How much does it cost to be CJ?  Not Pamela Anderson– CJ.  So, not how much are  implants, a nose job and a personal trainer; but how much are CJ’s nail appointments, and hair? How much does her (or any of the characters’) makeup cost? The car lease? Her CD player and apartment in Malibu?  The sofas? CJ and the gals never wear the same clothes in two shows.  Never the same shoes. How much does that cost? They don’t shop at Sears, right? …

Baywatch, along with Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place, is changing America in ways you don’t notice– precisely because you don’t notice. In prior TV and movies any incongruous displays of wealth had an explanation, however cliched.  Magnum PI lived off the kindness of Higgins.  Rachel on Friends has rich parents.  But with rare exceptions, the characters in the new crop of 20 something TV have access to material goods way outside their pay range, but they are made so ordinary you never think to question it.  We know very well how Pamela Anderson affords it.  But it’s made axiomatic that CJ can.

It’s wrong to look at the Baywatch women as pornography, especially during a time when actual pornography is becoming so easy to acquire.  The real pornography is the surrounding materialism, the casual display of impossible lifestyles and unattainable goods as if they are ordinary commodities.  After ten hours of porn, a breast flash doesn’t seem like a big deal.  After ten hours of Baywatch, leasing a car doesn’t, either.

The preceding is from a 1995 article on The Last Psychiatrist entitled “This Is Baywatch”. The cognitive dissonance created by much of media today is baffling. When I read the above article, an example that came to mind was from “Night Stalker“, a short-lived program on ABC in 2005.

The lead, Stuart Townsend, plays L.A. crime reporter Carl Kolchak. A still frame from the opening credit sequence is below. It’s Carl Kolchak working from his home in the Hollywood Hills.

Can you spot the problem? The median sales price for a home in the Hollywood Hills is just under $1 million. The median salary for a reporter in Los Angeles is roughly $90,000/year.

Ramit Sethi has written about subtle barriers in place to combating the subtle psychological barriers to meeting reality when it comes to losing weight. He derides the, “Ugh, why don’t fat people just eat less?” complaint:

Former FDA commissioner David Kessler has written a terrific book describing how food companies systematically engineer foods to overeaten (including designing foods that can be swallowed quicker so we can consumer more and more in one sitting). These are tested, refined, and optimized processes, not mere accidents.

Most importantly, behavioral change is not simply about trying harder.

As regards both the psychological impact of Baywatch in impacting consumerism beyond one’s means while simultaneously neutralizing thought about overspending, and to Ramit’s point about engineered fattiness in popular foods, I see a strong case for willfully withdrawing from popular media in some or all areas of life.