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18 Oct 2011, 11:18 am

It’s T-shirt Time
by DelusionDamage, 06/02/2011 Original Here

What is the most intellectually stimulating and socially relevant TV-show on air right now? Is it one of the ones where genius investigators solve complex crimes, or where doctors draw on obscure medical knowledge to figure out confounding symptoms?

Not from where I’m standing. Allow me to suggest instead that the TV-show which can give you the most food for thought per minute of air time is Jersey Shore.

Image

Yes, this thing. Why? Isn’t it just some stupid reality show about people running around doing whatever they feel like and stopping now and then to be interviewed about some stupid thing they did?

That’s exactly what it is, and that’s why it’s my favorite show right now. Imagine you’re watching a nature show, but instead of a narrator telling you things like “now the male is displaying his mating dance to entice the female”, there is no narrator and instead they get to interview the animals.

That’s where it gets interesting… because you can still spot the mating dance, you can see the herd hierarchy dynamically change through threat displays and status competition right before your eyes, and then you get to hear what the participants have to say about it.

…and that’s where it gets really interesting, because this is not happening in nature, where the laws of nature, survival and reproduction, natural selection, and the like, reign supreme.

No. This is what would happen if George Orwell were here to see today’s cultural trends and teamed up with Stephen King to write a dystopian horror novel about it. This is what would happen if you raised eight people on nothing but pop culture, advertising and entitlement mentality, and then gathered them up in their mid-twenties and put them in a house together.

This is your life without adult supervision.

Used to be, even if your parents didn’t look out for you too much, you’d still learn a set of values in school that could take you somewhere. You’d still have a peer group and you would spend much of your time playing with other children. Playing outside. You might get really interested in playing baseball, or reading books, or you might join the local hoodlums in getting drunk and running over mailboxes in cheap old wrecks of cars that you would have to develop miraculous mechanic skills just to keep running.

You could make mistakes, but everyone has their misspent youth, and eventually you’d probably find some sort of constructive thing to do with your life. Even the wild kids would likely find themselves getting married in their early twenties, starting families and settling down to lead the kind of lives that, by the time they approached thirty years of age, would make sure they didn’t end up like this:

Image

This male has adorned himself with a piece of corporate advertising. In permanent ink. This female has cleverly equipped herself with twin battering rams affixed to her chest in order to better crush sexual competitors.

If this picture is not enough to make you pull your children away from the TV and send them to an insanely religious boarding school, allow me to deconstruct exactly what you are seeing here:

You are seeing a fundamental breakdown in the very basic building blocks of how the human species propagates itself.

Used to be, if you were a man you would strive to be a respectable one, and some nice girl next door would likely find you that way and make a home with you. If you were a woman, you would strive to be an agreeable one, and would likely manage to make enough of an impression on a decently respectable young man that he’d ask you to spend your life with him.

Not today.

The Jersey Shore man laughs at the thought of gambling even one night’s prospects on a single female. You always gotta have a back up plan. The deal isn’t closed until it’s closed, and until such a time you’re insane not to line up another girl or three on the back burner in case this one slips away. The planning these guys put into a night at the local dance club would make a battlefield general shirk away in shame.

The Jersey Shore woman isn’t looking to get hitched either. She’s just having fun – except when she’s crying about not being able to find love with a nice hot-bodied gorilla juice head. Yes, these are the qualities which rank highest among what makes the perfect man: a gym-sculpted physique, large physical size, and liberal use of steroids.

What then, on the Jersey Shore, makes a perfect woman? Ha, don’t be crazy, you pump them and you dump them. Rule #1 is “never fall in love at the Jersey Shore”. Even this group of guys knows nothing good can come of it, and with this assessment I can’t but agree.

The one couple that, against all odds, ends up forming from among the eight participants, challenges Hell to reclaim its reputation as the place where bad matches are made. Someone call the Guinness Book of World Records because we need to revise the entry on how loudly two people can scream at each other. The relationship between these two is built on the same solid foundational belief that our children are learning from countless messages our culture bombards them with every day: the shamanistic act of concluding in conversation that you and another person are now “boyfriend and girlfriend” imbues you with a wonderful, magical love, which makes sure you will never feel less than exuberant about anything as long as you remember never to compromise on anything or acknowledge that you may have been wrong about something. If ever a problem does arise, it is only your natural right to get angry, throw things, punch each other, have sex with other people for revenge, then crawl into bed next to each other in the evening and pretend for a moment that nothing was ever wrong, until such a time as you happen to be feeling bad, which is a sign that it’s time to selectively dredge up those of the old transgressions which suit your mood and to loudly and one-sidedly blame your partner for all your unpleasant feelings. After all, it’s never your fault. You just did whatever you wanted like you’re entitled to.

It’s no wonder that a constant supply of new partners is an essential requirement for the Jersey Shore life. That’s why the guys have their daily routine: gym, tanning, laundry. They work out to keep up the previously mentioned gorilla juice head bodies, stop by the solarium to fry themselves as dark as they can without actually burning the skin off their bodies, and pick up freshly washed clothes for the evening. Then they sit around the house until midnight or so in wife-beaters.

