Following in fictional footsteps?
As consumers of popular media, we often find favorite personalities to identify with. We might imitate their clothing choices and hairstyles, but do we imitate their lifestyles as well? Recently, I came across a list by Soraya Roberts of AOL of the Worst Female Role Models on TV. Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) of Sex and the City is on the list, for her tendency to drop everything for Mr. Big, along with Felicity’s Felicity Porter (Keri Russell), who changed her college plans to follow a crush cross-country. These fictional femmes, along with the 8 other characters on the list, have the utter nerve to make mistakes, fall too hard, and do the things that no self-respecting “role model” would ever dare to do.
My first reaction was that these women are not necessarily role models in the sense that Ms. Roberts seems to imply - as a single gal in the city, I might envy Carrie’s wardrobe, but I draw the line at her love life! I watched Friends for the witty one-liners rather than a realistic portrait of twenty-something living, and while as a college-bound teen I was an avid Felicity fan, never once did I watch her Ben-Noel melodrama and actually think that this was something to aspire to! My knee-jerk reaction is to view television as pure escapism, and I was at first taken aback by the idea that anyone should expect a television character to serve as a moral compass - don’t we have our own principles and real-life role models to guide us? However, a recent study at Herriot Watt University in Edinburgh (source: BBC) showed that people who watch romantic comedies often have expectations in their own love lives shaped by the happy endings in the movies - needless to say, those expectations are often unrealistic.
It seems to me that popular culture does have the potential to shape our behavior - but only if we let it. The characters in our favorite TV shows and movies make very real mistakes, but in a fictional world, where the consequences are often done away with in a plot twist or simply nonexistent. In fact, some of the most entertaining characters are often the most flawed - it is up to us to separate fact from fiction and to make the right decisions for ourselves.
