I read an article some time ago about how women are getting dumber. Seeing that written like a solid statistic obviously shocked me – as far as I knew, we were becoming smarter and more accomplished. We can vote, study and run companies and countries. The suffragettes are a-tap-dancing in their graves.

The research behind the piece was that we’re simply taking in too much rubbish information. And I’m fairly certain they’re onto something.

We call it ‘relaxing’ to watch mindless television. Our reading repertoire consists of subscriptions to a couple of glossies. I’m sure some of us can count the number of books we’ve read in a year on one hand. We watch celebrity news instead of the real news. And I can understand that in a way, the real news is upsetting and hard to deal with. But you should be watching small letter e at least half as much as big letter E exclamation point.

We’ve become far too comfortable with our ostrich approach to entertainment. You love pizza and Chicken Licken, but you don’t eat it twice a day, every day. Junk information is no better than junk food. It comes down to apathy - we don’t care what we’re taking in. All we know is we giggled once, forty episodes ago. And now we’re drooling on the couch with a vacant stare, still entranced. All those hours of TV that we call ‘light-hearted’ and ‘easy-watching’ keep us so ‘entertained’ that our brains have become too lazy to think.

It’s definitely a symptom of our stressful lifestyles, and I’m the last person who’s going to take away from our much-needed couch-downtime. We’re over-compensating for those stress-levels though. Instead of watching an interesting documentary – something informative and potentially educational – we watch women fighting each other over imaginary feuds in The Real Housewives Of Whogivesash*t.

I’ve found reality TV to be the death of our society. The whole concept started as some sort of post-modernist revolutionary idea: “what could be more perplexing, more enthralling, than watching people just living how they live?” Survivor was the earliest example (with at least an inkling of interest and curiosity), followed quickly by the home-reality drivel, The Osbournes and Big Brother.

And it was novel. But it seems to have spiraled us into an abyss. We’re watching people fight for their dreams on Idols etc, without realizing we’re ironically sitting on our arses watching TV. There’s so little creativity. It uses such base elements of ‘drama’ to create ‘interest’. But the world laps it up. Who do you think made Seacrest so rich, you Kardashian enabler.

I think we need to go old-school on this, much like parents in the ‘90s. Regulate your TV watching, but more importantly, regulate WHAT you’re watching. Maybe only allow yourself to indulge in two reality shows at any one time. That includes Masterchef Australia, Madge! Perhaps force yourself to read instead of watch that repeat of Project Runway that you actually saw the first time around anyway. We owe it to ourselves, and to our fore-sisters! Now go forth and be a smartass!

Kim Schulze

Follow Kim on Twitter, @KimSchulze and Facebook, www.facebook.com/TheKimSchulze