Only when the cab arrives to take them to the night club is it “t-shirt time”. In order to attract the required slew of females, it is extremely important for a t-shirt to be perfectly unused when taken to the club. How the club’s drunk women, who can barely stand up without support, manage to hold the guys t-shirts to such a high standard is a true mystery. In any case, the strategy seems to be working because there are always scantily clad young women in need of being half-led, half-carried out of the club and back to base camp, where the mission is to “get it in” (direct quote) before they pass out.

Of the Jersey Shore cast, the guys actually seem to have it together admirably compared to the girls. Aside from the girl who can’t stop crying over her “I love you so much”/”We’re done!”/”You’re my everything”/”Just get away from me” beau, there’s the girl who’s just desperate to find that magical love that’s always promised but never seems to materialize – with a hot gorilla juice head, of course. Then there’s the girl who, between bouts of rubbing her tightly wrapped assets on various “gorilla juice heads” at the clubs and screaming at her “long-term boyfriend” on the phone for not catering to her needs, describes her dating philosophy in the quote “After I have sex with a guy I will rip his head off” and, with a straight face, includes the expression “wow” in her nickname. This is not the worst nickname in the group.

This is just TV, though, right? They pick the craziest people for these shows, right? There’s no way your kids could turn out this way, right?

Well, not quite. Look at the messages our society is sending teens about how they should relate to the opposite sex, and you will find all the building blocks of this Orwell-King joint feature are already there. Women are encouraged to behave in completely intolerable and utterly uncompromising ways under the guise of “respecting themselves”, and to “empower themselves” by squeezing all the available sexual mileage out of their brief window of natural beauty until eventually no one will have them even for that one night any more. Men are quickly learning that “marriage is for losers” – a message which, unlike the ideas fed to women, has serious value in the environment created by those ideas. To marry a “self-respecting”, “empowered” woman is to ask for a lifetime of suffering. By taking every precaution to avoid that trap, a TV-educated man can pass that lifetime of unhappiness onto the child who’s going to be born into the single-mother household with a “self-respecting”, “empowered”, alcoholic party girl for a mother if daddy succeeds in “getting it in” before passing out drunk. The risk of child support is as low as the chance that mommy will remember daddy’s name in the morning, much less in a few weeks when the test comes out positive.

Much has been said about how a time should or shouldn’t be judged by its cultural icons, and whether fame is always a sign of admiration or if it can be the opposite, but one measure of value is not as open to interpretation…

A star of Jersey Shore can get paid upwards of $10,000 to appear in public for a few hours. At a night club. To party.

This is not because people have negative feelings about them. In fact, it strongly suggests the opposite.

Between arrests for street brawling, visits to doctors’ offices for alcohol-induced internal bleeding, and collecting four-figure hourly wages for dancing in public, these people are real flesh-and-blood role models for our society’s teenagers. If you wonder what kind of ideal your kid’s being taught to aspire to, turn on your TV.

Oh, and if you’re still trying to attract women by working hard and being respectable, you can stop that. Throw away the suit and tie, that might have worked in your dad’s day but it’s t-shirt time now.


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18 Oct 2011, 11:31 am

This should be in the "Television, Film, and Video" forum.



hyperlexian
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18 Oct 2011, 12:25 pm

moved from Love & Dating to Television, Film, and Video


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Princess78
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18 Oct 2011, 12:30 pm

I don't watch "Jersey Shore," because I'm too old (I'm 33), but I think I stopped watching "The Bachelor" and "The Bachelorette" for the same reason. These people say they're looking for "the one," when in actuality, it's just an excuse to have sex with strangers. They say they're looking for a husband or a wife, but it's really just an excuse to have sex with good-looking men or women. And they're also pretty limited. They can only date the people who were chosen for them, the 25 bachelors or bachelorettes who signed up for the show. There were only two people in the entire history of these shows who got married and had a family. Otherwise, most people who appeared on these shows have broken up. If you're looking for "the one," reality TV is certainly not the way to go. Parents shouldn't let their kids watch this show, either. Their kids might think it's OK to have sex before they are married, and with multiple partners, too.



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19 Oct 2011, 3:58 am

I never watched it. I dont have any interest in it though I think snooki is pretty.

What I do find interesting however is this:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/what-the ... -years-ago


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Mirror21
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19 Oct 2011, 4:13 am

What I found interesting was the idea of treating reality tv like a documentary on certain breeds of human. I can just see myself walking behind my roommates, slowly, commenting on their instinctual behavior and irrational emotional responses as well as the amazing ability of these creatures to function living of off the bounty of nature such as McDonald's and recording their struggles to survive the trek to the rest room.



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19 Oct 2011, 9:11 am

I just "liked" the pictures of what the Jersey Shore looked like 100 years ago on Facebook. Funny! :lol:



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19 Oct 2011, 2:25 pm

Pretty awesome, huh? I liked the older ladies in full Turn Of The Century long dresses on those chairs. Some of those ladies would have been born around 1850, it is weird to see a photo of them.


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