Soap Operas are America's Soapboxes??

"Monday, August 22 #4618As Dante watches Nick and Bridget, Taylor calls him regarding Bridget’s pregnancy. Dante reveals that Bridget already terminated the pregnancy, to Taylor’s shock. Although Bridget states that she didn’t mean to hurt Nick, he is extremely upset and refuses to believe that Bridget has terminated the pregnancy. Brooke is shocked to find Stephanie pointing a gun at her. Brooke picks up the gun as if she’s going to shoot herself, but she turns the gun on Stephanie instead. Stephanie taunts Brooke to shoot her and when Brooke fires the gun at Stephanie, she misses." [Recent plot summary from The Bold and the Beautiful]

Last evening as I relaxed in my new all-girls dormitory near the University of Jordan in Amman, my neighbor Maram and I turned on the local music video station and to my chagrin 50 Cent's "Candy Shop," the sugar-coated song filled with sexually explicit innuendo, was playing. Although the rhythm of the song has a certain like bees to honey je-ne-sais-quoi, when I remembered the lyrics and watched the gyrating women taking chocolate-bathes in the video, especially in front of my new Jordanian friend, I became ashamed of the American import. More than ashamed, I was anxious that Arab audiences here would assume that the attitudes reflected in music videos would be assumed to be ubiquitous among Americans.

I asked my friend Maram if she thought everyone in America went to the "Candy Shop," so to speak. "No no!" she laughed as if to show the utter ridiculousness of my assumption. I breathed an inward sigh of relief. "Of course we know that these music videos are not real," she continued, "and that American life is really just like "The Bold and the Beautiful" and "Days of Our Lives. I am a huge fan! Who is your favorite character?"

Maram's limited English and my non-existent Arabic thwarted my efforts to explain the narrow, largely feminine, audience that the melodramatic series appeal to in the US. I laughed to myself for awhile then became troubled by the association of soap operas with the American lifestyle. When I think of soap operas the plot lines that spring to mind are usually twins separated at birth, forbidden love affairs, amnesia in a foreign country and subsequent identity crises, money laundering by men with dark mustaches, adulteries and secret children recorded in inordinately detailed diaries; basically all the trappings of a dysfunctional arabesque, a drawn out Jerry Springer where the actors are attractive and glib.

I don't advocate nixing soap operas from the air waves here in the Middle East, though I think we should consider their, and all other American media exports for that matter, unwitting impact. Americans think of soap operas as cotton candy, gossamers, never equating or relating them back to their lives except to exclaim, usually in the pejorative, "Wow, that's like a soap opera!" Yet Maram, along with other Jordanians I've chatted with, don't understand the distinction between American entertainment and American life. This is understandable, they are 6000 miles away from the evidence that would disabuse soap operas from their soap boxes. If America wants to convince the Middle East that democracy is worth embracing, we need to formulate a better way to showcase what life is like in our own democracy.