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“Nobody abused me. My daddy didn't grope me. I'm a happy, well-adjusted person that really likes sex!”
— Flavor of Love 2's Nibblz, explaining her bisexuality to some of her fellow cast members.
“You prejudiced whore! Are you gonna say you're on a show to ‘have dark babies'? If you want dark babies, why don't you just get a crack head that's dark?”
— Flavor of Love 2's Buckeey, reacting to a comment made by Wire, a fellow cast member.
“Your love is better than ice cream, better than anything else that I've tried …”
— Sarah McLachlan, songwriter
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True love might be better than ice cream, but the Flavor of Love that's portrayed on VH1's hit celebreality series Flavor of Love, now in its second season, isn't sweet at all — it's rather nasty, in every sense of the word.
Flavor of Love's “love”-hungry characters — its star, Flavor Flav of Public Enemy fame, and a group of 20 women (including a few “bisexuals,” naturally) living together in a mansion for three weeks and vying ruthlessly for Flav's affection — are so selfish, indelicate, and downright abhorrent that they're triumphantly tragic.
And that poses a problem: I feel guilty admitting that I laughed continuously during the show's premiere.
Yes, my feminist alarm went off, and it sounded like this: Warning! Warning! You're watching violent, inebriated, desperate and self-destructive women trying to get an extremely unattractive man wearing a Viking hat and a huge clock around his neck to have sex or fall in love with them! Abort! Abort!
But I ignored it, and thought: Shut up! This is numskull-icious! And the alarm sounded again. Louder.
But I didn't change the channel. I chose to take pleasure in the distasteful display of human behavior Flavor of Love offers. I chose to lose myself in idiocy and enjoy degrading, tasteless comedy rather than watch another Law & Order rerun.
So why not keep this guilty pleasure to myself? Why write about a show that on the surface seems more objectionable than it is valuable?
Because the premiere episode attracted 3.3 million viewers, and I doubt they were all frat boys. I'm sure I'm not the only intelligent woman who's amused by this show. If I find humor in it, despite its despicable depiction of women, bisexuality and love, it's likely that lesbians just like me do, too. And, since I feel that Flavor of Love pits my disdain for the show's female “contestants” against my love and respect for decent women, perhaps others feel the same way and struggle with it just like I do.
Flavor of Love presents an opportunity to have a conversation about how — or if — we should balance our queer and feminist sensibilities with a sense of humor in the face of the most degrading and inane form of reality television yet, something I call real-tragi-comedy.
Do we laugh at these “characters” and risk being accused of applauding ignorance and, worse, misogyny, or should we attempt to politicize nonsense? We all remember how foolish Jerry Falwell looked when he accused one of the Teletubbies of being gay. Isn't it just as important for us to choose our battles wisely as it is to fight them effectively?
If grown women willingly sacrifice their collective self-worth for a few bucks and an extremely slim chance at modeling or acting careers, is it the responsibility of feminists to save them from themselves? Must every action made by a female in the public eye be measured on a scale of social value? And since most of the cast members are African-American women, are intelligent viewers obligated to play the race card and denounce VH1, even though the bad behavior clearly crosses all racial boundaries and the audience is obviously baited?
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