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I need to get something off my chest, ladies. I LOVE the VH1 series "Rock Of Love" (its present incarnation of course being the "Rock Of Love Bus," or as I have dubbed it "Rock Of Love: Bus Of Fools"). It is, I think it's safe to say, a guilty pleasure of a show on par with "Paradise Hotel" (also LOVED!), or the cringe-worthy but eminently watchable "Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew" (VH1 clearly has my number... my sad, shameful number) -- something one imbibes as a palate-cleansing aperitif in-between sober and intelligent programming like, oh, anything on HBO or "Mad Men" -- at least that's what we tell people, right? But really, why are so many of us -- educated women who consider themselves thinkers and feminists -- watching this BS?
I think I have it all figured out. One word: Schadenfreude.
The word is an imperfect fit, but it captures the spirit of what I'm going for. Defined as "delight in the misfortune of others," for the purposes of unpacking what's so compelling about shows like "Rock Of Love" I think of it more as "delight in the mistakes of others," whether the mistake is choosing to wear an outfit that makes you look as though a strip club got sick on you (see: most of our lovely "Rock Of Love Bus" contestants), or creating flimsy and baseless alliances with untrustworthy douchebags (see: every relationship between every person on every season of "Paradise Hotel"), or just being desperate and imprudent enough to allow yourself to be filmed while trying to untangle your life from the death-grip of drug addiction (see: "Celebrity Rehab"... Oh and also "Hey Paula!"), all of these shows play to the dark but very human place in each of our psyches that can't help but be tickled by watching stupid people make stupid decisions and do stupid things. I'm not saying it's right or good, I'm just saying it undeniably IS.
However, as a woman, it gets a little more complicated when we're talking about a show like "Rock Of Love," because it's pretty easy to correlate the joyous disdain women like myself feel for the surgically-enhanced Stripper Barbies on that show as a case of women hating on women, which raises some hackles, and I get that. But ladies, these are women who have wholeheartedly subscribed to the bottom-of-the-barrel worst, most self-denegrating and loathsome versions of womanhood Mankind (with great emphasis on MAN) has fabricated and foisted on us in our time. Their behavior, self-presentation and demeanor all effectively drain the female viewer of all sense of kinship with them AS women. I mean, it's hard to feel all sisterly about a woman who'd see carrying a blow-up doll to the altar as being a way to bring that extra special something to a wedding, or would be eager to give aging douchebag and Hairclub For Men client Bret Michaels a lapdance in front of an audience of twenty other heckling women (I'm keeping my examples decidedly PG13 here, this being a family site and all, but OMG YOU WOULDN'T BELIEVE THE THINGS SOME OF THESE WOMEN DO. NO, SRSLY).
Another, more introspective and cerebral way to look at this phenomena would be to say that perhaps these women are something like televisual voodoo dolls for the female viewer, each representing parts of us that we don't like talking about, the parts we'd like to, at least figuratively, stick pins in -- the hidden, trashy "slut"; the needy girl seeking approval and validation from men; the vain part of us that wishes our bodies were "perfect" and resents anyone we think prettier than ourselves -- and certainly, the women of "Rock Of Love" could collectively be conceived of as a place for us to dump these sorts of "bad" shameful feelings. And from the comfort and safety of our living room couches, no less!
Does any of this ring true to you? How do you explain the mass appeal of these programs? Why do you watch -- or not watch -- these sorts of shows? And even if I'm wrong about why I
