Why Rock of Love Bus is Amazing

As long as I can remember, I have always loved trash TV. When I stayed home sick from school, my big rush was watching Jerry Springer without my mom realizing it (she forbade my watching it...this involved a lot of "channel surfing" when I heard her approach.) Jerry Springer and Maury were my favorites, which made life in the sickbed great because it was 3 full hours of alternating freakshows in the mornings, from 9 until 12.

So, really, it's no surprise that I love the trashy reality TV shows that VH1 purveys. I love them to varying degrees, with Flavor of Love probably the least favorite, but I suppose that that was their trial period. The shows got better, and trashier, as the production team got more experience.

Hence, this, the third season of Rock of Love, is AMAZING. Beyond amazing. Life altering.

Life altering in the sense that you didn't realize people could be just THAT idiotic.

I'm a bit of a sadist. I love watching people make complete idiots of themselves, for the viewing pleasure of whoever stops to rubberneck. With the trashy talk shows, it's a bit different. If you sign up for a show entitled "Are You the Father?: Paternity Tests Revealed" you have a pretty clear idea of what you are getting yourself into. But when a similarly trashy show has a "true love" (albeit with a skankyass washed up hair metal lead singer) theme, the actual participants try and justify their behavior through a kind of moralistic jargon. And you end up wondering if they are just reading cue cards, and actually understand what the words they are saying mean.

The hypocrisy evident in a competition for "true love" that inevitably involves strippers and penalizes those contestants with a disdain for this kind of voyeuristic bullshit is amazing. To be fair, though, being on a show like this is definitely voyeuristic bullshit to start with...maybe the contestants are being penalized for not taking the premise to its logical conclusion.

Regardless.

Rock of Love Bus is amazing. And here are some reasons why.

1) Where, on any dating competition anywhere, has it been so obvious that every single contestant has had a boob job?

2) Every season of Rock of Love, the girls have gotten both dumber and trashier. This time, the bottom of the barrel has been sandblasted.

3) You could write a goddamn masters thesis on how groupies, as illustrated by the Rock of Love girls, have set back feminism by a hundred years. There is absolutely no justification whatsoever, other than being constantly drunk or high, for how these women present themselves, and how Bret Michaels treats them. Fuck Penny Lane.

4) If the women are ridiculous idiots, Bret Michaels looks like he fell off the Botox Bus one too many times.

5) Everyone is a bad actor. No exceptions. On the plus side, seeing everyone lie so obviously makes me smile throughout the episode.

But, beyond the label of awesomely bad, comes a point where the awesome, rather than the bad, becomes the idée fixe. Where else have you seen half naked women playing "ice hockey" with baby dolls with hair extensions as the pucks? What about a kelptomaniac ex-porn star stealing used socks? What about women taking shots from each other's vaginas?

I rest my case.