Hey you guys,
In a rare break with tradition Guilty Pleasure Monday, that most half-assed of recurring A.V Club blog features is hummin, comin' at ya on Monday. Boo and ya.
As a rule I avoid reality shows that aren't Top Chef because I like to fight my inherent misanthropy, not diligently cultivate it like a dark psychological bonsai tree. Yet, in a strange twist I have recently become semi-addicted to perhaps the most misanthropic reality show in the history of television. It's the kind of archetypal guilty pleasure that makes you think "God, this is unspeakably awful. Yet I can't stop watching it!" It's a televised atrocity that proves that despite what hacky stand-up comics have long proposed, women and men really aren't too different when you get right down to it. After all, men are horrible. Women are horrible. And neither deserve love so much as they merit a swift kick in caboose and a stern talking-to.
It's a Bravo show called Millionaire Matchmaker but a more honest name might be Dancing a Merry Jig On The Urine-Soaked Grave Of Feminism. The premise is simple. Patti Stanger, plastic surgery victim and the worst woman in the world, has a thriving business putting together socially retarded, lecherous millionaires and shallow, superficial skanks.
On Millionaire Matchmaker there is a grotesque disconnect between the values Stanger professes to espouse and the ugly moral bankruptcy at the heart of her loathsome operation. Stanger states repeatedly that it's really all about true love and deep, meaningful emotional connections. The skanks and gentleman douchebags alike are encouraged to only have sex within the context of a committed monogamous relationship. Yet Stanger spends much of each show haranguing aspiring millionaire-fuckers to push out their tits, iron their hair (because in Stanger's warped reasoning men hate curly hair and redheads almost as much as they hate assertive, business-minded women and smokers) and generally do everything in their power to look like a nineteen year-old stripper. Stanger pretends to facilitate fairy tale romances when all she's doing is introducing socially retarded horndogs to their first ex-wives. In a million different ways these hapless jerks will never stop paying for sex.
Stanger makes little effort to hide her contempt for her clients or her staff. She regularly derides her millionaires as Poindexters and geeks trying to buy their way into the "cool kid table", a rarified realm she long ago anointed herself the gate-keeper of. Yet it is part of the show's dark genius that her cynicism and Hobbesian take on humanity always seems justified. These guys really are creeps and these women really are selling out their entire gender by becoming willing, docile concubines for nouveau riche assholes on national television.
Much of the train-wreck fascination of Matchmaker comes from watching Stanger try to reconcile her ostensible lofty values and noble aims with her abominable behavior and free-floating contempt for everyone and everything. At one point Stanger insists that even if she were to become a multi-millionaire herself she would go around the world uniting rich schmucks and desperate tarts for free, like "a match-making Mother Theresa". Sadly, hilariously, Stanger isn't being the least bit ironic in comparing herself to Mother Theresa.
You know, there's a word for women who unite rich assholes who want to fuck attractive women and attractive women who want access to the money and power of successful men. They're called madams and what they do is a lot more honest than the reprehensible bill of goods Stanger is pushing on this deliciously evil waste of pixels.