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The new season of the Real World premiered last night (Brooklyn we go hard), giving us our first look at the castmates and the house and, of course, Katelynn, the first transgender Real World roommate. On the one hand, the first episode seemed to suggest that the producers had finally taken a rest from the body-shots-fueled fuck buddy casting of the past 10 years. It was the first time in recent memory that the first five minutes of a new Real World season didn’t involve any low-self-esteem girls dancing on a bar, or any dudes talking about how excited they are to fuck everything for sport. For the most part the cast seems surprisingly naive, enthusiastic, curious, and, well, physically unattractive. I’m not saying it’s an ugly cast, but if the past few years have been overwhelmingly Abercrombie and Fitch, this season seems more Filene’s Basement. That’s a good thing btw.
So, there’s Ryan, the secret Iraq War vet who is so tightly wound that it seems very likely that he’ll kill everyone in the house before season’s end; Devyn, the bossy (in the Kelis definition of the word) black girl; Baya, who after an hour I still don’t know anything about; JD, the strong and quiet and also gay type; Sarah, the heavily tattooed “alternative” girl who first things first says that people always describe her as the “weird” and “crazy” girl, which means she’s actually boring and pedestrian; Chet, who wears homemade purple clothes in every single shot and is so clearly in a foggy nightmare over his own sexuality that it’s almost painful to watch; Scott, the bodybuilder who has worked in a gym since he was 14, and who comes from New Hampshire, which it turns out is a state that allows people to work in a gym when they’re 14 (learn something new every day); and finally Katelynn, who I don’t know if you know this, but she is a TRANSGENDER.
Let’s do this!:
Did you do the math? There are eight strangers this season instead of the traditional seven. Everyone remarks upon this. People call home to tell loved ones about it. And it is true that for a show that’s been on the air longer than LeStat has been feasting on life force, it is odd. Actually, it’s more than odd. It’s offensive. Because, sure, every season is a new location and a new house and a new group and a new obligatory extra-curricular assignment, but nothing ever really changes. So the only thing that’s different this season is the addition of a transgendered cast-member (in case you didn’t hear about this, Katelynn, one of the new housemates, is transgendered. I know!). I’m not making that judgment call on my own, either, by the way. I don’t really think that having a transgender housemate somehow changes the rules of the game. But MTV has been riding this detail really hard as some kind of groundbreaking moment in television, and if I’m supposed to accept that as true, which I’ve been in a generous mood this week so OK, then that suggests that the introduction of an eighth cast-member has something to do with Katelynn. Like, we need a whole new slot for this special kind of creature. Maybe I’m wrong. No explanation was given this week for the eighth slot, so maybe when they learn what their “job” is going to be this season it will turn out to be something that everyone can plainly see requires eight people to accomplish.
I seriously doubt it.
So most of the first episode is given over to Katelynn. Fair enough. She keeps the strict definition of her biology to herself until the end of the episode when JD takes her out to dinner and gently opens the path for her to come out to him in the taxi. But even though he’s still the only one who “officially” knows, everyone has pretty much figured it out by the end. What’s interesting is the vehemence with which people want to argue that she is just a tom-boyish girl and not a post-op transgender, which gives you a sense of how loaded this issue still is for a lot of them because there’s an underlying opinion that suspecting someone of being transgender is worse than just thinking someone looks like a dude. It’s just a mess. Ryan at one point refers to Katelynn as “it” and has to be politely reprimanded by JD, which is about as bad as it gets, although that’s still really bad if you think about it, and the fact that it somehow doesn’t seem that bad, since it’s not, like, a straight up physical hate crime, which obviously seems possible, points to how far everyone (everyone like America everyone, not everyone Real World everyone) still has to go to getting out of everyone’s business.
Speaking of messes, Ryan. He’s a veteran of the Iraq war, but keeps that a secret from his house mates, which seems like the reddest of flags. He suggests that he doesn’t want to tell them yet because he doesn’t want them to think he’s some aggro military dude, which kind of makes sense, but then also really doesn’t make sense. If you’re not an aggro military dude, that will be made really clear by your non-aggro behavior and your lack of aggro military dude characteristics. Somehow it just seems like an alcoholic who doesn’t drink around people he’s just met because he doesn’t want them to think he’s an alcoholic. (He also might be an alcoholic). Because when he does finally talk to his roommates about his experiences, it gets really creepy. Like this:
And also this:
I’m not weirded out by his having shot his gun at human beings. He was in the army, that is what you do when you are in the army. But I am weirded out by what clearly seems to be PTSD. His quiet dismissiveness combined with that weird conversation about the photo that implies some kind of dissociative personality crisis is very troubling. Because I’m a doctor and know what’s what. I’m just saying that I really hope Ryan’s housemates don’t draw first blood or things are going to get very United States of Tara meets Falling Down.
