Brat Camp (2) and Big Brother: Teenagers and women.

In the second show of Brat Camp, the the kid’s begin turning on one another.

Rob said to me as we watched them, “oooh great can’t wait for that episode, yeah that’s what happens, I see it in the class room all the time,” (I could see he was getting some depraved sense of schadenfreude from the whole show,) “Once the authority has complete control, then the kids start attacking each other.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Dunno,” he shrugged. “I just know that’s what happens.”

“Maybe it’s because there’s no point in challenging an authority that has firmly and unquestionably instituted it’s position, so they move on down to the next level where they can still have some hope of exercising control over people who are still in a struggle for power with one another?”

“Yeah that would be it, " he agreed.

I wondered how Chomsky would explain this in regard to his theory that the natural human response hardwired into our brain is to never allow ourselves to be fully subjugated by totally oppressive political systems. Maybe the kid's responses were a perfect example of how humans instinctively rebel against tyrannical systems, (because let's face it, regardless of the fact that the system seemed to be effective in changing the kid's behaviour, Camp Turn-a-bout was undoubtedly tyrannical.) Maybe the very fact that some of the kids rebelled against the totallitarian approach of the camp leaders was not an indicator of their 'naughtiness' or 'waywardness' but was a natural human response. There was no doubt to me that some of these kids were truly out of control and needed help, but was it really benefiting them to teach them to blindly and unquestioninly obey authority figures?

As far as I was concerned, Joe - the punk with the Union Jack T-shirt - might have needed to learn respect for other human beings and the value of contributing to society with some good hard work, but Camp Turn-a-bout also had the potential to strip all those things I saw in him of value. The parts of him that did question the authority systems of his society, and any society who loses the ability or right to questions its governing body, is a society putting itself at risk. It taught them to unquestioningly conform. Surely there must be other ways of getting to these kids.

But I'm jumping the gun a bit, maybe Camp Turn-a-bout will surprise me in future episodes. I see a lot of the psychology surrounding the place works on the basis that the kids need to appreciate their rights by earning them with responsibility. Maybe, hopefully, in further episodes as the kids mature, their understanding of their social responsibilities will be realised as an earned right to question their authority figures, not indiscriminately, but when the time calls for it.

On another note, the whole process of the subjugated human responses to turn on each other, raised some questions in my mind on another matter; how women treat one another.

All of a sudden I recalled reading in my latest book, (Witch Hunters. P.G Maxwell Stuart,) an explanation by the author of what he really understood to be the motivations of the reporting of a witch in a community. By his understanding and research, it was often, (not always,) more a matter driven by local and communal internal pressures rather than driven by larger political conspiracies.

He bases some of this argument on the fact that it was usually women reporting on other women that began the trial of a so-called witch. (There were also many male witches incriminated.)

The state of female relationships in our own day and age is currently under a lot of speculation. Why do our teenage girls tear each other apart? We have movies like “Mean Girls” which addresses the fractious nature of female teenage relationships, we watch psychologists grappling with the problem on Oprah Winfrey. We see in the Big Brother series (I’m speaking of my country’s version,) that the culling of female contestants often happens in preference to the young, virile, Australian male, and we witness the way the girls on the show unwittingly fall into the trap of being prime candidates for viewer’s dislike and their own eventual eviction, because as the boy housemates bond and become closer and more invincible, the female housemates almost always fall into patterns of tearing each other down. And although the males also engage in bitching and back-stabbing, the intensity of the girl’s version of these experiences is strong enough to deny them the same very strong group bond that the males often end up in, which almost always inevitably leads to house domination.

(This is not to say that the average white Australian male always wins Big Brother; We just had a female win recently. But she was young, blonde, sweet and non-threatening, which also reveals the psyche on femininity in the Australian public.)

And while it’s true that there are also a lot of votes going to male housemates simply because the show is puerile and watched by scores of teenage girls who vote the men in so that they can look at their 'hot bods,' and this is probably the obvious reason men are lasting longer than women, it doesn’t discount by above theory as a valid contributor to why men lasting longer on the show than women in general, in fact it supports it, because we then have to ask the question, why are female voters more predisposed to vote for men they like to look at or think they have a crush on as opposed to voting for their own sex in a demonstration of solidarity?

Naturally my first thought was that females tear each other apart without stopping to think about what they’re doing for just the same reasons Rob and I had discussed in relation to Brat Farm. They think they are in a competition with one another to attract male attention. (And as Naomi Wolf points out in The Beauty Myth, females look upon themselves firstly in the light of how other people are going to experience them, and only then how they will experience and look upon themselves.) But it's also deeper than that, they tear each other apart because they're so deeply subjugated by patriarchy that they can't even recognise it, it's normal for them to accept the patriarchal system they've been under forever and so it doesn't enter their minds to truely turn their attention to toppling that power structure, instead they turn in on each other.

http://got.net/~elained/patriarchy.html

Any and every female is preconditioned to exist in a patriarchal society from birth. Julia Kristeva would argue that it begins when a child learns language, which is patriarchal in nature. I would argue that it happens even before that with the unspoken and physical cues that a baby of any sex is presented with and long before he or she understands language.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Kristeva

In one of my Master's papers I wrote;

Long before use of language in a patriarchal form, a child is receiving a multitude of information that signifies our patriarchal culture, which will inevitably affect the very core of who the child becomes. For example; an experiment played out for the camera, was one in which a baby boy was dressed in a pink jumpsuit and left on a couch for strangers to come and talk to and hold, and then alternately dressed in a blue jumpsuit and the same procedure repeated again. Although it was the exact same baby in the pink and then blue jumpsuit, the behaviour of the adults towards the baby was vastly different.

While the baby was in pink, it was held tenderly to people’s bodies, rocked, sung to softly and its future was ruminated on in regards to stereotypical female professions like “ballet dancers.” While the baby was in a blue jumpsuit, people once again assumed it was a little boy, hugged it with a little more gusto, threw it up into the air, told it how “strong” it was and considered such occupations for it as a “football player” or “fireman.” Despite the fact it was always the same baby...