I first heard of Jersey Shore in the spring of 2009. I was a teaching assistant at the University of New Hampshire, and one of the students in my First-Year Writing class described his afternoon routine using the acronym GTL. What is GTL? I asked him in a conference. He looked at me appraisingly, as though he were trying to decide if my question was serious or if I was just pretending to be an ignorant loser.
“It’s from Jersey Shore?” he said. Aha! I thought. This is some sort of cultural thing.
“I didn’t know you were from New Jersey!” Again, the appraising look.
“It’s a television show.” He paused, clearly trying to decide whether he should explain to me what a television is. You know, it’s like a box with a screen and you plug it into the wall and then you can see pictures on the screen and hear voices and noises and stuff and it tells you stories. It’s really fun, Ms. Morgan. Way better than those books stacked all over your desk. You should seriously try it. “GTL is Gym Tanning Laundry. Because you know, you gotta look good.”
Of course. GTL. Gym Tanning Laundry. Silly English teacher.
So this conversation was mildly disturbing, but really not atypical of the conversations one has when speaking to nineteen-year-old business majors about their freshman writing assignments. I figured this Jersey Shore thing was some sort of anomaly. I mean, I’ve learned many new and bizarre things from students over the years. For instance, that “frat mattress” does not actually refer to bedding and that “Birdman” is not a character on Sesame Street but a rapper. Fascinating little nuggets of information that languish in my memory because (mercifully) I don’t often encounter situations in which they need to be retrieved.
The Jersey Shore thing, however, proved to be different. It didn’t go away, but kept reappearing with greater frequency and intensity. A creature named “Snooki” surfaced everywhere. Even President Obama mentioned it at least once. And I began to feel like the college courses I taught consisted of one long Jersey Shore reference that I was, for the most part, completely missing. Last fall, I taught a writing course that went late on Thursday evening, and one student routinely pleaded for class to end early because “it’s t-shirt time!”
But aren’t you already wearing a t-shirt? I thought.
Anyway, a few weeks ago, I finally sat down to watch an episode of Jersey Shore. It was . . .alarming. Like seriously. It was fucked up.
Before I go any farther with this, I should tell you that even though I’m a terrible snoot, I really do like reality TV. I love Teen Mom and the Real Housewives of every city except maybe Atlanta (but I will totally watch that season if there’s nothing else on). Admittedly, my reality TV fascination (let’s not call it an addiction) stems from and reflects some of the truly ugly sides of human nature. For instance, the need to distinguish oneself as different and superior by judging other people as stupid or ugly or just plain mean. It’s also a nifty form of escapism. These people are living lives I will never live, could never even imagine if I didn’t see them streaming through my TV set. Arguably, they are living lives that don’t actually exist. (Just yesterday, I complained to a friend that the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills make me feel like a lard ass. She responded, “Oh honey, those women aren’t real.”) At any rate, I’m not some elitist asshole who thinks all television is evil and that everyone who watches it is a mindless drone blithely marching toward the destruction of human civilization.
Jersey Shore, though? That’s different. Personally, I found it to be pretty boring. I mean, watching other people get really drunk and argue over who has to clean the kitchen isn’t terribly fun. It’s pretty mundane stuff, really. For example, the episode to which I subjected myself contained a scene in which three girls sat on a sofa playing with their hair and exchanging sullen glances because one had reportedly called another one “fake.” For like three minutes. Cue the crickets. I’m going to bed.
So the show itself is maybe not all that insidious. The thing that totally freaked the shit out of me was that as I was watching, I realized that for many people under, say, twenty-five, the world of Jersey Shore has become a sort of ideal. The hair thing, for instance. I have on more than one occasion stopped class to ask a young lady if she had bubblegum stuck in her hair or something because she was so absorbed in pulling apart the individual strands and examining them that I thought, surely there must be a problem here. But no. This is apparently what the females on JS do any time they find themselves in an awkward/boring/distressing situation. And then there is the fact that I was pretty much right about the JS reference thing. An alarming percentage of undergraduate discourse seems to consist of Jersey Shore references. T-Shirt time. Fist pumping. The smush room. And then, of course, the objectification of all people, male and female. Forget use-value. We’re talking sex-value. Good looking men are gorillas (eerrrp?), whereas unattractive women are hippopotamuses. It’s base. It’s lewd. It devalues human beings and makes young people feel that the size of their breasts/pectoral muscles is more important than the size of their intellect. And I, for one, do not believe this to be true. Twenty years from now, when Snooki’s ample bosom has descended to touch her navel, will anyone care to watch her drunken exploits? I think not.