Then there’s Chet, who as previously mentioned makes his own purple clothes, asks the body-builder to show him his abs, and claims to have no gay-dar whatsoever. Whoops, that sentence is full of so many typos! Let me fix it. Then there’s Chet, who is gay the end.
For the record: metrosexuality is not a real thing duh and the only person who would ever earnestly use it to try and clarify any confusion over his sexual orientation is himself wildly confused about his sexual orientation.
As far as New York is concerned, it’s the same as any Real World season, which is to say, how on Earth does this even remotely correlate to any kind of Brooklyn experience when you’re living on a soundstage at the edge of Red Hook with its own Crunch gym in the basement and a decorating style that might be described as “Chuck-E-Cheese Meets Strip Club”? But actually, the house isn’t even the part the most unrealistic thing about this “authentic New York” experience. The most unrealistic thing is this stickball game:
Um, what?
Next week: Katelynn is a transgender still some more.
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In addition to the 8 roommates thing, they also won’t have a group job. They all get to pursue their own interests. It’s going to be, like, SO real this season.
ew
Did you just casually toss in a Lestat reference? What have the vampires done to you?
I haven’t seen this, but based on the clips, I would guess that Ryan is shy about his military experience, because he is afraid of being judged. There could be more, but it’s a bit silly to diagnose him with a major psychological disorder based on a single episode of a reality show on mtv. I appreciate that you hedged that shit with the ironic doctor bit, but still…
I’d also give him a break about the “it” thing. It is not really an indication of intolerance to not know the politically correct terminology in a clearly unfamiliar situation. That is not an indication of Americans needing to “get out of everyone’s business,” but rather the opposite. It demonstrates a need for experience and understanding which only comes with familiarity. That means getting IN to people’s business.
The proper pronoun usage for transgendered people is tricky enough, anyway. I think a dude can be forgiven for not knowing the right words to use his first time out.
You’re going pretty far out of your way to defend Ryan when I’m not actually attacking him. From what I have seen, which as you have pointed out is one episode of a reality show on MTV, he seems like a deeply troubled kid who has not fully processed his Iraq experience. Right before that clip about shooting his gun he talks about how one of his best friends just shot himself in the head after watching a baseball game. So, yeah, of course I’m being melodramatic by saying we’re in a Falling Down situation, but I do think that the experiences and psycholgical damage of war are basically incalculable, and that probably being on a reality TV show isn’t the best way to sort through it.
And as far as the “It” comment is concerned, I think that you make a decent point about it coming from a lack of understanding about these types of issues, and I never said that Ryan’s insensitive pronoun-usage was in any way mean spirited or malicious, but I also think that you’re way off base when you say that “the proper pronoun usage for transgendered people is tricky enough.” It’s not tricky. The proper pronoun usage is whatever pronoun they associate themselves with. Arguing that you don’t know what to call a post-op transgendered woman who walks around the house in a bikini and hasn’t told anyone that she was once a man is just being willfully ignorant and is in no way an excuse for referring to a human being as “It” which actually I take back what I said at the beginning about you making a good point because dehumanizing shit like that is unacceptable no matter how new this might be for you. If Ryan had said “he or she, I’m not sure,” that seems like reasonable confusion on the issue. “It” is just fucked up.
PTSD is markedly different from Dissociative Amnesia, for one. If you’re going to play bench psychologist don’t muddle your terms.
I don’t think I went out of my way to defend Ryan. At least,, not any more that go out of my way to comment here at all. And while you weren’t attacking him exactly, you were describing something he said in a way that implied it was about a step down from a physical hate crime.
And for people without experience, pronoun use for transgendered people IS tricky. We are not born with an innate knowledge of what people are supposed to be called. That is learned. I know transgendered men who took a long time to figure out how to describe themselves AFTER they started living as men. Just because you feel confident in your knowledge of what is proper, that does not make it obvious to everyone else.
A post-op transgendered woman who walks around the house in a bikini and hasn’t told anyone that she was once a man can be a really confusing thing for the uninitiated. I think that you may have gotten a bit too comfortable in your enlightened state to realize that this is new to some people.
I understand why using the word “it” is offensive, but it is a place to go when the words a person is used to don’t, in that person’s experience, seem to fit the situation. It is not usually willful ignorance, it is just simple ignorance. It is really easy to get riled up about what someone should have said, but it seems reasonable to give the dude the benefit of the doubt. He probably wasn’t trying to dehumanize anyone, and, in the future, he probably won’t make the same mistake again.
