Last night I sat down to watch my favorite can’t-look-away spectacle Jersey Shore (to give you an idea of my extremely high tolerance level for trash, my previous favorite spectacles have been Rock of Love Bus with Bret Michaels and The Real Housewives of New Jersey).
If you were looking for a visual definition of class, this is it.
As I watched Sammi and Ronnie get into a rather dramatic, almost relationship-ending fight over her big toe (I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic when I say this might have been the most ludicrous fight of all time), I realized something about myself. I, like Sammi, enjoy getting offended and I purposely set myself up for it. Jersey Shore raises so many legitimate questions: is being a self-identified “guido” offensive, is it alright to show violence against women on TV, why do Italians chose such god-awful nicknames for themselves? But I’ve realized the most important question of all is: why the fuck am I watching this?
The easiest answer I’ve heard is that watching horrible people makes us (the normal, good people) feel better about ourselves. I don’t buy this. Watching an hour of Jersey Shore and a half hour of Jersey Shore: After Hours (yeah, I really did) didn’t make me feel like one seriously classy lady compared to the skanky-as-all-hell, Snookie. It made me feel like a piece of shit who is wasting her life watching numbing MTV reality shows. So again, why do I watch it?
I think that I, along with many others, watch shows like Jersey Shore because we enjoy being offended. Earlier this week I watched Transformers 2 simply because I heard it was incredibly bad and I wanted to get offended and worked up by racist black robots. And let me tell you, I was really offended. But I fucking loved it. I enjoyed ranting to my friends about how shitty a director Michael Bay is and how I couldn’t believe I had seen such racist representations in a movie made in 2009.
I enjoy watching Jersey Shore for similar reasons. As a woman, I watch the show and witness a plethora of frighteningly sexist talk, behaviors and attitudes that obviously offend me. As a person with Italian heritage, I watch the show and see stereotypes that are not only outdated, but are really, really stupid. In a way, watching Jersey Shore enables me to watch my greatest fears about human nature and American culture come to life. If I didn’t watch awful reality shows that offended me on so many levels, then I’d be living in a kind of bubble. I’d be living my snooty Manhattan life surrounded by my over educated friends and I might forget that not everyone thinks the way I do.
So, is watching spectacle TV purely for the joy of getting offended acceptable? Probably not. But if I never watched another bad reality TV show and chose to only absorb the most critically acclaimed, high brow entertainment, would I really be that much better off? It certainly wouldn’t give me as great an understanding of the American people as Cops does. Everyone knows that reality TV isn’t real. But I’m going to keep watching it and continue to get worked up about it because I believe that it contains quite a bit more than a sliver of truth. And if I’m right and it does, we’re fucked.
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