A student from Durham University in England was recently awarded a first-class degree in sociology. Eliza Cummings-Cove made news because it was reported that her 10,000-word dissertation was on the Kardashians: an analysis of the effect of the celebrity family’s lifestyles on women.
“I think there is a lot of cultural snobbery about it,” Cummings-Cove told the Telegraph, referring to the long-running reality show Keeping Up with the Kardashians. “The Kardashians are everywhere in the media and they are shaping many of the girls today into the women they will become.” Her thesis was written well before the latest Kardashian-related controversy: the spat between Kim, Kanye West and Taylor Swift.
Cummings-Cove watched 80 hours of the show as part of her dissertation research. I have watched more than that, so here’s my insight in 700 words:
It’s easy to laugh at the antics of the photogenic family, but if there is one interesting message coming out of the show for young girls, it is that life can be very confusing and the ability to adapt to challenges is essential.
When the show first went out, the patriarch of the Kardashians was Bruce Jenner, a former Olympic gold medallist and father of the two youngest sisters, Kendall and Kylie. Jenner has since made the transition to Caitlyn. That alone was a pretty extraordinary cultural message to the millions who watch the show, and must have encouraged many conversations about gender in households wherever the show is watched.
Public gender transition
Kris Jenner, the bossy mother of the six adult children featured in the show, did not crawl into a hole when her former husband made a very public gender transition – something many other people in her position might have wanted to do.
Kris is now with a man decades her junior. Is it because she’s rich? Who cares? It’s still a counter-narrative to the conventional age balance in a relationship, when if one party is considerably older, it’s invariably the man.
Besides, Keeping Up with the Kardashians shows that you can be as rich and famous as you like, but that won’t make your relationships turn out any better than people who don’t live in mansions.
Khloé Kardashian’s husband, Lamar Odom, was found close to death in a brothel in Nevada after a weekend of extreme drug abuse and cavorting with prostitutes. The disclosure was a public humiliation for his wife, who was in the process of divorcing him. Nonetheless, she went to the hospital and stayed with him for weeks. She was loyal and kind when she could have run far away.
Kim is the most famous Kardashian, with the biggest bottom, the mouthiest partner (Kanye West), and the most social media traction: 76.7 million followers on Instagram and 46.5 million on Twitter. That kind of influence cannot be ignored.
Kanye is her third husband. Kim was told by her second husband, Kris Humphries: “Baby, by the time you have kids and they’re in school, no one will probably care about you.” She divorced him after 72 days of marriage.
Was it all a shameless publicity stunt? Possibly. Does it matter that they should never have married? Of course it does, but with a husband who says things like that, it would clearly have been worse if they stayed married. You make mistakes, is the message. You move on. You start again.
Kim’s face and body is one of the most- discussed elements of the Kardashian phenomenon. What, for instance, do you make of a woman who one day is on the cover of Vogue, the most famous high-fashion magazine in the world, and the next is balancing a bottle of champagne on her stuck-out naked backside in Paper magazine? Maybe that you can be whatever person you want to be.
Kim is currently on the cover of Forbes magazine, as the face of the new “mobile moguls”. That’s because her game, Kim Kardashian Hollywood, has been downloaded 45 million times since launching in 2014, making her tens of millions.
Fame-hungry airhead or wildly successful entrepreneur? Life can be very confusing.