If you like naked butts, it's a fantastic time to be alive. Our television sets are teeming with them. Naked and Afraid and Dating Naked are two fabulous examples.
Though not much is really allowed on basic cable compared to the premium channels, somewhere along the line, TV censors decided that the word "douchebag" was okay and that bare asses were also a go, and thank God for that because two reality show creators had the good sense to combine them. Douchebags compete for true love on Dating Naked, and douchebags compete against nature's elements on Naked and Afraid. The guise of both is of course the literal and metaphorical stripping away of all artifice and impediment, so that folks can get to what's "real" and primal.
VH1's Dating Naked takes place on a tropical island. Two people go on three different dates, the first one with each other, the second and third with two other randos. At the end, they pick the person they most clicked with and flop off into the sunset. Drama is created when someone hits it off with one person but then must watch him or her go on a date with the next one ("you love her but she loves him, and he loves somebody else, you just can't win"). At night they all congregate at the pool and either cavort or feel like shit, depending on how they pair up.
Oh yeah, and they are naked. Editors blur out the labia minora and majora, as well as the scrotum and vas deferens. The female mammary glands are also blurred, but the intergluteal cleft and gluteus maximus of both sexes are not obscured. The bullshit premise is that clothes somehow get in the way of really getting to know a person "on the inside," and that seeing them completely nude at first meeting forces people to jump straight to personalities. How many times have you been on a date but any connection got completely hijacked by the person's choice of shoewear? It happens.
Naked and Afraid airs on the Discovery Channel and takes one male and one female survivalist and dumps them in some godawful hellhole with no clothes and only two tools to work with. In this show's case, nudity is actually strategic to the central idea of Man Versus Nature, completely bare and against the elements. Locales like Namibia, Panama, or the Amazon have been featured, and these are some bad-ass troopers who usually last 21 days with no real food or comfort. I'm sure there are people who are getting off on seeing fit people's rear ends glisten as they run from anacondas and baboons, but for the most part, the focus is on their actual survival. Woe is the couple that could not make fire at night on the banks of the rainforest.
All the mosquitoes in the area post on Facebook that two warm, blood-rich bodies are huddled under the rubber tree and it soon goes viral. And "viral" when skeeters are involved means malaria or dengue fever. Bugs are generally what bring down anyone who surrenders and ends up leaving early. You can watch them go insane right before your very eyes. Sometimes two people get paired up who can't stand each other and that's always extra-entertaining, or there's often one person who does way more work than the other one and resentments build. Discovery has not been forthcoming on what these people get paid to be on the show, but they do get awarded with PSR scores (Primitive Survival Ratings) which are supposed to be bragging rights down at the Bundy Ranch or something.
Dating Naked probably has its own set of bug problems, but those somehow end up on the cutting room floor. All we see are jokes about balls and tattoo comparisons. The producers do have a sense of humor though, and at the expense of others, thank God. They always throw in some nutjob who would flunk any other dating show's screening. I like to think they are tipping their hat to Blind Date, that fantastic dating show of yore that mercilessly ripped apart its contestants. Most of these poor schlubs think that dating naked is their last option, having tried everything else and failed. Maybe for once someone will see past their bad fashion sense and instead focus on their horrible personality. Dare to dream!
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