Flavor of Love, Rethunk

When I run on the treadmill at Crunch gym, I occasionally indulge myself by watching trashy TV shows instead of, say, the CNN headline news channel. The other day, I flipped to VH1's Flavor of Love, a reality TV dating show similar to The Bachelor in which rapper Flavor Flav of Public Enemy invites 20 female contestants to live in his mansion and compete in various challenges to become his wife.

The show started out innocently enough: Big Rick, Flav's bodyguard and chauffeur, informed the girls that they would be hosting a party for the rapper's friends. But as the girls' excitement mounted after the famous guests-G-Unit, Warren G, and DJ Quik, to name a few-arrived, it became more apparent that Flav wasn't looking for love, let alone a future life partner. As rapper Don Magic Juan told one contestant after she performed a bend-over-booty shake, "Damn girl, you're good-I mean, I don't want to date you or nothin' but damn do I want to get in them pants!" The more I sweated the more I began to understand that the gold-toothed, velvet-robed Flavor, who stood on his balcony watching the girls administer lap dances through binoculars, was not observing who would make the best wife but the best whore.

How can I make this claim? Well, aside from the fact that my mother does not give lap dances to my dad's friends at family barbecue, the very concept of a show in which 20 girls are literally at a man's disposal makes Flav's mansion appear more like a brothel than an expensive abode. Like hookers, the girls don't use their true names-rather, due to his self-proclaimed "bad memory," the rapper assigns nicknames based on the contestants' personalities. Personalities? I'm not sure about Deelishis, but the last time I checked Beatuful (pronounced "booty-full) and EyeZ referred to physical attributes, not character traits. Is Somethin's personality so profound that it defies explanation? Does this then mean that No Nickname has no personality?

Just like whores, the more provocatively the contestants are dressed, the better their chances of winning the affection of the customer, Flavor. And how does a girl get a taste of Flavor's love? Well, by being escorted by Flav's bodyguard-chauffeur by day and pimp by night, Rick, to spend the evening in the rapper's bed. In one episode, the morning after Flavor spends the night with Nibblz, Toastee tells the other girls that Nibblz was giving the rapper a hand job because there were strange noises coming from Flav's room. Even if Toasteee's statement was just false conjecture and even if Flavor did not participate in any sexual activities other than kissing (which is shown in front of the camera), that a "date" consists of a romantic dinner at KFC, that this is the second season of Flavor of Love, and that Flavor gives jewelry and other expensive gifts to his contestants after the bed invites are more consistent with the theory of wife-as-whore than the one of wife-as-lover.

Unfortunately, Flavor of Love is characteristic of wider media sentiments. Before writing a piece entitled "Don't Marry a Career Woman," in which a dirtier house is listed as one of the reasons not to get involved with a high-powered woman, Forbes magazine columnist Michael Noer wrote an article entitled "The Economics of Prostitution," in which he compared wives to whores. He likens both types of women to economic "goods" which can be substituted for each other: "the implication remains that wives and whores are-if not exactly like Coke and Pepsi-something akin to champagne and beer."

I'm not sure which is more disturbing-that men like Noer and Flavor still think it is okay to degrade women or that some women still think it is OK to be degraded in order to win a man's affections. As corporate lawyer Miranda Hobbes on Sex and the City quips, "I know how to please a man, you just give away most of your power." The women on Flavor of Love aren't forced to subordinate themselves, but they know that by giving into Flavor's needs (most of which are sexual), they improve their chances of winning the competition.

As John Stuart Mill wrote in The Subjection of Women, the rule of men over women is the hardest oppression to overcome as it is "not a rule of force: it is accepted voluntarily; women make no complaint, and are consenting parties to it." Until women reject the idea that they must lower themselves in order to please men, men will not view women any differently.