On a stylistic note, I did not care for your use of the second person in much of your response to my comment. It was used to reference my actual comment, but also to illustrate, I hope, a hypothetical criticism of a person like Ryan. It read like you were accusing me personally. I don’t think that is what you meant. If it is, you are off base.
Well it seems the producers at least tried this season. I haven’t been able to watch this show since Paris.
I’m liable to agree with godsauce here. I don’t think Ryan should be crucified, and I think you’re getting a little hasty in jumping to conclusions about how he processed his military experience. It’s quite easy to throw heavy shit like that around when you haven’t had military experience yourself.
“It’s quite easy to throw heavy shit like that around when you haven’t had military experience yourself.”
Fair.
The true genius of casting Katelynn is it paves the way for MTV’s “A Shot at Love 3: With a Twist.”
Dude the guy survived being an infantryman in Iraq and if you look at some of his videos online he’s very blunt and straightforward in saying that he felt after actually experiencing it that there was no justification for being there. I think he can survive 12 fucking weeks on a reality show. And compared to some men from small towns who serve and are again, infantrymen on the ground dealing with IEDs and the deployment of infantry in Iraq as basically a militarized police force doing search and seizure raids on houses – he seems, as he even admits, ignorant about transgendered people but he doesn’t seem to have any issue with gay men at all, like JD. Just ignorant. Reaching to diagnose him with PTSD is ridiculous, and I say that as having some loved ones who did serve in Iraq and have PTSD and some who don’t. One generalization that is true is that individuals who serve in combat find it very hard to discuss their experiences. I had the show while working prepared to hate it, but was pleasantly surprised by the complexity of the individuals cast this season. In some strange way, these young uns made me feel like we’re going to be all right… And Ryan especially evoked something I forgot. That we sent fucking KIDS over there to Iraq, and they coexist with twitter, facebook, Xbox live, and reality tv… But they also saw a lifetime of shit we never will.
I fucking hate MTV having dealt with them on a professional level, but as far as I am concerned they have advanced the idea of gay people being people for better or worse for the past ten years (if having done a massive disservice to the image of African Americans), especially for a younger generation. We’re obviously a ways off, but if someone in some podunk town by the end of all this shit sees Katelynn as well, even, boring… Then that’s a step forward.
Hi Godsauce, if that is your real name- you didn’t watch the episode. Watch it, and the clearly defined, mtv-created “perhaps Ryan hasn’t dealt with all the feelings that being at war creates” narrative. Gabe was just riffing on what the producers/editors(I’m not the captain of showbiz so i don’t know) give him. I’m sure we all wish him the best BUT him being a veteran does not take away Gabe or I’s God-given right to cast aspersions and make near-baseless claims on people we don’t know based on 1 episode and whittling them down to a singular character trait or experience. It’s called judgement and it’s awesome. Additionally- Can you believe Transgender’s eat chips?
My name is Godsauce, and I can totally believe that transgenders eat chips, because chips are delicious.
They “I didn’t bring up my military background because I don’t want to be judged solely on that” seems like a valid reason for not bringing it up immediately. (Although it made more sense 8 years ago when it was Danny in New Orleans and he didn’t want to be labeled as the gay one from the outset.)
Ryan’s mistake was that he didn’t stick to his guns (natch) and started throwing out baited comments so he could reel in unsuspecting roommates into his war stories, which he obviously feels are making him more interesting.
Also, does anyone else think this whole cast acts so much younger than normal? What is happening to the kids these days?
Yeah, I’m really surprised. I didn’t watch the show, but the whole cast doesn’t seem like a group of shallow, self-absorbed monsters for once, so maybe I’ll check it out.
Also that song was one of The Most Awkward things I’ve ever seen! Is he seriously saying that he is not gay? COME ON.
I agree with Dan.
I hope there are recaps of this show every week, this was great. I’ll have to watch it regularly.
You can go back and forth forever (wink) about whether he has PTSD or not. I have family and friends back from Iraq and Afghanistan that do and don’t have it. I didn’t watch the whole episode but from those clips I’ve come to two (likely indefensible) conclusions: the guy sort of wants to talk about it and sort of doesn’t, I just wish that when he got clearly uncomfortable and weird about his time in the service that the other roommates would leave the topic alone. Ya know?
whoa, you actually made the real world sound interesting enough to make me wish i had cable. wtf gabe?
