I’m horrible!! But it’s like … looking at the sun: The show just oozes with so many god-awful heteronormative-hole assumptions, I can’t muster up the strength to look away!

Here’s how the show is set up: Patti, the matchmaker, gets paid by millionaires to help them find intelligent, beautiful, successful, funny women to date. But here’s the catch – in order to stay in the “Millionaire’s Club,” the millionaires have to stick to her rules, which include: 1) Planning and coordinating all dates (taking the “lead,” as a “real” man should); 2) No sex for the first three months; and 3) commitment to basic life changes/communication habits, such as, don’t talk about yourself all the time when on a date (duh!), and get rid of the butler and start answering the damn door yourself! Patti calls all of this “courtship,” and she demands that her millionaires also commit to future goals of marriage and (sometimes) kids/family.

Already, the premises are glaringly flawed according to the Onely (feminist and queer) perspective – on a basic level, it’s clear that Patti is working to promote and maintain American nostalgia for the “traditional family” and the “naturalness” of heteronormative coupling practices. The show, and Patti herself, serve as perfect reminders of how these beliefs about sexuality and “the way things should be” remain normalized in popular culture today: Patti’s insistence on the “naturalness” of heterosexuality trickles down from the rich and powerful, helping to shape everyday beliefs and practices.

But there’s more – not only does Patti insist on what Adrienne Rich would call “compulsory heterosexuality,” she is willing to ignore red flags and probably bad matches for the sake of “getting the job done.”

In the episode I just watched (with great guilt, alleviated only by the fact that I was taking notes so I could write this post!), Patti stood her ground against one 45-year-old’s hangups about age (he only wanted to date women in their 20s) by throwing out this telling non-sequitur:

Peter Pan doesn’t end up wih the love of his life at the end of the party!

Oh, so that means we should couple up even if we don’t end up with true love?

And now, I’m going to go hide in a cave somewhere, I am so overcome with shame and regret for consuming this junk-TV d-lite. Even with a beer in hand, I’m not so sure it’s worth it.

– L

Oh, and P.S. — did anyone notice that I never even had to specify that by “millionaire” I meant “male” for you to know what I meant?

In 2004 just before I became totally lost in my cybernarcosis, cyberdeliria, enraptured by the deep internet I played with the digital image of the foremost German Romantic landscape painter David Casper Friedrich’s (1774-1840) Wanderer Overlooking the Sea of Fog (1818 ) His anti-classical work was part of a new synthesis of art, philosophy, and science focusing on the natural world which seemed somehow embued with the spiritual experiences of life. Friedrich’s timeless depiction of a wanderer looking out over a sea of fog evokes the journey of life towards higher more difficult summits. I enjoy the irony that the man depicted in his original image was a mere warden, not a world traveller. David Casper Friedrich gained the admiration of the poet Goethe, “the initiator of the tradition of the Bildungsroman, the novel of formation” (more). “In Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship the protagonist undergoes a journey of Bildung, or self-realization” (more).

“With interventions into man’s genetic inheritance, the domination over nature reverts into an act of taking-control-over-oneself, which changes our generic-ethical self-understanding and can disturb the necessary conditions for an autonomous way of life and universalistic understanding of morals (Jantschek 2001 cited by Habermas cited in Žižek 125).”

Bildung is the painful struggle to form/educate one’s natural dispositions through which an individual develops his/her moral identity.

Žižek summarized Habermas’ concern with biogenetics argued that biogenetics threaten a vital concept of moral identity formation based on the painful lifelong struggle (Bildung) to realize one’s innate potential while educating one’s natural dispositions. Direct biogenetic interventions render the notion of such an education meaningless. Also, at an intersubjective level

tag cloud: biogenetics,

Webliography and Bibliography

Habermas, Jurgens. Lecture. Marburg.

Jantschek, Thorsten. 2001. “Ein ausgezehrter Hase.” Die Zeit. July 5.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2004. “Against hyphen-ethics.” Organs without Bodies: on Deleuze and Consequences. New York/London: Routledge. pp. 123-132.