The Old Man and the Sea (of Fake Boobs and Narcissism)

o say that The Girls Next Door — Hugh Hefner’s new “reality” TV series — is the stupidest show ever produced by television executives somewhat understates the case.
    It is the stupidest show ever produced by consciousness.
    Actually, when you come right down to it, Girls isn’t a show at all. It’s an extended marketing platform for crusty old Hef’s crusty old brand of misogyny. The plot of the program — to abuse that term — concerns the goings-on at the Playboy Mansion, a dismal mock Tudor where doddering Hef lives with a harem of pneumatic, self-commodifying ho-bags, er, I mean, his girlfriends.
    There are three central girlfriends, and the show’s producers struggle mightily to extract some hint of personality from their gold-digging doggerel. Holly is the alpha bitch, the veteran girlfriend who tells us that she sees herself settling down with Hef in five years, as soon as she can get rid of her rivals. Her central daily activity is to play with her various dogs, none of whom are quite as large as her breasts. Bridget is the classic small-town girl with big dreams. Much is made of her master’s degree — she’s educated! — though as she informs us relentlessly, her central life goal is to be a Playmate, a destiny she settled on at age four.
    “I was going to teach,” she chirps. “Then I thought: teach? That’s not fun!”
    Kendra is the youngest of the trio, at twenty, and a proven master of paradox. “People assume we’re skanks,” she observes. “But I think people respect us, too. They look at us and say, “Wow, how cool!'” Later, she muses, “My boyfriend is so charming. He brings joy to my life . . . I’m his girlfriend. We do the same things every week, so I kind of see that as a job.” Kendra lists Hef as one of her heroes, along with her dogs.
    Reality TV producers are constantly attempting to contrive drama from the aimless reams of footage they amass, and the struggle with Girls is almost painful to watch. Impetuous Kendra is always late for din-din! Hef’s lamb chops are taking too long to prepare! Holly’s new hairstyle may be too weird for Hef! It is a testament to the vapidity of this enterprise that the central “struggle” to emerge in the pilot is Bridget’s desire to get her waxed cooter into the magazine. “She’s always wanted to be a Playmate,” Holly notes. “That would be achieving all she could achieve both in mind and body.”
    Tragically, Bridget must suffer the indignity of watching a new batch of bunnies arrive at the Mansion each week to be photographed. Her response is logical enough: she encourages the models to drink to excess the night before their shoots, so they will be hung over. (Mangling their genitals while they sleep apparently never occurred to her.) Toward the end of episode two, just as all seems lost, Hef gathers the girlfriends upstairs and announces — I hope you are sitting down — that they will be getting a spread in the magazine! Joyous tears ensue.
    Hef himself appears on camera very little, with good reason. At age seventy-nine, he looks more like an aged monkey than a sexed-out swinger. It is painful to watch him kiss his ladies and he does so tentatively, not with the passion of a true lover, but the formality of a doting grandpa. (Fun fact: the combined age of the girlfriends is seventy-six.)
    There is almost no discussion of sex on the show, because it is quite obvious that Hef doesn’t view these women as sexual objects. He views them as hood ornaments. “Hef has a very particular sense of beauty,” Holly explains at one

point. “It makes me wish I had a smaller nose.” (For the record, if Holly’s nose were any smaller it would be a blowhole. Like the two other girlfriends, she is dyed platinum blond, with laughably huge knockers and a waist the approximate circumference of a pack of Lifesavers.)
    It should be noted that all the girlfriends appear bored out of their skulls and perhaps clinically depressed. This is what happens when people are kept as pets. They literally have nothing to do, other than play with their own pets and prepare for their dates with Hef, though “dates” is not quite the word. These are promotional events during which Hef escorts six to eight women to some very public place where they pose for photographs and “try not do anything stupid,” as Holly cheerfully explains. The whole idea of these appearances is to communicate Hef’s masculine omnipotence, his effortless dominion over women. As one of his dates puts it, rather desperately, “You’ve still got it, Hef!”
    The problem is that Hef so obviously doesn’t still got it. He’s too old and enfeebled to play the leading man. He’s become a caricature of himself, a pimp with stand-by oxygen tank, a gigolo in Depends.
    There was a time, long ago, when his ramblings about sexual freedom seemed aimed at genuine sources of repression. But there’s never been anything free about the sex he peddles. In the real word, what he does is more closely related to prostitution than liberation. Thankfully, the real world intrudes very little at the Playboy Mansion. At one point, a couple of male kitchen staffers are shown spooning gourmet food onto china plates for Holly’s dogs.
    “The dogs eat better than we do,” notes one. “But that’s okay.”
    “Yeah,” seconds his partner. “That’s okay.”
    Later in the show, Bridget informs Kendra that two members of al-Qaeda were arrested in her hometown of Lodi.
    “Eeeeew!” Kendra says.
    And really, it’s hard to disagree. Terrorists are just so . . . icky.
    That said, after watching a few episodes of Girls, it’s hard not to feel that America is cruising for a bruising. Forcing women to wear burkas may be repressive and cruel, but watching women reduce themselves to upscale slaves is equally dispiriting. One has to wonder how a group of young women could develop so much self-loathing in so short a time. Then again, the vast prairies of porn are filled with such young women (and men), who arguably do far more damage to themselves.
    Wags like myself will take a certain grim pleasure in looking down on these pampered molls and their willed idiocy, as well as the raw, pathetic narcissism of a guy like Hefner. The program bears witness to the triumph of commercialism over humanism . . . it makes Elimidate look like Wild Strawberries . . . and so on. But this approach misses the central tragedy of a show like The Girls Next Door. The producers had plenty of drama to work with. They had only to ask the right questions: Why did these women come to the Mansion? Where did they come from? How do their loved ones regard them? What fears and desires led them to such blithe self-abnegation? And is there any chance they might recognize, even for a moment, what they’ve become?
    Then again, this is Reality TV — the one place where you never have to worry about the harsh truths of reality. Let us pray that Girls — along with Being Bobby Brown and the rest of dried reality puke being served up this summer — will sound a death knell for the entire genre, which has devolved from campy to pathological to just plain sad.  n°

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
	Steve Almond‘s new essay collection is (Not that You Asked). It is, like much of his work, filthy.