Why Does MTV Let Jersey Shore Guys Get Away With This?

While watching this season of Jersey Shore, in which the male roommates have been particularly cruel about women’s weight, I’m left wondering what Snooki thinks about all this. Especially since she once famously said, “That’s a fuckin’ sensitive subject.”

It’s not like I expect very much sensitivity from men who can’t even feel the simple things—like a bird shitting on their heads—because they have so much product in their hair. But I’m surprised that MTV is making the nightly mission of Mike, Vinnie, and Pauly — aka MVP — to avoid “fat” women as the show’s second-most prominent storyline. (With Sam and Ronnie’s annoying “I’m done” drama, obviously being of the utmost importance.) And the network is ultimately presenting the guys’ attitudes as lighthearted, boys-will-be-boys fun. Along with trailer promos for that feature actual elephant sounds played over video of random girls who are supposedly large and unattractive, the first sentence of the show’s summary, from MTV’s website, says, “The eight housemates of Jersey Shore are back for another season of GTL, fist-pumping, and battling grenades.” Emphasis ours, because what the fuck?

In case you’re not yet indoctrinated, The Situation defines a “grenade” as a “fat, ugly girl.” (See also: “zoo creature.”) A “landmine” is a “thin, ugly girl.” And it would seem that the men on Jersey Shore have an incredibly hard time of avoiding all these undesirables. While signing a reality-show release form pretty much guarantees you’ll be humiliated in some way, I wonder how it’s been for these girls whose faces have been shown on national television and have been labeled as overweight and/or unattractive. I also wonder how both MTV and the male roommates are able to playfully promote “a grenade-free America,” when one of the female roommates, Snooki, has been open about her eating-disordered past and her discomfort with jokes about her weight.

Either way, MVP seem to only care about not hooking up with fat, ugly girls. So why are they, in their estimation, constantly around them? I mean, they’re the ones who are describing those girls that way, when the rest of the world can see that these ladies are perfectly fine (though maybe a bit drunkenly misguided, but that’s another issue). They’re in freaking Miami. It’s full of beautiful people, no matter what your definition of beauty may be. Either these guys suck at their game, or they’ve grossly over-estimated their own level of attractiveness and what it can yield.