The roots of the word "villain" are tied to the Latin word for "farmhand," or he who toils for another and is thus ignoble. Therefore, the term originally meant being someone's bitch, which makes sense because the reason villainy exists — or at least our need to exalt people with villain status — is because of the human need to feel power over others.
This is why society periodically shames people en masse. It's like road rage, a primal reaction to a perceived aggressor, with that oh-so-satisfying feeling as the drama escalates from a middle finger or blaring of the horn to the other driver veering off the edge of a cliff to a bloody, battered death. Yes!
Sometimes this black-and-white paradigm really is that easy: Jared Fogle collects kiddie porn, ergo he's bad. Other times it's a bit grayer: Brad Pitt dumps Jennifer Aniston for Angelina Jolie, LeBron James moves from Ohio to Florida, Joe on Bachelor in Paradise uses Juelia to get a rose so that he can stay for a romp with Samantha, the woman he really wants to have sex with. Wait, no. That last one is un-fucking-forgivable.
Bachelor in Paradise is a phenomenon at this point, with a "Bachelor Nation" of people who really should know better than to get caught up in the soap opera. It's so goddamn good by being so goddamn bad that I can hardly stand it. Watching it makes me feel the same way I felt the first time I fired a gun: an erotic jolt passed through my body, nipples erect and a convulsion in my vulva. I'm being dead serious. The show is like an opiate that fits directly into my body's pleasure receptors. All of this is due to this season's villain, Joe. He is so awful, so supremely disgusting, that he should probably go into hiding like George Zimmerman.
Paradise takes a bunch of ex-cast members from the Bachelor/ette franchise and puts them on a beach in Mexico. Contestants pair up and break up, and every week new people arrive to complicate matters further. If you get a rose, you get to stay another week, which means seven more days of chef-prepared meals, a full bar, tropical breezes, and being surrounded by hot bodies.
Joe came in on the second episode and immediately went straight to the limits of douche-y. He looks like a total dick, so I'm not sure why any of us were surprised. He's not handsome at all, resembling a Campbell's Soup Kid whose head has been gently squeezed in a vise, pressing his beady eyes closer together and elongating his hangdog visage. He has a Kentucky drawl, which would be fine if he were intelligent — but sadly, Joe plays to the stereotype that dipshits from Kentucky are indeed dipshits.
Then he committed the ultimate Bachelor sin: Not Being There For The Right Reasons. He lied to everyone, including Juelia, a single mom who was smitten with him, just so he could stay long enough to bring Samantha, his vagina-on-a-stick, into paradise. Bachelor producers made great fun of splicing footage of the two of them having sex in a hot tub with clips of Juelia crying and cursing his name. Joe also manipulated the men on the show, though that's not as interesting because it's not as cruel, but it did give us some good clips of him calling them his "bitch" and talking about wanting to bash their faces in. All of this built our hatred towards him; every utterance sent vulvas convulsing and if you listened close enough you could hear a groundswell of "OMG!"s taking over the Twitterverse. Joe is bad, and we are good, and you can feel the world collectively flushing with righteousness and moral superiority: Burn witch, burn witch, burn witch! Oy, my nipples could cut glass!
Jon Ronson, author of So You've Been Publicly Shamed, said it best: "We are defining the boundaries of normality by tearing apart the people outside of it."
For the month of August, I have been able to do this with Joe. He's been the chosen one to receive the public stoning.
"We know that people are complicated and have a mixture of flaws and talents and sins," Ronson writes. "So why do we pretend that we don't?"
Duh, because it's fun. Very, very fun.
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