Take a shot every time someone says bitch, a punch is thrown, a nipple or vagina is blurred, the girls take a shot, or a weave falls on the floor. So go the rules of the Bad Girls Club drinking game, Oxygen’s genius idea to put a bunch of misbehaving girls (coke whores, sex addicts, alcoholics, etc.) together and hope they can rehabilitate themselves into better citizens.
If it sounds like a women’s prison, it’s not. It’s worse. Because on top of being ineffective at stopping “recidivism,” the girls are put up in a mansion and have nothing to do all day but put on makeup at “stations” the size of a twin sized bed and slap any ho who gets in their way.
Currently in its 10th season in the glitzy suburbs of Atlanta, BGC is the definition of trashy TV. Half of the words are bleeped out, everyone’s inebriated, and the show lacks any real mission other than making a mockery of girl gone bad.
That being said, BGC is perhaps one of the funniest hours of TV I’ve ever watched. It mixes everything you love about Jersey Shore and The Real Housewives with a heaping helping of Jerry Springer. The cast’s complete inability to resolve any of their problems in an effective way other than self-medicating and dragging a girl along the floor by her hair makes each episode an even hotter mess than the one before.
But as I curled up with my bottle of Fireball, I began to wonder what enjoying this show says about me, and whether I can call myself a feminist if I enjoy watching and mocking women behaving badly. One minute I’m writing my thesis about boardroom equity legislation in the EU, and the next I’m tuning into girls berating each other as nothing more than dumb bitches.
It’s a thought that extends to a wide variety of issues and media. Can we call ourselves supporters of racial equality if some of our favorite comedy programming predicates itself on poking fun at hurtful stereotypes? Can we say that we respect the struggles of mentally handicapped people, and then dance the night away to “Let’s Get Retarded”? Can we shun using the n-word in daily life, and yet go on listening to Lil Wayne and watching Django Unchained as if those words aren’t there?
While some would argue that music, TV, and film are art forms, and any advocacy for censorship stifles civil liberties, with all entertainment media, there is an expectation of interaction.
These artists are making their art for consumption. There’s nothing passive about the content artists produce, and there’s also nothing passive about our media choices.
With reality television, though, the disparity between “art” and “reality” is more blurred than ever. Listening to a song about someone being disrespectful to women is at least partially fictionalized, but a show that portrays real women in the same light is at all more unnerving.
Whether it’s giggling about Honey Boo Boo’s nutrition-devoid life in poverty or the over the top flamboyancy of almost any character on any Bravo show, these are real people with real lives, deserving of respect. Or are they?
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching countless hours of reality TV, it’s that there isn’t anything real about it. All of these shows have scripts, staging, blocking (a friend of mine in L.A. just landed a gig writing for a Hills-esque “reality” program). Add onto that layers of sound editing, scene re-sequencing, and directorial advice, and it’s hard to say that reality programming is any less artsy than other video content.
Art can still be offensive, and BGC definitely treads that line, but the show is funny largely because of how far it deviates from the norm. Fifty years ago, a bunch of girls with no goals, staying at home, not working, and largely wasting their brains away wouldn’t have been funny. It would have been life for the typical woman. BGC depicts a reality that has largely disappeared for women today, who are educated at higher levels than men.
Look to the plethora of other “bizarre” programming and the trend continues. 19 Kids and Counting—make that 20, the Duggars just popped out another one—is entertaining principally because it is so far from the four-person nuclear family norm. Swamp People is popular because no one lives in swamps anymore. It’s called urbanization.
For the majority of female viewers, BGC is a far cry from a representation of girls today. It’s outlandish and exaggerated. In a paradoxical way, perhaps nothing is more indicative of a world comfortable with powerful, educated, and assertive women than a show mocking women who buck this monumental gender shift. I’ll raise my glass (or bottle?) to that.
