Sometimes I don't even know why I bother to watch TV anymore. The other day, I literally sat through an advertisement for a show about dwarfs who run a pitbull rescue organization. The head dwarf's name is Shorty. C'mon, son. It's the summer, though, and because I've been gainfully unemployed since my return from Espana, I've lapsed into turning on the 'set every now and again. I did that this past Sunday to disastrous results. Don't get me wrong. I love attractive, successful black men and I suppose the football player Chad Ochocinco is technically one of those. However, I do require that those same men not speak Ebonics and that they have some grasp on a language with an actual dictionary. Not so with Ochocinco in his new reality dating show, "The Ultimate Catch."
Better yet, I'd prefer if he didn't outsource his dating life to VH1 for a reality show. I mean I get it: how hot would it be to have a collection of hot singles hanging on your every last word? As I continued to watch the show, Heaven knows why, I found a few things interesting. Number 1: I don't buy this "I have no preference for a particular type of woman and anyway, people are too hung up on race" attitude that Ochocinco espouses. Out of 17 young girls, he picked 2 black women to be in his top 16 and the rest are mostly brunette white women. The man clearly has a preference and he should just own up to it. Issue number 2: what separates an attractive girl from her less attractive peers? I mean if we're gonna play this game of reverting back to the good ol' days when women existed merely for the benefit of men, can we at least establish a clear rulebook of how they need to look to do this? I've always been confused about what it is men find sexy. Clearly, the answer is that they like ALL types of women. Perhaps what I should really be asking is what is it that they find definitively unattractive? I've often heard guys talk about that "ugly chick" or that "fat girl" and then assumed that only absolute bombshells will suffice. But then I watch wonderful shows like this where the man picks both unequivocally beautiful girls as well as ones who look like they baked too long in the oven and my head starts spinning. And the real shocker is that he reacted to all of them, the pretties and the not-so-pretties, with the same enthusiasm.
Or maybe I should amend that: he DID show different levels of enthusiasm for each girl. As a matter of fact, he determined the ones he liked in a ranking system similar to one that you'd find in a March Madness bracket. This, to me, is even more tragic than Flavor Flav's show, the Bachelor or any other dreadful TV dating show. Not only are women assessed based on their looks, the number of times they make out with the main protagonist or how many bitch fests they get into with other women in their obligatory mansions. Here, the women are directly given a ranking, starting with 1-16 and paired up with another contestant so that they can be judged comparitively. Speaking of objectification in my prior post, I feel like this must be it. A man evaluating a woman, giving her a number according to his particular preference and then expecting those women to compete for his affection.....not too cute.
And it's really not too cute in 2010. The thing is, the minute I turned away from that show, I landed one of the many channels that routinely plays "Family Guy." I will admit, hands down, that some of the writing on that show is absolutely hilarious and brilliant. But there's definitely an undercurrent of disdain and agression towards women that's popular in a lot of male and/or masculine humor of a show like this. As if it wasn't sad enough to watch these treacherous looking women teeter on their heels as this man looked them up and down on VH1, here I am watching these shows with my mother as Peter says to Meg "You can't give up sex. You're what we call a 'Practice girl.'" Both my mother and I are Harvard educated women sitting in a room in the modern era with a Black President and our kind (aka womenfolk) are still being disparaged left and right.
I'm not such a wet blanket that I believe we should entirely abandon all elements of pop culture just to make sure no one's been offended.It's not enough, however, to simply say "shut off the tv if you don't like it." As long as someone's watching, whether it's me or your cousin Dan or any other random person, those things become filtered into our collective cultural conscience and affect they way we view and interact with one another.I would like to hear a strong argument from people who watch these shows without a critical about whether they'd want their future daughters to grow up with these subtle but omnipresent messages.Why can't I imagine a solid response? What's up with that?
