What I've Learned from the Jersey Shore

If your underwear is showing, then your dress is too short.

If you insist on wearing a short dress, then make sure that you wear underwear.

Fighting strangers in public just because they threw a drink at you/pulled your weave/looked at you in the wrong way does not make you look like a man (or a woman). It makes you look violent and stupid.

Orange is not a good look for anyone. It's also a sign that you've spent too much time in the tanning booth.

If you wear your hair so high that you start to resemble Frankenstein's monster or the monster's bride (Pauly and Snooki, I'm talking to you), then the villagers just might come after you with flaming torches and pitchforks.

Referring to yourself in the third person does not make you sound smarter (and who gives himself a lame nickname like "The Situation", anyway?).

It's okay to swim in the ocean. It's not actually full of whale sperm.

When your boyfriend/girlfriend screams at you on a regular basis, destroys your belongings, freaks out if you talk to someone of the opposite sex, and/or shoves you around, it's time to break up and cut that person out of your life for good. It doesn't mean you should take that person back again and again just because he/she is so "awesome".

Even if you pull the blanket over your heads, everyone still knows what you and your date are doing.

If you are lucky enough to get a free trip to Italy, don't spend the whole trip partying with tourists. Looking at art, eating Italian food, interacting with the locals, exploring the different cities, and experiencing all the other things that Italy has to offer should not be an afterthought that is saved for the last couple days of your trip. 

It's good to exercise and lift weights on a regular basis. It's also good to lift a book and actually read it every now and then.

Spraying your hair with a bunch of hairspray is not the same as shampooing it. And spraying yourself from head to toe with cologne (which is so strong it makes other people hold their breath and back away quickly from you) is not the same thing as taking a shower.

When your fifteen minutes of fame are up, at least you'll have a career to fall back on selling T-shirts in the Shore Store.

When I first started watching Jersey Shore, I did it because I was bored and nothing else was on. I hadn't even really watched reality TV (except for the occasional episode of Millionaire Matchmaker) since I stopped watching The Real World almost a decade ago. I'd gotten irritated with that show because it had gone way downhill since the show first aired. Now every show centered on drunken catfights, hot tub orgies, and pretty, spoiled brats whining about how hard life was for them even though they didn't have to work and got to live rent-free in fancy penthouses.

And yet, I later found myself tuning in to watch Jersey Shore, which is full of drunken catfights and hot tub orgies, except the cast of this show is a lot more orange and have turned partying into a career. I could never live or act the way that they do (nor would I ever want to), and yet I couldn't help watching them. (On the other hand, I haven't been watching the show as often as I used to, because the episodes started getting repetitive three seasons ago. For example, it gets boring to watch Snooki and the Situation get thrown out of clubs again and again.)

One reason I watched the show was because they're so stupid it's funny. They say and do the stupidest things sometimes, and they don't even realize how stupid they look. I guess it's bad for me to say this, but I actually feel better about myself when I watch them. I think, Well, at least I've never done anything THAT dumb. 

I know I'm not the only one who indulges in reality television. Millions of people take pleasure in being voyeurs to other people's lives; they say it's "reality", but it's anything but. The episodes are edited by the show's "writers" and producers, and certain events and emotions are magnified to make them seem much more dramatic than they actually are. Some of the people on these shows are so greedy for fame and money that they let the shows bring out the worst in them without considering the long-term consequences. We watch people get engaged to people they've only known for a few weeks, only to break up a few months later. We watch women who see nothing wrong with marrying for money so that they can have luxurious lifestyles, and we watch men treat women like sex objects.

We also watch teen moms who spend more time obsessing over their abusive boyfriends than their own babies. That's one reason I'm seriously considering not watching Teen Mom anymore, because the show has become so disturbing. What kind of mother would rather scream at her mother and drive off to smoke weed than stay home with her son? What kind of mother would slap her emotionally abusive boyfriend around in front of her child? What kind of mother prevents her ex-boyfriend from spending any time with their son just to punish him? Several of the girls on Teen Mom, that's who. Yes, there are older women who act like this too, but the behavior of some of the girls on this show in particular makes me worry about the example that several (though not all) of the girls on that show are setting for other teenagers.

We watch teenagers and twentysomethings on other reality shows get drunk, take their clothes off, and do the kinds of wild things that make us wonder how they'll ever get hired for real jobs when they finally come to their senses, because employers who are not Joe Francis (of the Girls Gone Wild notoriety) will probably not want to hire young adults who do those things on national television. (That might explain why some of them continue doing reality TV well into their thirties and forties.)

And even though we may be frustrated, repulsed, or horrified by their behavior, we continue to watch because it's "entertainment". It's also very easy for us to judge these people, seeing as how we only get the edited version of their lives. I've read the online message boards for some of these shows, and many of the people post extremely hateful, nasty, and ignorant  comments on those boards that bash the people on those shows.

But on the other hand, I think that we can actually learn something from reality television. For one thing, we can learn about how we shouldn't act, and we can learn that all that fame and money can't really make up for the fact that the people on those shows have no privacy and have made themselves vulnerable to millions of viewers' criticism. Reality TV also teaches us that loving, lasting, and genuine relationships are nothing like the ones that we see on TV.

What about you? Do you watch reality TV? If not, why not? If you do, which shows do you watch and why?