You're the Man!

I meant to write this post earlier. Sunday night, I made my television debut as a studio audience member of You're the Man! - a Cambodian, reality television show. As a front row participant, and one of six non-Khmer attendees, I received my fair share of camera time. Inexplicably, it seems there are videos camera at nearly every event I've attended for work in Phnom Penh and they've been trained on my face for approximately 20% of the time. Unsettling, yes, but footage of audience members "listening" to presentations in a foreign language: riveting, I'm sure.

For You're the Man!, six Cambodian men lived together for two months and competed in several televised challenges to discover who best embodied the qualities of a "real" Cambodian man. in one episode, this meant doing work a woman would typically do in a rural village (laundry, cooking, gathering firewood, childcare, unremitting, unpaid familial duties, etc). In another they competed to see how many men each could convince to take a voluntary, confidential, HIV test. In madcap Cambodian fashion, this meant piling into tuk tuks and racing to the testing centers. Others varied between fun (learning to live like monks, dressing up as a condom super hero and passing out condoms) and more serious (solving a ghost story with themes of domestic violence.)

I really liked the finale. The crowd was excited. There was a karaoke contest, as there's been at every work event I've gone to, with invariably excellent singing. Although I wasn't able to fully grasp the Khmer, I also liked the show's messages and think a mass media approach to supporting more positive gender norms can potentially reach more people. It's difficult to measure, but encouraging change through role modeling positive norms is both fun and innovative.