Sunday, June 10, 2007
Love and hate are abstract, but what happens when you love and hate is not abstract.
Twice this week I've heard women talk about ex husbands / boyfriends / partners as having been "in control of the remote" or "the one controlling the channel changer." I was turning this metaphor over in my head during shavasana today. It implies that the men were in control of the relationship, but it also implies that the women think of themselves or their lives as being like television. Whoever controls the remote is more or less a person sitting on the sofa and this is supposed to symbolize agency? I understand the idea, but as a mechanism for conceptualizing agency and romantic relationships, I find it a bit disturbing. What would be a positive relationship, one where you each get to use the channel changer equally?
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'We made a joint decision to answer phone calls at the PBS membership drive'
I was once driving through North Carolina and a DJ was announcing a radio station contest: women married to men were supposed to tape their address and phone number to their t.v.'s remote control and mail it to the station. One of those remote controls would be randomly pulled from a giant vat of remote controls. The winning woman received free liposuction. The idea was that the man of the house would be left without easy access to the t.v. and then could watch his hot, fat-free wife instead of the tube.
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