Howdy y’all,
Welcome to tonight’s review of a show I like to call The He-Man Woman-Hater’s Club. Seriously, how fucking misogynistic is this show? It’s like a master class in body-shaming, virulent sexism and the wholesale exploitation of women.
Tonight was ostensibly a new episode but you could be excused for thinking you’d stumbled onto a rerun. Just about everything felt warmed-over and numbingly familiar: the increasingly tiresome psychodrama that is the Ronnie-Sammi mess ("dump the asshole already!" screams all of America), the men-children bringing more women home than they know what to do with, the third-grade pettiness and stupidity of the anonymous J’accuse! letter detailing Ronnie’s infidelities. Christ, even Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino’s threat to exclude Angelina from various theme nights felt like a veteran band apathetically trotting out an old hit.
In the parlance of Violent J, whose nearly 600 pound manifesto I am currently reading, what once was fresh as fuck now seems somewhat stale-ass. The joke just isn’t funny anymore. You can only watch women be lied to and emotionally abused and demonized and cheated on for so long before guilty pleasure gives way to sadness about the human condition and horror that Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino is going to make five million dollars this year.
Think about all the teachers in your elementary school. Add all their salaries up. Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino still makes more than all of them combined. What makes him worthy of such an unholy sum? Well, in tonight’s episode, and in every other episode, Sorrentino alerted a grateful nation to the dangers posed by women he classily refers to as grenades and Rhinoceroses.
Grenades, as y’all already know, are ladies the gentledouchebags of Jersey Shore deem insufficiently attractive, or at least not up to their exacting standards (Apparently they linger under the delusion that they should be enjoying threesomes with Jessica Alba and Cindy Crawford every night). Rhinoceroses, by comparison, are grenades who have the added disadvantage of being overweight.
It’s a good thing that Vinnie, Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino and DJ Pauly D demarcate which of their lucky conquests qualify as grenades and which are rhinoceroses because otherwise they might be mistaken for perfectly lovely young women who are obese only in the sense that they don’t appear to be anorexic.
This was especially true of the “rhinoceros” the fellows put to bed so they could fuck her ostensibly more attractive friends. By sane standards she’s attractive, even hot, but in the upside down world of Jersey Shore she’s apparently some she-beast. Gosh, I wonder if there’s any connection between rampant eating disorders among the young women who constitute MTV’s core audience and theoretically hot young men on Jersey Shore treating every woman who weighs more than 115 pounds as a morbidly obese she-creature.
Alright, I will now step off the old soapbox and address the rest of the episode, like when Sammi and Ronnie each pulled out their magnifying glasses and channeled their inner Encyclopedia Brown trying to figure out “The Case of the Incriminating Anonymous Letter.” It was like The Scarlet Letter only the fellows decided all the girls were whores and grenades and rhinoceroses as well. Ronnie deduced that the missive couldn’t come from Snooki, since she was incapable of using big words like “wisely” (as in Sammi loves Ronnie not wisely but too well).
It was all very second-grade, though the episode’s guiltiest pleasure came when Ronnie denied that he was up to mischief at the club and his bros similarly denied knowledge of his antics and the editors cut maliciously and hilariously to Ronnie motorboating the Jell-O shot babes and Vinnie and DJ Pauly D pointing at him and saying, “Look at Ronnie motorboating that Jell-O shot girl. We are both here and see everything.”
Why don’t these dullards realize that if they lie about shit that’s been captured on tape their ruses will be exposed sooner rather than later? Jersey Shore still engenders a certain trainwreck fascination but I can’t help but feel like I’m getting a little too old for this shit.
Only one thing can save this show from jumping the shark: appearances from J420 and Johnny Yanks and entire episodes devoted to the minute details of running a gelato shop.