Futurist and pioneering media critic Aldous Huxley saw it coming. In Brave New World Revisited, he talked about children being “highly susceptible to propaganda,” and indeed the perfect “television fodder.”
For those who don’t watch MTV, it may take a hundred turns through the grocery aisle to realize who these attractive young women are. They look like any other celebrity—stalked by paparazzi while doing everyday chores, babies slung on the hip in one frame, bikini-clad in the quintessential beachcomber shot in the next. There’s the requisite drama with the familiar bold-letter headlines, the words interchangeable: police, custody battle, diet, plastic surgery, wedding, party, sex.
They look familiar, but you can’t place them—unless you’re familiar with MTV’s top-rated “16 and Pregnant” or “Teen Mom” reality-television shows. These young women are celebrities all right: they’re famous for having babies in high school.
Big media corporations—which liberal scholar Robert McChesney once compared to the 19th-century British Empire, with teens “like Africa”—have drilled the depths of youth exploitation once more, successfully packaging the titillation of teen sex, the burgeoning “baby mama” market, and the old voyeuristic pleasure of watching someone else’s domestic dysfunction unfold.