Fumarama

John Atkinson of Chiasm recently linked to my blog from his own. It was incredibly nice of him. And if you like music, energy issues, non-mainstream worldwide news, or boys from Northern New Jersey, this is the blog for you. He did express disappointment that I don't blog on either of the shows he watches, Lost or Beauty and the Geek. While it is true that I do not watch Lost, I have been watching this season for BatG. I have been a bit afraid to blog about it because the show is based on a stereotype and I knew that I could not write about it without engaging in my own stereotypes. And so I apologize but here goes...

The premise of the show is fundamentally flawed for me. As Karen so succinctily put it recently: "successful is the new cute." And she is totally right, while "geeky" might hold a guy down in high school but by the time you hit your twenties (and definitely your mid to late twenties) women, even incredibly shallow annoying ones such as some of the ones on this show, prefer a man who can support them than one that looks good. See for example, Trump and his wife, or Anna Nicole Smith's decision to marry that old guy. And some of these guys with their grad degrees from MIT, and Harvard, and Berkeley are going to be successful.

So these girls rather than sneering at these guys lack of fashion sense should be chasing after them. And these guys aren't even so bad. Except for Pao who seemed really over the top, these guys are not so bad. Scooter and Nate are both really cute and funny. And Matt was talking about how he has a lot of female friends, those types of guys always get a girl. Girls like being treated nicely. My point is that that any of those guys can go back to their normal lives and get a very cute girl but for the girls, in contrast, this might be their only chance to find anyone as successful as the men on the show.

Anyway, maybe this is why the show works perfectly. Because underneath the gloss of being from two diffrent worlds, these two groups are really compatible. The girls need a stable guy who will treat them nicely and admire them, and the guys, not quite over feeling like a geek in high school, want to be with the hot girl they could not get back then. The true social experiment would be to have it the other way around: geeky girls and beautiful, vapid men. I don't think it would work. Smart women, in general, don't like men who are dumber than they are. And men never pay attention to a woman unless they think she is attractive. Basically, they are very dismissive if a girl is not hot. I would like to see it done. The one advantage is that girls are far easier to make over.