‘Jon & Kate’s’ Neo-traditional Appeal
Hank Steuver of The Washington Post likens the cable show “Jon & Kate Plus 8” to “a holiday update letter that never ends”:
We’ve all known (or read the blog of) an intense mother who cannot shut up about every banal detail of the household, who (as Kate does) surrounds herself in the minutiae of the mundane — the trips to Gymboree, the perky Bible verses on her kitchen wall. Of the unanswered mysteries in “Jon & Kate Plus 8″ (what does he see in her? what could the sex possibly be like?), the most disturbing mystery is why we are compelled to watch. A typical episode serves up the sort of thing most of us would do well to avoid, especially if we already live it 24-7: temper tantrums over toys, screaming fits over sharing, toilet mishaps, minivan voyages to nowhere and back.
“Jon & Kate Plus 8″ debuted in 2007 as TLC shifted from home-makeover shows (we’re a long way from the quaint voyeurism of “Trading Spaces”) to explorations of the domestic extreme. When it’s not “Jon & Kate Plus 8,” it’s “18 Kids and Counting,” the epically backward (and eerily sweet) story of the pious, home schooling Duggar clan in Arkansas or “Table for 12,” which similarly chronicles the unremarkable Hayeses, a policeman and his wife who’ve two-upped the Gosselins in head count. This amounts to a lot of family time, which America, inundated with a decade or more of “family values” culture disputes, apparently hungers for. As to the relative ratings successes of TLC’s “multiples” shows, prevailing theses involve some untreated, deeper loneliness in us, a fascination for the crowded house and the soothing effects of belonging to the pack.
Also there’s the anachronistic, psychological freak show: Daddy is a sure-shooter and Mommy’s body is a clown car; we have no purpose other than to eat, sleep, argue, reproduce and grow. Perpetuation of the family gene pool is our only purpose, and all costs (material or emotional) are beside the point. Biologically this makes some animal sense, and it’s no accident, at least on my dial, that these shows play out so close to the travails of the Serengeti.
“Jon & Kate Plus 8″ rarely takes time to show any activity that would suggest an intellectual or unselfish pursuit. The focus is on structured play, adhering to the schedule, wearing matching outfits, eating matching food. It’s like a holiday update letter that never ends, in which the Gosselins are mainly seen consuming resources. (Hip to this, a recent “Jon & Kate” special focused on “going green.”)
Steuver’s criticism of the show amounts to an early Betty Friedan view of marriage: it’s banal, pointless, anti-intellectual, and self-absorbed. Certainly this depiction is partly true of “Jon & Kate Plus 8,” but if it were really true, nobody would watch the show. What Steuver overlooks is that “Jon & Kate Plus 8” also highlights what you might call the Don Quixote view of marriage: the nobility and self sacrifice of raising and protecting young children, the beauty of innocence and vulnerability. When I watch the show, I am struck by two things: eight kids are running around the house with smiles and frowns on their faces and two parents are scrambling to care for them. The show is not an endless holiday update letter; it’s an endless YouTube clip.
To be sure, the show also now traffics in the Sancho Panza view of marriage and its discontents: the hope that out-of-wedlock sex will bring liberation, etc. But the Panza- and Friedan views of marriage won’t keep the show popular over the long term. We Americans already live in a society in which, beside the fact that large families are on the wane, increasing numbers of young people don’t get married and marital breakup is common. Who would want to watch a show called “Jon & Kate,” shorn of the eight kids, for season after season?
There is a lesson in this. Traditionalists won’t win the marriage wars; many women, especially those in the professions, will stay in the workforce, and many children will be raised in daycare. But neo-traditionalists have a shot at expanding their ranks, especially among those couples who work outside of or on the fringes of the professions. Their Quixote worldview of heroism and romance can’t be matched by their competitors, and is likely to appeal to those who grasp that getting married and raising children is at least as satisfying as earning a big salary and living in a nice home.
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Children who attend day care, aren’t raised in day care, it’s not as if someone drops off their kid at the raising factory to return later and pick them up all ready for adulthood. Children are looked after while at day care and are raised by their parent(s).
I didn’t realize there is a marriage war (except for the same sex one, and we know how you stand on that one). In a free country people get to decide what type of marriage they want (or don’t want). For those who are able, staying home to tend to their children full time is the right option for them, for others not so much. What war?
Apparently, being a shameless attention-whore reality star is a heroic deed, while being a woman who actually has her own dreams and ambitions outside of being a baby factory is selfish careerism. Gotcha.
Conservatives are so hard up in the culture wars that they’re turning to egotistical morons like Carrie Prejean and Kate Gosselin as role models. I’d say they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel here, but I don’t want to insult bottoms of barrels by linking them with these two…
And besides the many emotional and marital stability reasons why having eight children is, for most families, an incredibly stupid idea, there’s the matter of finances – which never add up unless you’re a millionaire. Hence, Gosselin, like Octomom, has her own ideas about who will foot the bill:
2005 Associated Press story reported that a pre-TV Gosselin had petitioned the state to extend payments for [her nurse], whose fees were first paid by Medicaid (Jon was unemployed; Medicaid provides limited assistance to premature babies).
“Kate Gosselin said she feels society has a responsibility to help with the children, since modern medicine promotes the use of fertility drugs, which can lead to multiple births,” the AP reported.
If by “neo-traditionalists”, you mean “hypocrites with a healthy sense of entitlement”, then yes, your movement is expanding their ranks.