We’ve Got A Situation, Part II

Hold on, I’m not done talking about The Situation.

On Episode 6 of Season 2 of Jersey Shore (“Not So Shore”), the housemates reversed the usual pattern of having the men (spearheaded by the bizarrely competent Situation) cook after Sammi had offered that the women would cook the next meal. A significant subplot of the episode was the guys’ strong conviction that the girls wouldn’t be remotely able to pull off the task of preparing dinner, some of the funniest moments of the episode were Jenni and Snooki’s ineptitudes at the grocery store, and when the girls actually did manage to make a decent penne alla vodka (delicious), the general reaction was one of surprise and slightly condescending praise. Now I’m going to plagiarize a conversation I had with my mom driving home from Montreal (to visit Nida, actually).

What does it mean that the females on Jersey Shore were expected to be completely incompetent in the kitchen? Why is the Situation a good cook? It could be just that Jenni, Snooki, Sammi, and Angelina are particularly a) spoiled, b) stupid, c) lazy, or all three, although Jenni did take control of the meal preparation pretty admirably. But it could also be symptomatic of a female backlash against certain aspects of domesticity in the still (incredibly) relatively new era of at least attempting gender equality.

Young women and young men are being told, correctly, that women and men should have equal opportunities in the workforce and that the era of housewives and “don’t bother Dad, he’s in the study” and “Gee Wally” is obsolete and flawed. And this is all very good. But I wonder if it leads to boys thinking “I need to be a new, enlightened, pro-feminism man and learn how to cook” and girls thinking “I am a strong woman unshackled by the constraints of the domestic. Cooking and being in the kitchen and such housewife-ly things are insulting and beneath me. I’m not going to cook, and my man is just going to have to accept that.” I have known women of the second position, and I am certainly a man of the first.

My mom then pointed out that this development would make life much more difficult for men, because they certainly aren’t expected to work any less hard than men did in the 50′s and 60′s, but they are now expected to help around the house, to cook their fair share, to engage their wives and children in conversation without just going into their den with a cigar to be left undisturbed with the evening paper (obviously not, nobody reads the newspaper anymore). I agreed that this was true, but then realized that life is more difficult for women now too, because they are generally encouraged to work outside the home and usually do so just as hard as men do, but are also supposed to maintain their households and usually be the primary caretakers of their children.

You know the I Love Lucy episode where Lucy and Ethel work in the chocolate factory and Ricky and Fred try to clean the apartments? If you don’t, basically the wives and husbands belittle each other’s professions and each declare that the one is easier than the other. They switch places, fail hilariously (Lucy frantically eating the chocolates off the assembly line is a classic television moment), and in the end agree that they are best suited for their own clearly defined roles. Seen today, this seems laughably outdated and uncomfortably sexist. But, in a way, isn’t there kind of a point to it? Or am I crazy? In the old days, men had men’s roles and women had women’s roles. These days, everybody tries to do everything, and I think it means that people spend less time with their kids. Which is nobody’s fault. And I’m not some chauvinist reactionary. I think that women and men should have equal work opportunities always, and I’m obsessively respectful of women possibly to a fault. But I think you could argue that “women” in general took chunks of time that used to be devoted to children and cooking and brought it into the workforce without a corresponding shift from men of comparable magnitude, and that childrearing and healthy eating have lost more and more time to both the men and women of capitalism.

Maybe everything will all balance out some day, and sexism will be truly dead, and I won’t worry that what I’ve just said was anti-women working, because it wasn’t. As Dave Barry once said, the fairest solution would be to “have the men do the cooking and housework for the next six thousand years or so.” We’ll start with The Situation.

We’ve Got A Situation, Part I

How many people can you think of that completely own a word? Meaning, when you say that word, you will think of that person, even if you’re not trying to. It has to be a normal non-invented word in common parlance, so not something like “Newspeak” or “Orc.” I don’t mean a name, like how anybody named Adolf makes you think of Hitler or Winston makes you think of Churchill.

I bring this up because I know that whenever I hear the word “situation” for the foreseeable future, possibly for the rest of my life, I will think of a self-obsessed former fitness center manager who allegedly fake tans every day and who will apparently make 5 million dollars this year.

In the first season of Jersey Shore, The Situation injected himself into every plotline, relentlessly insistent that every woman he met would be immediately entranced by his “situation” (abs). His arrogance was appalling, his bravado almost sickening at first. This is how the man became famous.

But, if you’ve watched every episode of both seasons of Jersey Shore (which I have, and will never be ashamed to admit), you may have noticed something remarkable about Michael Sorrentino: he has actually almost receded into the background! Now the most famous (well, him or Snooki) and presumably best-paid of the cast, he has settled down to the point that a) I actually count on him to provide some of the wisest cast-member perspective on what’s going on in the house and b) At this moment (26 minutes into the most recent episode, because I paused it to write this situation), he is probably the first or second LEAST controversial character in the house! Either him or Pauly D.

Sorry, I seem to have fallen into the weird Jersey Shore convention of unnecessarily appending the terms “in the house” or “right now” or both to every sentence. Angelina sounds like an unimaginative early 90s rapper. We get it, you’re in the house.

Back to the Situation situation. If Sorrentino is not a complete idiot and arrogant beyond reason (and I don’t think he is), and if these were the qualities which made him a breakout star (which I believe they are), they mean something troubling and truly amazing to consider in a vacuum: A young man with apparently mediocre prospects transformed himself into a bombastic caricature of assholeishness for a period of a few months, and as a direct result of this transformation is now 1) a recognizable celebrity, 2) a millionaire, and 3) in ownership of a noun. But the key difference between the Situation and Snooki, the second most famous Jersey Shore cast member/character (not coincidentally, the two whose absurd nicknames stuck…someone should write about why and how Situation and Snooki worked as names while Sweetheart and J-WOWW did not. Notice how nobody calls her J-WOWW anymore? I would like to figure this out). Long parenthetical. I’m awful with those. Restarting sentence.

The key difference between the Situation and Snooki is that Snooki has not largely abandoned her original caricatured identity, which says to me that either Snooki is not as intelligent as the Situation or that she is in fact that person. Maybe she is, since there’s that ridiculous story of her public intoxication and her screaming “I’m Snooki! You can’t do this to me!” or something like that. But the Situation milked his persona for all it was worth, and now is able, against all odds, to actually settle in as a (relatively) nice guy! Amazing.

I don’t really have a point here, except to say that when you saw the title of this post, I bet you knew immediately that I was going to talk about Jersey Shore and Michael Sorrentino in particular. And that’s an unbelievable testament to his power.