O to a Bad Girl

Oxygen, launched on February of 2000, is an American cable network that markets to young women focusing primarily on talk and reality Tv shows for their original programming, Needless to say, although entertaining this programming can be a bit juvenile but Oxygen, makes it work, streamlining their priorities on hair battles, the life of B list celebrities, dancing, modeling and of their most popular claim to fame, the cat fight; modeled best in their hit series, The Bad Girl’s Club (BGC).

What is the Bad Girls club you ask? Well you’re either 68 years old, or have been living under a rock in a third world country….or both, if you are not acquainted with shallow, barbarism that is The Bad Girls Club . In which case, I will tell you.

The Bad Girl club is a reality tv show focused around a group of 7 girls, picked to live in a mansion located in a populated major American city, with no job or critical life goals. Their common interest? To drink, party and pick up guys … or girls(many of them aren’t picky). Oh, and also, being a self proclaimed ‘Bad Girl’.  So you could imagine what goes down in a house with seven bad divas, with nothing to keep them occupied, but partying and drinking. That’s right., pandemonium.

After the drinking and the partying, and the making out, there’s fighting, and after the fighting there’s partying, and after that more fighting, then more drinking, then more fighting. Oh yes, I forgot to throw in scheming, because a house full of Bad Girls, can’t exist without at least one of them, trying to prove they’re the “baddest bitch” 

So why does this show exist?  I hate to say it, but it’s damn entertaining. I will guiltily admit since the shows release in 2006, I have been an avid fan. They’re something about watching a girl take another girl by the hair, over an eaten granola bar, that’s just exiting television. Not necessarily, good or quality television, but entertaining and exciting. I apparently am not the only one who thinks so, considering BGC is on the taping their 9^th season, with their top viewings for Season 5 being 1,679,000.

What worries me, is what this says about me, and a million other Americans, at the fact that we take such joy in such foolery. I recently have examined the errors with this show and myself, while watching Season 8. After witnessing a girl that was in the house for less than a night, get jumped by all the other girls in the house, for no other reason, that being new, and them not liking her face, I felt like the show had gone too far. I at least like some rhyme or reason to my violence. 

Furthermore what does this say about me and the primary audience of the show that are women. This show, displaying women and childish and wild, and unable to support one another, is on a women’s network. It is being ran by a women and targeting young women, instantly making the ignorant women of the shows celebrities. 

Yes, of course you could argue that those watching it know the difference between right and wrong and they also know not to idolize the women on the show for their ignorance. You could also argue that the women on the show are well aware of their ignorance and choose to participate to become celebrities. Alright that's fine, but what does it say about us culturally as American women, that we support the ignorance? While watching the shows and reading between the lines, a majority of the BGC celebrities are women that have been hurt in the past, either physically, emotionally or both. If they haven't then they were spoiled rich girls looking for attention. Is that what we want to promote to the young women of America? That it's more acceptable to hide our pain through drugs, drinking and partying? 

Yes, I know no one wants to watch Oprah and Dr. Phil making people cry on the couch all day, but there has to be a better way to display reality than watching drunk ignorant women make a spectacle of themselves on television for sport.