and i can't stand the rain against my window
bzz bzz bzz anxiety-brain, have some capslock-y navel gazing.
I don't know if I'll be distancing or being honest when I say I've only seen a couple of episodes of Jersey Shore? I mean, I haven't, but I'm not saying that to avoid being A Person Who Watches Jersey Shore - because lol, let's talk about the ridiculous shit I have copped to watching - but I fully admit I'm talking out of my ass based on Jezebel recaps of the episodes and bits of self-congratulatory hand-wringing I have caught here and there on other sites like Salon (OH SALON, I WISH I COULD QUIT YOU). I am fascinated by the cultural response to the show. We all hate it! We all bond over our national consensus that they're jackasses! BUT WE'RE ALL ABOUT SEASON 3.
I mean, interested and far more deeply entertained than I am by any reality show since Project Runway lost me (WHATEVER DID HAPPEN TO ANDRE?!?), not at all offended or annoyed. I'm endlessly entertained when the NIAF gets their little panties in a twist over it, more than they ever have over the Sopranos or the fucking SALVATORES. (Oh, the chafing and pouting there would have been if Caprica had reached a bigger audience. Because admitting just how sharply it depicted that particular assimilation narrative and sub-culture would be off-limits. Likely more of a POC space in the social hierarchy, but PFFT, SO ITALIAN IN SO MANY WAYS.)
Because I just - my mom being Italian-American was a huge part of how I was raised, though she's third-generation. I doubt that's unusual in East Coast cities and suburbs, but I suppose that's inconsistent nationally. Then I think it's been weirdly important to my social experience, because I ended up with the thick black hair, olive skin, and hip-waist dramatics, to the extent where I get asked a lot WHAT I AM. EXISTENTIAL DILEMMA! but not really, because (a) still totally white-privileged, so it's not whaling on wounds from bigger social issues and (b) I'm used to it, I didn't really realize it was an unusual question until a few years back. So the Jersey Shore phenomenon kind of caught my attention more than it normally would because it pressed those subconscious buttons.
And dude, let me tell you, they ARE FUCKING NOT A JOKE.
They're slightly OTT in the way any group of people on reality television, to be sure, and then there's a sub-cultural OTT-ness that it totally feeds into and it all self-reinforces. That subdued pink-polo old money "good taste" WASPy culture is less accessible to social groups whose status has changed fairly recently, I think, where it still reads as plainness in a lot of ways, and plain means poor. (Not to mention, we are not, as a group, a people who can carry off pastels well. Washed-out olive skin really does look green.) Disdain for that isn't solely style policing, it's contempt for the nouveaux-middle-class-ness of it all. Mostly the response to the show is the general pleasure in feeling superior to reality television casts, but I do think the form it takes sometimes carries some unconscious, coded classism. Which again, isn't WE ARE SO OPPRESSED, because it's not oppression, so much as a marked but relatively benign expression of our weird invisible American class system.
Actual (okay possibly paraphrased, but the essence of it is burned into my brain) quote from The Situation: "These girls aren't like, girls you sleep with! They're like, actual human beings." The gender policing is totally not coded or subdued in any way. The guys don't hide their paranoid distancing from all things feminine BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY, the girls advertize for plastic surgeons. It's this culture of needing to SHOW EVERYONE what an effort you're making to fit into those expectations, and I think it makes people uncomfortable not because it's in any way worse, so much as they're (unintentional, to be sure) telling the truth about the effort that goes into those performances. It breaks the code of silence. It's crass; it's just not done.
Which is where we get to Snooki, who is, let no one lie to you, AMAZEBALLS. This segment from Anderson Cooper sums up all of my feelings:
THE KEY TO MY HEART.
Snooki is one of those hyper-caricatured personas. She's always performing, and she knows it, and she's milking it for all it's worth. She's pretty much her own RPF crack-ficcer. (POSTMODERN BRILLIANCE.) But she's not really performing any more than any other female faux-celebrity, you know? The hair, the nails, the quick wit combined with the treatment of current affairs as half-understood gossip. But because she's just a small hair off from the usual physical and cultural presentation of sufficient-but-submerged femininity, she's even louder and more discordant than she would be anyway. So she's the recipient of a lot of discomfort with femininity itself, and some small level of guilt over how much we know we expect it. The freak-show treatment of her is protesting too much. It may be a persona, but it is a big, dramatic refusal of pretense and self-effacement.