Poor Chet: “I might be metrosexual, but that’s not a sin”. And JD’s most akward look ever.
You just know Chet was crying behind his metrosexual sunglasses
Isn’t Chet Mormon?
Dammit Gabe, now I want to watch this.
It always amazes me when I read some armchair psychologist’s assessment of what a former soldier should or should not be like, much less what that person feels about his/her service experience. The most outrageous, uninformed and vastly unfair opinions always seem to come from those who have not only never served a day in uniiform and never had the personal grit it takes to do so, but then try to use what that veteran never said in an attempt to support their preconceived notions and political agenda. “Hmmm…that veteran’s personal choice to move on with his life and not spout off at the mouth about what a cold blooded killer he is doesn’t support my hypothesis at all. Maybe I can paint his silence as something even more insidious and REALLY prove my point.” You have seen way too many movies my friend.
Just because the guy wore the uniform, served his country and may have taken several lives while doing his job does not mean that somehow he is instantly different from everyone else and you should be able to identify him by his “1000 yard stare.” It is entirely possible that kindly, nonthreatening, charitable old man you pass on the street was also responsible for taking dozens of lives in his younger days.
Ryan’s desire not to expound on his service in Iraq is typical of a veteran who did his job, lives with it quite easily, and wants to move on with the rest of his life. We are neither ashamed of, nor do we have trouble coping with our actions, but we also do not want that to be our defining feature to those who do not understand. Most people who have taken lives under those conditions are neither ashamed of it nor do they desire to relive it by telling others about it, especially someone like you who has no capacity to understand it.
The person you should be concerned about is the guy (or girl) who wants to brag about it or even talks readily about it. That person is almost certainly lying. My family and friends have an idea of some of the ugly places I served, but they have not the foggiest idea of what I did. All they know is I have a wall full of medals, funny stories about bad food, and even funnier stories of my buddies whose friendship made it all survivable. Barring some unforseen circumstance, they never will.
As for your riduculously uniformed PTSD diagnosis, I have lived with service connected PTSD for many years. I see nothing in Ryan’s conduct so far that would indicate anything of the sort. We’ll see how his personality unfolds through the season, but from what I’ve seen so far I’d say he’s handling his experiences quite well – whatever they may be.
Whether or not you agree with our current involvement is your business, but it should have no bearing on Ryan or this show. My money says you certainly wouldn’t have the guts to spout any of that crap to Ryan’s face. Much easier (and safer) to anonymously attack a veteran’s character while cowering behind your computer monitor, right?
Thanks for the seminar but who are you arguing with?
This just makes me feel old. MTV used to be ‘hip’ and ‘edgy’ when I was a youngin’. Now they get scooped on tranny storylines by the CW. Does that means Tyra Banks is the new Kennedy? Barf.
Being transgendered myself(quick side note: it’s funny that even the comment box doesn’t accept the word “transgendered” and offers “transponder” as a replacement,) I think the show itself, although over emphasizing, did a good job of not making a joke or much of a gimmick of her. Unlike America’s Next Top Model.
I completely agree that using the word “it” to define ANYONE is extremely degrading, whether you’re transgendered or not. It doesn’t really scream tolerance. Although acceptance is the ideal situation, some tolerance would be a nice start. I can understand he’s never been exposed to the situation, like most people, but the word “it” should really never be used as a pronoun for anyone.
Hopefully they will allow her to blend in on the show and not make it into a complete circus. Regardless, it’s nice to see people talking about it, and maybe gaining some knowledge on the subject after seeing some normal transgendered people on high profile tv such as this, (sometimes) Dirty, Sexy, Money, and even America’s Next Top Model. Shows that don’t use them for cheap “dude in a dress laughs.”
Yes, transgenders even read Stereogum!
i feel like this was posted somewhere else because these comments don’t seem like videogum-reader comments…
From Wikipedia:
“Witnessing traumatic experiences or learning about these experiences may also cause the development of PTSD symptoms. [1] The amount of dissociation that follows directly after a trauma predicts PTSD: individuals who are more likely to dissociate during a traumatic event are considerably more likely to develop chronic PTSD.”
Additionally, “…situation-specific amnesia is a type of dissociative amnesia occurs as a result of a severely stressful event, as in post-traumatic stress disorder. Dissociative amnesia is due to psychological rather than physiological causes and can sometimes be helped by therapy.”
does anyone know what the name of the song is on the new sneek peak of real world brooklyn when its all about katelynn and shes sad cuz she hasnt heard anything from mike and at the end the other roommate says “there will be people who will love katelynn for katelynn”?