Do YOU Have Love?

Things have slowed down a little, which is a good thing and a bad thing. I need to be gearing up to get some work done over the break, and I have my students' final papers staring me down from the end of next week. That grading promises to be boatloads of fun. I just hope to god that they haven't all again chosen to argue the same thing about the same small selection of pieces. Whaddayathink? Yeah. I'm screwed. Ah well, at least I made it through the semester, mostly intact. I'm bizarrely looking forward to the comparatively easy work of teaching research writing in the Spring! More grading, more repetitiveness, WAY less prep. The nightmares should start right around the first week of January. Bring 'em on.

I guess my perception that things have slowed a bit is primarily due to some denial I've been cultivating. Does that denial have a face, you ask? Why, yes. Yes, it does. I've been unabashedly scouring youtube for the parceled up back episodes of A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila. I still have a wretched time getting her name right. For some stupid reason, my tongue doesn't want to say the 'l', so I'm always saying "Tia," even in the heat of an intensely nerdy discussion with q about the representation of bi-ness on the show. But, truly, the show has found a place in my not-as-guilty-as-you-might-imagine pleasures. I was trying to explain to Q last night what I find so captivating about it. I haven't quite articulated it to myself yet, but in a way I find it more compelling than other such reality shows. This is actually saying something as I've developed something of a penchant for the genre over the last couple of years. Blame it on my devotion to the treadmill. That's how it all began. As a sidenote, I actually had to plead the poor gym attendant today not to change the channel from vh-1 just as I Love New York 2 was coming on. I had, indeed, planned my trip to coincide with the new episode. Things look rocky in the house, by the way.


But the thing with A Shot at Love is complicated. The show is framed in such a way that, at the beginning, Tila was talking about trying to decide if she wants to be with a man or a woman. Now, closer to the end, she's getting a bit more ambivalent about this, talking instead about focusing on the person rather than the gender--a pretty standard bi line that drives non-bisexuals batso. Or, rather, it isn't that one discourse has replaced the other, but they are now woven together in the show. Depending on who she's talking to--the white, wealthy, suburban grotesques who exclaim that they never thought their son would bring "someTHING" like "that" home--or the suspiciously loving and non-prude extended family of our favorite "futch" (you guessed it, femme/butch)--she switches back and forth. I want to say that it radically doesn't matter who she ends up with, but... I'm always pulling for someone on these shows, but it seems less charged whether New York ends up with Buddha or Punk this time around (although, mark my words, it WILL be one of the two) than whether Tila chooses Dani or Bobby. This is all intimately bound up with the show's surreal subjunctivity, posing "straight" men against "lesbians" as though all's fair in love and war. The guys are so hysterical about affirming their heterosexuality that they are and have been way more violent than on any other comparable shows I've watched. The girls are constantly accused, by the guys and each other, of being indecisive, not knowing which (male or female) they want. One girl was kicked off really early in the show for messing around with a boy who is one of the final three. Not to be trusted.

All in all, the language of indecisiveness--always an important part of the drama in this genre-- is intensified as something intrinsic to bisexuality. At the end of the day, as Lorna likes to say, she's most likely to pick Bobby, thus proving once and for all that bisexuality doesn't exist. She likes the "softness" and "understanding" of a woman, but she gets really excited for the men, whose rough faces and strong hands she dwells on in every episode. Tila will go where the sex is, mark my words. Still, though, indulging in the fantasy of equality, which the show exploits with as much panache as is imaginable, I would love to see Dani win. Or lose and move to Buffalo. One of the two.