Snooki is - seriously! - the opposite number to Tina Fey/Liz Lemon. This woman of this rigidly gendered, "vaguely ethnic" (OH JACK YOU BLACK IRISH BASTARD) world, with some level of intelligence and perceived ugly-duckling-ness eventually pushing her into an equally intense, but untenable, retreat from everything feminine. Liz - Fey's unreal, caricatured way of working it all out - has absorbed that highly performative all-or-nothing attitude toward being a woman. And it let her succeed on fairly mainstream terms, but she's quaking up on that tightrope. Snooki's in-your-face commitment to that hyper-feminine persona is ownership of and limitation by that dichotomy, but it's as thorough an exploration of that same dichotomy.
On the record, though, I completely appreciate the existence of Jersey Shore. Whatever the trivial details (and I do acknowledge that they're trivial, but when has that ever stopped me) Jersey Shore represents the long-overdue DEATH OF IRONY. Ultimately, it appeals because they are so not trying to impress us with how unimpressed and untouched they are by society. Possibly it's tacky to admit it, but that's a breath of polluted salt air.
bzz bzz bzz looks like the rich text weirdness is being fixed atm
Also, this article has been linked all over because of how it is brilliant, but if you haven't caught We're All Mad Here: Institutionalization in the Whedonverse, I recommend heading on over. I want to have thoughts because I swear, feminists on the internet and the Whedonverse have both done more to help me with Being A Mentally Ill Person than most shrinks I have seen (and lol, THERE HAVE BEEN A FEW) and so when those two things converge I generally like to flail. But I'm still chewing it over.
bzz bzz bzz what else.
~sf-women-daily is having a Comment-a-Thon and everyone should go play!
~FUCK GRATITUDE. GET IT.
I don't know if I'll be distancing or being honest when I say I've only seen a couple of episodes of Jersey Shore? I mean, I haven't, but I'm not saying that to avoid being A Person Who Watches Jersey Shore - because lol, let's talk about the ridiculous shit I have copped to watching - but I fully admit I'm talking out of my ass based on Jezebel recaps of the episodes and bits of self-congratulatory hand-wringing I have caught here and there on other sites like Salon (OH SALON, I WISH I COULD QUIT YOU). I am fascinated by the cultural response to the show. We all hate it! We all bond over our national consensus that they're jackasses! BUT WE'RE ALL ABOUT SEASON 3.
I mean, interested and far more deeply entertained than I am by any reality show since Project Runway lost me (WHATEVER DID HAPPEN TO ANDRE?!?), not at all offended or annoyed. I'm endlessly entertained when the NIAF gets their little panties in a twist over it, more than they ever have over the Sopranos or the fucking SALVATORES. (Oh, the chafing and pouting there would have been if Caprica had reached a bigger audience. Because admitting just how sharply it depicted that particular assimilation narrative and sub-culture would be off-limits. Likely more of a POC space in the social hierarchy, but PFFT, SO ITALIAN IN SO MANY WAYS.)
Because I just - my mom being Italian-American was a huge part of how I was raised, though she's third-generation. I doubt that's unusual in East Coast cities and suburbs, but I suppose that's inconsistent nationally. Then I think it's been weirdly important to my social experience, because I ended up with the thick black hair, olive skin, and hip-waist dramatics, to the extent where I get asked a lot WHAT I AM. EXISTENTIAL DILEMMA! but not really, because (a) still totally white-privileged, so it's not whaling on wounds from bigger social issues and (b) I'm used to it, I didn't really realize it was an unusual question until a few years back. So the Jersey Shore phenomenon kind of caught my attention more than it normally would because it pressed those subconscious buttons.
And dude, let me tell you, they ARE FUCKING NOT A JOKE.
