Sunday question: What do you hate most about “Flavor Of Love: Charm School”?
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Posted by Jennifer L Pozner July 1st, 2007 |
Tonight marks the season finale of “Flavor Of Love Girls: Charm School,” the sickeningly infantilizing, boldly bigoted and thoroughly sexist VHI series aimed at “reforming” a gaggle of “slutacious” “ghetto” “whores” who were degraded — and who debased themselves — on the cable net’s earlier blacksploitation reality send-up “Flavor of Love.”
I probably won’t have time to write up a critique of the finale, ironically because I have to finish my book chapter summary on race and racism in reality TV tonight. So, instead, I’m opening the floor to you, WIMN friends.
Have you seen “Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School” (or the prior bad-acts “Flavor of Love” and/or “I Love New York“)? If so, what do you find most problematic about the series? Any particular quotes, scenes, production tricks, cockamamie premises or randomly despicable moments that stand out for you? What’s comedian and show host Monique most blatantly hypocritical line of the night? We want to know, in the comments field.
(VH1 is running the hell out of this series, so if you’ve missed it and feel like getting a bit queasy, check your local listings throughout the month. We’re looking for comments about every episode, not just the season finale, so feel free to let loose about “Charm School,” “I Love NY” and the original minstrel show that started it all, “Flavor of Love.”)
Comment away!
July 1st, 2007 14:06
First I would like to say, I cannot stand any of those shows.
What I can’t stand about “I Love New York” is that it perpetuates the stereotype that African American women are hypersexual.
July 1st, 2007 16:00
I’ve never watched any of them, happily! I saw previews and have avoided them since. ^_^ The preview was enough to tell me that the show was bad news…
July 2nd, 2007 11:10
Practically every line of that show is bad, but the scene in which the poverty-stricken contestant mentions how she wants to win the prize money in order to pay her rent, then is told that what she learns in “Charm School” is more valuable than the $50,000 prize, is one of the worst.
July 2nd, 2007 11:55
SakuraPassion, I have the same complaint about “I Love New York.” Some of that carries over to “Charm School,” too, with the women being called “hos” and “whores” pretty much every episode.
Sanford, that incident ranks as one of my worst-of moments around class bias in reality TV. Incidentally, as per the usual triumphant fairy-tale-ending arcs on most of these shows, they ended up choosing that woman (who, it turns out, has been homeless) as the winner. The whole series was crap, but at least, at least this woman has some money now for a place to live. It doesn’t erase the deeply negative messages the show put out there about economics, class issues, etc.
July 3rd, 2007 14:07
[…] Of course, I don’t want to judge the new show without seeing it, but it will take a minor miracle to avoid some major pitfalls. First off, how will the contestants be chosen? Based on their “ugliness,” we can only presume. Then the “lucky” contestants will be catapulted into an environment designed to be, as TV Squad puts it, soul-crushing. What is the viewer meant to get from this? It would seem to be not only a hideous excuse to parade and humiliate women that don’t fit into society’s narrowly defined beauty standards, but also yet another reality show that aims to confirm the stereotype of women as bitchy and catty. A brief glance at the headline chosen by Radar for its story on “America The Ugly” says it all: “VH1 preps show about ugly chicks.” […]
July 5th, 2007 15:55
I can agree with all of what has been said, that its frustrating to hear them all refer to each other, by the network, whomever, as hos. Its a sick term for every woman who knows how to think. But I think somethings missing here.
These girls ALLOWED this. I only watched Charmed School for a while hoping that maybe, just maybe, they would start to have some respect for themselves. I was mortified that during Flavor of Love they allowed him to rename them in a derogatory manner. He renamed them! And they championed it! What kind of woman does that? They deserve the title of girls if they’re going to act like girls. And I’m sorry, but if they’re going to act like hos, then that is what they deserved to be called.
The network, the writers all deserve a tongue lashing for the way they insist on portraying women but look at the women! All my life, I’ve just been so different, my life wasn’t focused on attracting a certain boy, being a certain weight, wearing certain clothes - I have respect for myself and I don’t have to take my top off to get respect. Taking your top off will not earn you respect. If you’re after drool and cat calls, then God bless.
I for one, don’t appreciate being treated like a non thinking piece of meat. Why is it so many women do? I hate to see what has happened to what we perceive as our worth. It saddens me down to my very core.
February 20th, 2008 10:41
[…] – scripted to appeal to the most base notions about women, people of color, LGBT people, low-income people, youth and more. […]
August 14th, 2009 13:27
[…] This is the backdrop through which we need to understand tonight’s debut of “More To Love.” Representation in media, as we who do media literacy and media criticism know, is often key to people’s ability to feel confident about themselves. To believe they are worthwhile. Images of strong, confident, sexy women of a wide range of shapes and sizes have been missing from reality TV, aside from voyeuristic weight loss competitions such as “The Biggest Loser” and “Dance Your Ass Off.” That has left many of us understandably longing for more body and appearance diversity in the genre. But I cannot stress this enough: where reality TV is concerned, visibility is rarely a blessing. When a constituency often marginalized in media is the subject of a reality show, that usually translates to gross objectification, reinforcement of egregious and outmoded gender, race, class and sexuality stereotypes, and as Samhita Mukhopadhyay writes at Feministing, “fetish spectacle.” Case in point: the way women (and men) of color were turned into characters of modern-day minstrel shows on VH1’s “Flavor of Love” and the spinoffs “I Love New York,” “Real Chance of Love,” “Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School.“ When the only major media presence a community has consists of mockery, misrepresentation or demonization, that community would be better off with invisibility. As Ludovic Blain often says on Twitter, #KeepRealityTVWhite! […]