TIME OUT:Why we still enjoy perusing 'penny dreadfuls,' writes MARIE MURRAY
A VISIT to the hairdresser’s brings more than a haircut. It provides reading material that we say we would never buy. Yet while we may disdain it, we do not ignore it. Indeed, if truth were told, one of the entertainments in many salons is that between “shampoo and set” we can indulge in reading material of the kind that we like to deny.
We may rationalise that we read salon magazines because we have no choice, but which of us takes Jane Austen along to the hairdressers when we can enjoy “enforced” fixes of celebrity splits, sordid stories and gross gossip as we move from chair to chair, gowned and in need of escape from reality and from the mirrors all around.
“My evil neighbour taunted me”. “Abducted by aliens I discovered myself”. “I was a man before I was a woman”. “My love triangle that ended in tears”. “My mother became my dad”. “I took two toyboys just for fun”. Oh the wonderful, outraged, mesmerised, righteous revulsion with which we read these gruesome disclosures.
Within the bundle of magazines plonked before us, which of us can resist these lurid headlines? Who does not peep surreptitiously to see what on earth it could be about? Who is not amazed at the dreadful disclosures about lives we cannot imagine living but within which lie grains of emotions we can comprehend?
What about tips for makeovers into identities we would never want to have? How does someone “drop five dress sizes in a week”, whose “secret nose job worked” and what are the adrenalin benefits of “having a snog”? Think of the satisfaction we feel, tinged with sympathy, when celebrities are snapped having a bad hair day, caught with bags and bulges, or when the cruel cameras capture cellulite and nails that need a manicure.
Who can resist the questionnaires that will reveal “how normal is your sex life”, if you are “racy or lacy”, or the pages that will “scientifically test your fashionista IQ”? What of the horoscope with all the future holds? Of course, it is incredible, but a smug peek can do no harm.
As to celebrity titbits, we must know who has had a baby, who is with whom or who has split from whom, how are they coping, where they are living, why did it happen, who betrayed whom and the minutiae and messes of their lives.
And if validation is needed for our surreptitious read, let it be said that there is psychological evidence to support these literary indulgences which says that we are neurologically preconditioned to feel connected to faces that are familiar. We want to know how these intimate strangers live because we are primordially programmed to need this information.
This extends back to a time when knowing who was enemy or friend within the tribe was essential for survival. So too was gossip, when group identity, tracking the whereabouts of significant others, and learning how to either denigrate, displace or imitate dominant members of the species, enhanced reproductive chances when survival of the fittest was at its most basic extreme.
We may convince ourselves that we only read these 21st-century “penny dreadfuls” because we are captive at the hairdressers with nothing else to do. We may protest that more worthy reading is impossible because of the many moves from chair to sink to cut to blow-dry, but the truth is that rationed amounts of such reading is good for us because it still has psychological function.
Reading occasionally at the extremes reassures us about our normality, gives a sense of superiority with feelings of empowerment and control to worship or reject those who are privileged. It provides risk-management perspectives through vicarious experience and personal warnings, the opportunity to gossip about those we do not know rather than hurting those we do, and immersion in celebrity irrelevancies before returning to our real lives with renewed appreciation of the real people who share them with us.
Marie Murray is a clinical psychologist and author, and director of psychology and student counselling in UCD