I'm reading this commentary on Martha Stewart and a few things jumped out at me. I've always thought Martha was interesting, but I find her way of speaking annoying (just the slow, over-annunciation makes me nuts). I always feel like she's talking down to me when I watch her show. And this part of the article really hit home with me because of that:
quote:
Richard Sheingold, a broadcast syndicator who's been enlisted to market the show is frantic with worry that it will bomb. He's fretting that the urban audience won't get it. "They're working-class people. They don't even have gardens," he says to Stewart. As Byron tells it: "Martha looked back at him. Her voice was even and cool, conveying the total confidence in her words as she said, 'Yes, but they want them.' "
Maybe that's where the condescension comes in. I always used to think that she was targeting the upper middle class with her shows - you know, suburban types with big lawns and trendy homes with all the newest household gadgetry.
Apparently I was wrong. It was us lower class schleps she's been targeting, probably because she knows there is a boundless market in us. Upper middle class people can eventually get their places to look like hers, and then they're done. But those of us who live in apartments, or townhouses, or whatever, we're always going to be striving for the Martha ideal, and that will keep us coming back for more.
And in case I seem paranoid about this, just look at where her products are, and who her marketing is aimed at. Zellers. K-mart. The shopping stores of choice for the poor. Upper middle class to upper class women are shopping at little boutiques downtown where they can buy their Irish linens and their hand-sewn patchwork quilts.
On a different angle, is Martha a feminist icon? She is the woman who made a zillion dollars by becoming the zenith of homemaking. Is it true that she is resented more for it than other, male zillionaires because she's a woman?
quote:
Then there's the issue of control. Much has been written on this subject in the past, notably in Jerry Oppenheimer's Martha Stewart -- Just Desserts: The Unauthorized Biography, and Byron doesn't break much news. As in Just Desserts, Stewart is the ultimate control freak, a quality reviled in women but vaunted in business. You don't hear anyone call Ted Rogers a control freak; he's a "micro manager." You didn't hear anyone complain that "Neutron" Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, wasn't "nice." Yet Byron, like the executives around Stewart, expresses surprise that she would want control over every product that bore the Martha Stewart brand.
Is she someone to admire as a feminist ideal? Or does her manipulation of her target audience make her into the propogator of the household version of The Beauty Myth - the desperate quest for more and more stuff in order to reach an impossible ideal of being the perfect homemaker and having the perfect household?