I’m having an identity crisis, and I blame the media. Amazon can’t make up its mind whether I’m a gay man or a lesbian. The DVD rental site Lovefilm keeps insisting that I want to see Children of Men, which, thanks, I don’t. The supermarket sends me vouchers for money off tampons, organic yoghurt, and cat food, which, though useful, makes me want to kill myself. Am I really that person?
Scrolling through an internet provider’s list of recommendations is as distressing as opening a succession of birthday presents from friends and realising that, in their eyes, you are some kind of middle-aged, alcohol-dependent drag queen.
It starts so well ? Welcome Morven! Here are your recommendations! Here is your essential cinema! And then you read through a long list of films about teenage boys whose friendship ”develops into something more” after ”events take an unexpected turn”. You buy one film about teenagers at musical theatre camp and you are branded a closet homosexual for life. I wonder what sort of prurient classification system they use, though, that I wasn’t recommended any musicals or trashy teen dramas — no Chicago, no OC — they just focused on the sex. I could find something sinister in this but I am too busy being offended by the music they think I will enjoy — one alt.country album and it’s vagina music all the way.
Escaping to television gives me no respite from feeling that I am being dismissed as a person I don’t like and don’t want to be. I like watching programmes that, if the adverts are anything to go by, are watched solely by the flatulent and constipated.
I find the idea of my bodily functions and sexuality being obsessed about by marketing professionals disturbing, but perhaps my biggest concern is that they are right. I can laugh about Amazon getting it wrong because I’m not a very regular shopper there. The supermarket loyalty card, on the other hand, is horribly accurate. I really am a health-obsessed domestic drudge. With a cat.
I don’t believe many people like to think of themselves as being so easily categorised. We like to think that we are individuals, that our tastes and choices are an eclectic concoction, that we are unique and unpredictable and fabulous. We don’t want to be ”radio listener”, or ”single mother”, or ”Bridget Jones”, or ”middle-aged status-obsessed”. As in Life of Brian we chorus: ”We’re all individuals!” Perhaps, as marketing gets better and better at defining and targeting us, we will be drawn, unknowingly, towards their pre-set targets. We will lose our individuality in favour of the convenience of reduced choice.
Presumably internet dating and MySpace work on similar principles: if you like this, you’ll like that/him/me. Obviously, this will be the case at times, but I’ve had friends and boyfriends with whom I’ve had absolutely nothing in common but have had an intellectual connection, a shared sense of humour, an indefinable pleasure in someone else’s company. What box would you tick for that? If all our relationships and choices are becoming defined by what we have in common, what happens to enjoying diversity?
I heard the comic Matt Lucas on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs recently. I didn’t think there was anyone else in the world who would choose The Kids from Fame, The Proclaimers and Ben Folds as their musical companions, and I don’t resemble Lucas at all, not even in profile.
It’s time to revolt against a system that swings from the obvious to the ludicrous. Break free from the shackles of your pre-packaged personality! Do something outrageous, out of character, go somewhere you know you won’t fit in! I will. Just as soon as I’ve fed the cat. — Â