And the operative word in that title is “girls.”
When you are a writer who focuses on reality TV, it can sometimes take a lot to move you to actual surprise at what people might be willing to lay out for the public on camera.
Jonny Fairplay lying about his grandmother’s death on Survivor? Hugh Hefner happily cohabitating with his multiple girlfriends on The Girls Next Door? New York from I Love New York…um…doing much of anything? At some point, you do become a bit inured to the idea that anything at all is really scandalous enough to make me sit up and take notice.
Thank goodness, then, for Keeping up with the Kardashians, for showing me, and many other jaded viewers, that there is actually something that might seem beyond the pale to us.
On this week’s Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Kris Kardashian happily arranged with a jailed Joe Francis of Girls Gone Wild to have her three daughters Kim Kardashian, Khloe Kardashian, and Kourtney Kardashian act as spokesmodels for the new “couture” line of Girls Gone Wild bikinis. (There is something kind of odd about a company that has made its fortune by encouraging women to take off their tops then producing tops, but I suppose the Girls Gone Wild need something “couture” to remove.)
Kris concedes that “sometimes people have a negative connotation about Girls Gone Wild.” Some of those “people” include, say, law enforcement officials, representatives of the Federal Trade Commission and the Internal Revenue Service, all of whom have had or do have some current legal issues with Joe Francis and/or the production company behind Girls Gone Wild.
But not the Kardashians do not have a negative connotation with Girls Gone Wild. In fact, even the littlest Kardashians want to be part of the Girls Gone Wild family.
Kylie Jenner, 9, and Kendall Jenner, 11, had a little fun as they were being babysat by half-brother Brody Jenner, and played their own version of Girls Gone Wild, pretending to lift their shirts and horsing around on the house stripper pole while Brody’s friend/manager Frankie Delgado started to film them so that he could put it on YouTube.
I really don’t even know what can be said about that except that I actually find it rather sad. The young girls probably have no idea what they are doing, and young kids mimic what they see around them all the time, so who knows? Maybe this was just one isolated incident that seems completely out-of-control because we only get small edited slivers of the family’s whole life. Then again, last week’s episode had the 9-year-old Kylie imitating her big sis Kim and Pussycat Dolls founder Robin Antin on the stripper pole.
But the fact that the parents would allow these incidents into the show – or, if they had no control over what did and didn’t make into the show, didn’t raise howls of protest in the press about how their kids were portrayed –makes me wonder just exactly what Kris Kardashian is willing to do to get “exposure” for her family.
It also makes no sense in the context of a video currently featured on the E! website in which Bruce Jenner talks about keeping girls from dressing too sexy and uses the phrase “age-appropriate” about 100 times. If it’s important for young people to present themselves in an age-appropriate fashion, why would they allow their daughters to be represented in this pretty age-inappropriate way?
Without knowing the story behind how this all came to be, obviously, no one can really know what the family is actually like. But it’s one thing for 9 and 11-year-olds to be curious about adult things and maybe even act out something age-inappropriate, and another thing entirely for those antics to make it onto a televised national stage. What on earth were their parents thinking?
What do you think? Is the critical stink around this episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians much ado about nothing or do you also think this is crossing a line for kids?
– Leslie Seaton, BuddyTV Staff Columnist
Source: Jezebel, E!Online, DListed
(Image courtesy of E! Online)
Staff Columnist, BuddyTV
