A Disaster of Allenesque Proportion

Just a couple years after Leslie Gore’s “It’s My Party” peaked on the charts, Irwin Allen introduced a TV show called “The Time Tunnel.” Its premise was that two scientists (one played by former teen idol James Darren) were stuck in a time travel experiment gone wrong. They would get zapped to an earlier age, find themselves in the midst of some historical event, and for the next 48 minutes they would battle evil in its various guises, from murderous cavemen to Hitler Youth. Inevitably captured, just as they were to be dispatched, their colleagues back at the lab would find their coordinates and attempt to bring them back. Of course, they could never quite get them back to the 60s, and so we would see them arrive in some precarious situation in another age, and in true cliffhanger fashion, we would have to wait a week to find out how they would escape.

Allen was known for his sensationalistic movies and television programs, but while they were lowbrow, they were also incredibly popular. If you look at his body of work, you see that while he started off producing adaptations of works by such respected authors as Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells, his projects became increasingly sensationalistic, and required less and less of the viewer.

Allen went from “The Lost World” to “Time Tunnel” and eventually to such campy enterprises as “Lost in Space” and “Land of the Giants.” While the technological improvements in the production of TV shows was growing almost exponentially, his programming endeavored to shoot for the lowest common denominator, and once it latched onto that audience, proceeded to drag them down even more.

If we track the music video industry and its portrayal of women, it follows an eerily similar arc. Leslie Gore and her contemporaries were the very picture of innocence and even purity. As the sexual revolution of the late 60s and 70s took root, however, the way women were portrayed changed significantly, first in the movies, and eventually on TV and especially in music videos.

At the same time that the sexual revolution was in full swing (wow, that was an awful pun – sorry), the women’s movement was also making major inroads. Traditional gender roles were being called into question, and people, especially those who were mainstream and over 30, were left with a lot of questions. Rather than risk alienating its audience, Hollywood simply stopped making as many movies featuring strong women characters, and instead reverted back to the days of the Westerns when women were either whores or one-dimensional women of virtue. Even Hollywood’s biggest stars took roles as prostitutes (e.g., Jane Fonda in Klute). There were very few good comedy roles for them because most people just weren’t laughing yet about the struggle between the sexes.

Meanwhile, music videos were born as a way for the record companies to promote their acts, usually shown at clubs and concerts between the live acts. Then in 1981, MTV blazed onto the scene, just as cable TV was starting to penetrate more and more households. At first, most videos on MTV were simple performance videos or stylized acting out of the lyrics, but within the first year, a few rock bands realized this was a new way to reach the most active record buyers – teenage boys. To get and keep their attention, most bands started featuring women in their videos, and the race to the bottom was off to a roaring start.

Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher” and the J. Geils Band’s “Angel is a Centerfold” were two of the best examples. Soon, however, the gyrating, semi-clad women in the videos were not even central to the “story” of the song, but were simply eye candy for the viewers.

When rap and hip-hop became more popular, the artists started taking it to extremes. The women were reduced to booty-shaking accessories for the men in the videos. The all-time low may have been reached in Nelly’s video for the song “Tip Drill” when a woman is completely objectified, even to the point of having a man swipe his credit card down her butt crack.

So if this is what the men are doing in music videos, what about the women? Unfortunately, the expectations are that women will go along with this teenage boy fantasy, even if the record buyers are predominantly female. Early on, Madonna’s fans were overwhelmingly female, yet she displayed her body in a way that not only appealed to males, but also sent the message to her young female fans that their bodies were their number one asset, and they had better learn how to use them.

This has persisted to today. Britney Spears’ latest single, “If You Seek Amy,” is a thinly veiled come-on, and shows her as a woman on the hunt for sex. Obviously, L’il Kim’s work is meant to appeal to the lowest common denominator, as well.

Even artists who previously eschewed such techniques are now laying on the makeup, putting on the push-up bras and slutting it up for their videos. If Leslie Gore fell into the Time Tunnel, she wouldn’t believe where we’ve ended up now.