Imagine you’re watching a nature show, but instead of a narrator telling you things like “now the male is displaying his mating dance to entice the female”, there is no narrator and instead they get to interview the animals.
You can still spot the mating dance, you can see the herd hierarchy dynamically change through threat displays and status competition right before your eyes, and then you get to hear what the participants have to say about it.
…and that’s where it gets really interesting, because this is not happening in nature, where the laws of nature, survival and reproduction, natural selection, and the like, reign supreme.
No. This is what would happen if George Orwell were here to see today’s cultural trends and teamed up with Stephen King to write a dystopian horror novel about it. This is what would happen if you raised eight people on nothing but pop culture, advertising and entitlement mentality, and then gathered them up in their mid-twenties and put them in a house together. This is MTV’s hit reality show “Jersey Shore”, perhaps the most intellectually stimulating and socially relevant program on air today. Why? Because, if you were born after 1980 or so, it lets you see clearly what would have happened to you if your parents had let you be raised solely by the cultural and social environment that’s been brewing for the past few decades.
This is your life without adult supervision.
Used to be, if you were a man you would strive to be a respectable one, and some nice girl next door would likely find you that way and make a home with you. If you were a woman, you would strive to be an agreeable one, and would likely manage to make enough of an impression on a decently respectable young man that he’d ask you to spend your life with him.
Not today.
The Jersey Shore man laughs at the thought of gambling even one night’s prospects on a single female. You always gotta have a back up plan. The deal isn’t closed until it’s closed, and until such a time you’re insane not to line up another girl or three on the back burner in case this one slips away. The planning these guys put into a night at the local dance club would make a battlefield general shirk away in shame.
The Jersey Shore woman isn’t looking to get hitched either. She’s just having fun – except when she’s crying about not being able to find love with a nice hot-bodied gorilla juice head. Yes, these are the qualities which rank highest among what makes the perfect man: a gym-sculpted physique, large physical size, and liberal use of steroids.
What then, on the Jersey Shore, makes a perfect woman? Ha, don’t be crazy, you gotta pump them and dump them. Rule #1 is “never fall in love at the Jersey Shore”. Even this group of guys knows nothing good can come of it, and with this assessment I can’t but agree.
The one couple that, against all odds, ends up forming from among the eight participants, challenges Hell to reclaim its reputation as the place where bad matches are made. Someone call the Guinness Book of World Records because we need to revise the entry on how loudly two people can scream at each other. The relationship between these two is built on the same solid foundational belief that our children are learning from countless messages our culture bombards them with every day: the shamanistic act of concluding in conversation that you and another person are now “boyfriend and girlfriend” imbues you with a wonderful, magical love, which makes sure you will never feel less than exuberant about anything as long as you remember never to compromise on anything or acknowledge that you may have been wrong about something. If ever a problem does arise, it is only your natural right to get angry, throw things, punch each other, have sex with other people for revenge, then crawl into bed next to each other in the evening and pretend for a moment that nothing was ever wrong, until such a time as you happen to be feeling bad, which is a sign that it’s time to selectively dredge up those of the old transgressions which suit your mood and to loudly and one-sidedly blame your partner for all your unpleasant feelings. After all, it’s never your fault. You just did whatever you wanted like you’re entitled to.
It’s no wonder that a constant supply of new partners is an essential requirement for the Jersey Shore life, and luckily for the male cast members, the local night clubs are always filled with scantily clad young women in need of being half-led, half-carried out of the club and back to base camp, where the mission is to “get it in” (direct quote) before they pass out.
Of the Jersey Shore cast, the guys actually seem to have it together admirably compared to the girls. Aside from the girl who can’t stop crying over her “I love you so much”/”We’re done!”/”You’re my everything”/”Just get away from me” beau, there’s the girl who’s just desperate to find that magical love that’s always promised but never seems to materialize – with a hot gorilla juice head, of course. Then there’s the girl who, between bouts of rubbing her tightly wrapped assets on various “gorilla juice heads” at the clubs and screaming at her “long-term boyfriend” on the phone for not catering to her needs, describes her dating philosophy in the quote “After I have sex with a guy I will rip his head off” and, with a straight face, includes the expression “wow” in her nickname. This is not the worst nickname in the group.
This is just TV, though, right? They pick the craziest people for these shows, right? There’s no way your kids could turn out this way, right?
Well, not quite. Look at the messages our society is sending teens about how they should relate to the opposite sex, and you will find all the building blocks of this Orwell-King joint feature already there. Women are encouraged to behave in completely intolerable and utterly uncompromising ways under the guise of “respecting themselves”, and to “empower themselves” by squeezing all the available sexual mileage out of their brief window of natural beauty until eventually no one will have them even for that one night any more. Men are quickly learning that “marriage is for losers” – a message which, unlike the ideas fed to women, has serious value in the environment created by those ideas. To marry a “self-respecting”, “empowered” woman is to ask for a lifetime of suffering. By taking every precaution to avoid that trap, a TV-educated man can pass that lifetime of unhappiness onto the child who’s going to be born into the single-mother household with a “self-respecting”, “empowered”, alcoholic party girl for a mother if daddy succeeds in “getting it in” before passing out drunk. The risk of child support is as low as the chance that mommy will remember daddy’s name in the morning, much less in a few weeks when the test comes out positive.
Much has been said about how a time should or shouldn’t be judged by its cultural icons, and whether fame is always a sign of admiration or if it can be the opposite, but one measure of value is not as open to interpretation…
A star of Jersey Shore can get paid upwards of $10,000 to appear in public for a few hours. At a night club. To party.
This is not because people have negative feelings about them. In fact, it strongly suggests the opposite.
Between arrests for street brawling, visits to doctors’ offices for alcohol-induced internal bleeding, and collecting four-figure hourly wages for dancing in public, these people are real flesh-and-blood role models for kids and teens all across the Western world.
Although not a parent myself, I have it on good authority that trying to always set a good example for your kids can be hard work at times, and you can sometimes feel tempted to take a break from the job of role model for a moment. Next time you start feeling like that, just to remind yourself of what’s at stake, turn on your TV and see who’s next in line for the position.
“Pauly” is ready to teach your son to adorn himself with corporate advertising. In permanent ink. “Jenni” is ready to teach your daughter to crush life’s obstacles with a thrust of the twin battering rams affixed to her chest.
This is their world now and Mister Rogers is dead.
The delusions about men and women propagated by our society cause massive damage to everyone in it. The mission of Delusion Damage is to help you reduce your suffering through understanding problems in a wider context where more “outside-the-box” solutions become available.
