Kim Kardashian at the Zoo
What’s all the fuss about? A young woman posing provocatively in underwear on the front page of a magazine? Isn’t there a page every day in the Sun newspaper with a pretty girl with no top on at all?
So what is the problem? Is this morally wrong? Is this sending a bad message to young men and women?
Presumably up until now Kim Kardashian has been seen as a positive role model. She is attractive(?), a rich business woman, famous for nothing, except for being one of the stars in her family TV show! At the risk of boring you the Blog reader I return to the market place. Whatever Kim Kardashian is: she is a brilliant sales woman. She is selling herself in the market place. A woman selling herself can be associated with prostitution: another part of the market place since civilization(?) began.
Perhaps it is the old english perception the selling yourself in business was like selling yourself for prostitution? These days they are much closer together even entwined? There appears to be less of a boundary now between women selling themselves to promote their business, and selling their bodies for sex. The difference is that a woman selling herself to make money on all her other associated products branded with her name, is not literally selling her body?
And men are catching up. The market has trained women to appreciate men in the same way that men have viewed women for centuries: the way they look. The way people look sells. It is part of our DNA: it is how we are all here: two people liked the way each other looked, and created us!
The market place has always used sex to sell. The market place in the UK came of age in the Thatcher years. It used to be that being a sales person was a grubby profession that you would not like to admit to. The rise of the City, and the demise of the manufacturing industries, turned the value of work upside down. The value of working and being paid to produce something was replaced by betting on commodities: doing less, producing nothing and earning much more.
Value has changed: it became broken away from what humans produce, to what humans can bet against and sell. Some hold onto the idea that a value of a human life does not have a monetary price. We can have the market place in all aspects of our lives: yet still remain as people beyond a monetary value. The person is unique: and therefore priceless. The Kardashians are showing us that as the power of the market dominates this idea becomes increasingly problematic.
The hope is that this is the beginning of the end of the market as we know it in the 21st century: not the end of the priceless value of people.
Copyright Adrian Scott North London Counsellor Blog 2012
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Disclaimer: This weblog content are the views of the writer and for general information only.
This article is designed to provoke argument and critique.