Hirpality TV

This is where I sound like an old fuddy duddy, and I really don’t even care. Earlier this week I saw a Facebook update where a friend said he was watching the “Fat-chelor” (he swears it’s not his term, and I believe him). Now I’m pretty much in the mind set that “The Bachelor” is awful television, and here it is, bad for our kids. Now we have the, well, “super sized” version with “More to Love.”

This is the last thing our kids, especially the girls, need to see. It was bad enough for their self-image, when all they saw was pretty (see: skinny) girls acting like douches to get the affection of some douche bag, because he had the right bone structure. Ah, but they were all there for the “right reasons” (I’m aiming to set a personal record for quotation mark usage in one post). And we know the producers care, because they’re now giving us a show that the heavier girls can watch. The highlights tell me this, and that these women are just so damn proud of their bodies, and want someone to love them just the way they are.

If these producers had a soul, there’d only be one show. Not a skinny show and a fat show. What really pisses me off about this, is only one title references the body types of the contestants. Reminds me of when we call a great Spike Lee movie a great “black” movie. When you have two groups of women, and we refer to one group as just women, and the other as plus size or “More to Love” you aren’t doing any of them any favors, especially the viewers at home. “The Bachelorette” is a normal, or what should be normal, woman. “More to Love” is women who are different, because why? They don’t barf after every meal.

As an uncle to girls, this sort of thing really pissed me off. Now that I’m helping raise a girl, and I hear more about how self conscious girls are at such early ages, it pretty much makes me want to throw a shoe at my TV. Wait, I don’t mean that, sorry TV. I love you, you know this.

At the same time, we can’t just blame the producers. It’s the public that eats this shit up. But what came first, the chicken or the shit? This isn’t good for young boys either, who catch mommy and daddy watching these shows. Movies are bad enough, with the whole portraying of what they want us to consider beautiful. But this is “reality” television, so its message is allegedly real. And that’s bullshit. The Kyd doesn’t need the television getting in her head, it’s already tough enough just finding friends to sit with in the cafeteria on the first day of second grade.