How Good Does A Whore Have to Be?

... or ... "Yet Another Pop-Culture Critique/Rant/Hypocrisy" ...

When we were together a few weeks ago, I was admitting one of my worst guilty pleasures and we got to talking about reality TV.  He asked me, quite sincerely, because he believes there has to be a reason for things, "What is it that makes these people worth a TV show?"  He wanted to know who reality TV "stars" are - or what they do - that people would want to watch.

The thing about it is that he misunderstands the concept of content in this context.  He and I come from a mindset in which "entertainment" is defined by a certain set of expectations, and "content" is a commodity with demands upon it.  We grew up in a world where television (for instance) was more often written than not.  Entertainment was expected to be about something, involve a plot, make a point, cause some sort of emotional reaction.  It wasn't necessarily sophisticated; it was just the mechanism of "the entertainment industry" in a different time.

Human beings, though, are natural voyeurs, and happy to find lazy ways to make money too.  When we learned (a) how wide an audience there is for "reality" - for peering into other people's supposedly "real" lives - we made fortunes for, at first, the Sally Jessy Raphaels of the world, the Maurys, even the Robin Leaches.  Over the years, one hour of "reality" ceased to be enough, and we began to see The Real World and its ilk, and the genius move was made.

All it takes to make a mint, for anyone who can stomach participating, is to find ostensibly pretty people (the idea of what constitutes "telegenic" is another post I may indeed never have the stomach - nor even the hypocrisy - to write) willing to go on camera for "life".

When I was in my mid-to-late twenties, I can tell you pointblank that watching the Sally Jessy's and the like had an effect on my expectations of myself.  My being a lycra-wearing eighties girl obsessed with whether every man in the world found me attractive in that limited and specific way which seems important to some people (particularly at a certain age) was NOT born of the man who loved and married me back then, nor of my family and lessons I learned from anything resembling life.  It was born of those things I chose to expose myself to, even those things I still pretend to be a snob about and think I am superior to.  It was born of shouty talk shows and Kelly Bundy and commercials glorifying screeching "femininity" and brashness of the sort centered entirely on getting attention, regardless of its type or ramifications.

The diet available today frankly makes me blanche.  I'm daily given reason to be glad I am as old as I am - because if the girl I was then happened to be a girl NOW, I would unquestionably be first in line (in, likely, multiple lines) attempting to sell my "life" so I could be famous, could prove myself interesting, could prove myself "hot", could make money doing so.

The irony, of course, is that my very lack of substance, perhaps to some extent my very lack of certain appeals - that would have been exactly what would have made me what passes now for a wild success.  The tawdriness and emptiness is "what makes these people worthy of a TV show."

Rather than expecting a plot or a point, huge swaths of entertainment now are based on the goal to elicit that glow of schadenfreude which tells viewers they are superior to what they're watching.  Laughs or shocks are always good - and, of curse, there's always that genre of shows pitched at women telling us we are supposed to consider highly saturated magenta and blue lighting on tatty LA mansions as "fairy tale" settings for vicarious love and romance (and, indeed, certainly conditioning younger women and girls in the lessons of hideously distorted gender roles, body image, and social behavior) - but, at the end of the day, SENSATION has come to replace the content middle aged folks like me and X once expected.

It doesn't matter so much who the whore is, willing to be pimped to unseen watchers for the release of sensation their televised experiences will engender.  It doesn't matter which whore you get out of the phone book, if that's a call you want to make, as long as they fit the general description you request.  Willing to abdicate privacy and a personal life, or willing to perform certain unspeakable services - as long as they are, it doesn't matter who it is.  Success is measured not by talent, nor charisma - but only by the reaching of that sensation, the release, the short-term goal of a disinterested consumer.

It doesn't matter who provides their personal exposure - there is really no "who are these people" factored into this transaction, nor the financial rewards of the industry it has given gargantuan birth to.  As long as a fairly minimal interview with casting agents and a perhaps even more minimal background check is perfunctorily satisfied - the human fodder need not be particular nor honestly individual (*peculiar* is not the same thing ...) in order to satisfy the demands of reality TV.

"What is it that makes these people worth a TV show?"

Worth is the wrong choice of words, perhaps.  "Willing to do it" might be more to the point.  And it's a heartbreaking, dispiriting point, really.

I think of the number of women of my generation who wore stripper shoes and tiny dresses on talk shows for one hour of fame back in the eighties, and whose doing so was essentially ephemeral, is now over, and probably forgotten ...  Then I think of the number of women just in a single day, now, whose self-abasement for others' entertainment is likely to live on in a way those talk shows could not have made possible.  I think about how many of them parlay their appearances on The Bachelor or any one of those "Wives" shows or any one of a thousand competitive quasi-beauty or quasi-talent or quasi-game shows into *careers* of selling off further parts of themselves, and it makes me so sad.

And, of course, so superior - about "those kids today" and every possible other middle-aged (having lost my own twentysomething physical appeals) cliche'.  Superior because I escaped the opportunity to sell my entire life like that, and thank G-d I am old enough to have escaped it.  Superior over even the middle-aged, telegenic barbies of my own age, staging hyper dramatic middle school cat fights for a living.  Superior to those who think game shows yield love and commitment worth the name.  Superior to the entertainment itself.

I respond EXACTLY, in short, as I am supposed to.

And it still makes me so sad.  Kicking the whore out of the room when you're done must feel like that.