In early 2008 I was flipping through some channels and landed on my feel good favorite, TLC. There was an innocent show about this couple with two sets of multiples. Forget their ridiculous amount of children and the fact that they insisted on having all six embryos carried to full term after having twins....I was more interested in the anomaly of how quarter Asian children could look more Asian than their half Asian dad. The show was John and Kate plus 8, of course.
I became a hardcore fan and was especially fond of their little boy with glasses. There is nothing, I repeat NOTHING, more adorable than a toddler with over-sized glasses. I'm just saying. Anyway, I watched the show over and over again much to the displeasure of my family. My father would always comment that John and Kate seemed so unhappy as a couple but I never took it to heart. They were strong and they were gonna get through all this. In truth I didn't actually know what would happen to them but it was fun at the time to pretend that I did.
I really took the show as a harmless bit of fluff. Flash forward to the summer of 2009 when the show and the lives of the couple in it exploded onto the front pages of magazines and headlines. Kate was on every show possible lamenting her crumbling marriage. John was running around wearing some suurrrriously unattractive t-shirts, smoking some cancer-sticks and chilling with questionable characters of the female race. It became a phenomenon (like so many others in our country) to watch the train wreck that is their lives. I even got into it a bit at first. I kept feeling sorry for Kate and for the way people were calling her a bad mother, even a monster. If there is one thing that troubles me (and trust me, there are PLENTY of things on this list), it is the way women are often portrayed as villains as soon as they show a bit of assertiveness. I thought she was being treated poorly and that this was another example of the way people are quick to jump on women as being evil and manipulative while they merely chastise men for being playboys.
Cut to January 6, 2010 (aka today) when I get a newsflash on my MSN account that Kate Gosselin is 'Starting Over' with a new look. Now, part of me hates myself for clicking the link in the first place but the other part of me thinks it's damn ridiculous that there is even a story about this woman's image. First of all, let's take the headline at face-value. Why does a woman's decision to change her hair mean that she has successfully restarted her life? Doesn't it just mean that she went to a hair salon? Am I missing something?
And second of all (but more importantly), what happened to the adorable Plus 8? You know, the ones who seem wholly Asian despite their genetic makeup? I'll tell you what happened: they fell into the background as their parents got wrapped up in their "fame." As I looked to the link to see what the latest installment of the story is, I realized that what was once a simple guilty pleasure has now turned into a large scale, pointless soap opera. So Kate got some new extensions and looks like ridiculous on the cover of People magazine. What can I do about it? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
While there is personal responsibility when it comes to choosing which "news" we want to hear about, I do find it ridiculous that this story is on the same page as a story about the Nigerian man who has been indicted for attempting to blow up a plane in the U.S. Why does everyone get a platform to be a part of the "news"? Whether someone sleeps with Tiger Woods (see older post), exploits his/her children for TV and magazine opportunities or tries to terrorize a post 9/11 nation, she or he will get to make headlines. Everything that happens in our country (whether it's truly news-worthy/ important or not) is turned into a spectacle for our viewing pleasure. Have we lost the ability to separate junk from actual news? Is Kate's weave really as important as planned terror attacks on our soil? What's up with that?
