The Lady or the Tiger

I confess I’ve been watching more TV than I have in a long time, and now I remember why I stopped.  It’s making me lose faith in humanity.

My most immediate frustration is with the whole Tiger Woods ridiculosity.  As soon as the story starts to lose a little traction, we’re given a new set of pundits trying to deconstruct all the religious implications: would he have fallen to this level of licentiousness if he were a Christian?  [Answer: Ted Haggard, Jim Bakker, Thomas Weeks, Michael Reid, Jimmy Swaggert, Tony Alamo, Father James Porter and his merry band of pedophiles; it’s a long, illustrious list, people.] We all know Woods’ philandering has nothing to do with Buddha or even some ersatz sex addiction for Dr. Drew to fix up. It’s all thanks to our own over-indulgent star-maker machinery chugging out trash by the bucketful.  When someone makes it, we’ll give him anything in the hope of winning His beneficence and getting a little piece of his starlight. Sure the guy can hit, carry, or throw a ball.  But then we turn him into a god and start licking his $300 sneakers to curry favor.  Except, these aren’t gods.  Most of them are stupid, selfish little boys being led around by their wieners.  Eventually their ego and immaturity win out and they start believing their own press.  We build the brand and the temples and the absurd pedestals.  Then when they fall off, we all start circling and pointing fingers and licking our chops.  It’s revolting.

While the incessant boy worship thing bothers me, I’m a lot more concerned about women and how we’re allowing ourselves to be portrayed in this weird construct.  Sadly, all the Tiger chicks are only drops in the proverbial slut bucket.

Clicking through the early evening cable nausea, we have the emotionally crippled socialites of [pick a city: Orange CA, Newark NJ, Atlanta GA, New York NY, Aspen CO], and all the caustic reunion shows that seem to have found their own blood supply.  Then there’s a family whose only real claim to fame rides on the unusually large ass of one of its daughters.  Oh, look!  It’s a spin-off in Miami for the Lesser Kardashians.  Queue up the DVR!  They’re apparently going down there to save their failing clothing store.  You can bet we’ll not be sitting in on their marketing strategy sessions.  Oh, silly me!  The strategy is to position E! camera crews in/outside the store so we can watch the girls who are so famous for …being famous.  Who needs advertising?  I’ve got a hundred bucks that says they’ll hire some fiery loud-mouthed Latina to help run the place and make their lives a living hell.  Yep, taking up residence in reigning queen of skank towns is bound to create lots of spicy new drama for our mascara’d marvelettes.

Here’s the tragedy: the vapid Kardashians are as close as we get to admirable. They sort of have jobs; they seem to care about their family.  Then you have The Bad Girls Club.  Real World [insert city].  For the Love of… some RayJay person.  Jersey Shore.  Even the notorious man bashing sessions at The Tool Academy include some female monsters this season.  With every click of the remote we’re served another gaggle of maladjusted women, all shot up with cow piss and plastic, preoccupied with criticizing one another and yanking each other’s $5,000 hair extensions.  And if they aren’t already dripping in unwarranted fame and excess, they’re obsessed with getting it at any cost.  My favorite part is between the main events when we’re entertained with infomercials for exercise programs built around stripper poles and lap dancing.  What the hell is going on?  Why are we shocked when men are caught acting like pigs and our 12 year old daughters are coming home with belly rings and tongue studs?

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I’m not for one minute saying that women should be ashamed of being sexual and that we should all get back into our gingham aprons where we belong.  But we should most certainly be ashamed of being ignorant, hostile and criminally shallow.   How can we possibly decry the bad examples being set by our heroes and trampy starlets when we gobble down every unsavory scrap of People magazine they put in front of us?  Decent souls doing good in the world don’t make anywhere near the kind of bank being pocketed by the sideshow freaks.  We’re the ones stuffing dollar bills in their g-strings, then we get all mad when they cross some arbitrary line in our moral sand.

Naturally, I’d prefer that we assess our own priorities and start fixing the root causes of all this broke-ass behavior.  But at minimum, we need to stop crying foul when our celebrities, politicians and various clingers-on don’t live up to the bizarre double standard we’ve created for them.