They're slightly OTT in the way any group of people on reality television, to be sure, and then there's a sub-cultural OTT-ness that it totally feeds into and it all self-reinforces. That subdued pink-polo old money "good taste" WASPy culture is less accessible to social groups whose status has changed fairly recently, I think, where it still reads as plainness in a lot of ways, and plain means poor. (Not to mention, we are not, as a group, a people who can carry off pastels well. Washed-out olive skin really does look green.) Disdain for that isn't solely style policing, it's contempt for the nouveaux-middle-class-ness of it all. Mostly the response to the show is the general pleasure in feeling superior to reality television casts, but I do think the form it takes sometimes carries some unconscious, coded classism. Which again, isn't WE ARE SO OPPRESSED, because it's not oppression, so much as a marked but relatively benign expression of our weird invisible American class system.
Actual (okay possibly paraphrased, but the essence of it is burned into my brain) quote from The Situation: "These girls aren't like, girls you sleep with! They're like, actual human beings." The gender policing is totally not coded or subdued in any way. The guys don't hide their paranoid distancing from all things feminine BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY, the girls advertize for plastic surgeons. It's this culture of needing to SHOW EVERYONE what an effort you're making to fit into those expectations, and I think it makes people uncomfortable not because it's in any way worse, so much as they're (unintentional, to be sure) telling the truth about the effort that goes into those performances. It breaks the code of silence. It's crass; it's just not done.
Which is where we get to Snooki, who is, let no one lie to you, AMAZEBALLS. This segment from Anderson Cooper sums up all of my feelings:
THE KEY TO MY HEART.
Snooki is one of those hyper-caricatured personas. She's always performing, and she knows it, and she's milking it for all it's worth. She's pretty much her own RPF crack-ficcer. (POSTMODERN BRILLIANCE.) But she's not really performing any more than any other female faux-celebrity, you know? The hair, the nails, the quick wit combined with the treatment of current affairs as half-understood gossip. But because she's just a small hair off from the usual physical and cultural presentation of sufficient-but-submerged femininity, she's even louder and more discordant than she would be anyway. So she's the recipient of a lot of discomfort with femininity itself, and some small level of guilt over how much we know we expect it. The freak-show treatment of her is protesting too much. It may be a persona, but it is a big, dramatic refusal of pretense and self-effacement.
Snooki is - seriously! - the opposite number to Tina Fey/Liz Lemon. This woman of this rigidly gendered, "vaguely ethnic" (OH JACK YOU BLACK IRISH BASTARD) world, with some level of intelligence and perceived ugly-duckling-ness eventually pushing her into an equally intense, but untenable, retreat from everything feminine. Liz - Fey's unreal, caricatured way of working it all out - has absorbed that highly performative all-or-nothing attitude toward being a woman. And it let her succeed on fairly mainstream terms, but she's quaking up on that tightrope. Snooki's in-your-face commitment to that hyper-feminine persona is ownership of and limitation by that dichotomy, but it's as thorough an exploration of that same dichotomy.
On the record, though, I completely appreciate the existence of Jersey Shore. Whatever the trivial details (and I do acknowledge that they're trivial, but when has that ever stopped me) Jersey Shore represents the long-overdue DEATH OF IRONY. Ultimately, it appeals because they are so not trying to impress us with how unimpressed and untouched they are by society. Possibly it's tacky to admit it, but that's a breath of polluted salt air.
bzz bzz bzz looks like the rich text weirdness is being fixed atm
Also, this article has been linked all over because of how it is brilliant, but if you haven't caught We're All Mad Here: Institutionalization in the Whedonverse, I recommend heading on over. I want to have thoughts because I swear, feminists on the internet and the Whedonverse have both done more to help me with Being A Mentally Ill Person than most shrinks I have seen (and lol, THERE HAVE BEEN A FEW) and so when those two things converge I generally like to flail. But I'm still chewing it over.
bzz bzz bzz what else.
~sf-women-daily is having a Comment-a-Thon and everyone should go play!
~FUCK GRATITUDE. GET IT.