The lesson from Kim’s divorce

Jennifer L. PoznerTheDailyBeast.com

Kim Kardashian has done American women a big favor, said Jennifer L. Pozner. The reality-TV star’s farcical 72-day marriage has finally drawn back the veil on “reality TV’s fairy-tale narratives,” and exposed them as the “hollow and manipulative” shams that they are. Despite their name, “reality’’ shows have little to do with “real life or real people,” and send destructive messages to the millions of young women who watch them avidly.

In shows such as The Bachelor and Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?, women live in Darwinian competition with one another for rich, arrogant men, and the winners are skinny, bitchy, desperate, and vapid. Relationships are shallow, and have but one goal—a “ludicrously expensive” wedding. “It’s tempting to laugh all this off as harmless fluff,’’ but it’s not. The growing “luxury wedding market,’’ now pulling in $80 billion a year, feeds on these fantasies.

Maybe as viewers watch the reruns of Kim’s Fairy­tale Wedding, and watch Kim promising to love her betrothed “forever,’’ they’ll realize that reality TV is one big, “regressive fantasy.’’