Everybody with cable TV and a proclivity toward captivating car-wreck television has an opinion on the sorta-famous young mothers on MTV’s “Teen Mom,” but this week marks the first time police started a case against someone based solely on what the baby momma did on MTV.
MTV giveth, and MTV taketh away.
“Teen Mom” is a runaway hit television show that may or may not glamorize teen pregnancy.
The only things I’m sure “Teen Mom” glamorizes are wearing sweatpants and completely ignoring your children.
However, an Indiana girl named Amber Portwood is currently under investigation by police and Child Protective Services in her hometown for mercilessly beating her baby daddy, Gary Shirley, in the last episode of this season’s “Teen Mom.”
If the police decide to rewind the DVR and watch the rest of this season, they may just take away Portwood’s baby and place it in a more safe and secure location where it can have a better chance at a normal life — somewhere like an industrial mine in Mongolia or inside a den of angry bears.
The bears would easily recognize the child’s father as one of their own, as he is roughly the size of a teenage grizzly and hibernates for half the year. Bears, though, would be immediately disappointed in Shirley’s work ethic and inability to do anything remotely productive in life other than pick up ugly girls in the diaper aisle at Walmart.
Portwood and Shirley are just one of the four sets of parents on “Teen Mom” who have agreed to have every detail of their depressing lives scrutinized by millions of people.
In exchange for a sniff of what passes for fame in the Facebook Age, these improbable American idols reveal every torturous moment to a global television audience and provide endless digital fodder in the form of video clips and message-board material.
We watched as Portwood was brought to tears by a particularly vexing computerized GED test and cringed as she screamed at her baby for being too needy and weepy.
A nation held its collective breath as Shirley excruciated over the most important decision he makes on any given day — pizza or hot wings.
I guess all the world’s a stage, and the men and women are merely players.
But it is still important to note the above passage did not originate in a song by Drake or Kanye.
It is a hallmark of modern American society when we have the ability to boil down complex issues that bleed across numerous socio-economic and cultural boundaries into a twaddling tweet or a “Like” button.
Yet the struggles of teen moms make for such compelling material precisely because they are such a personal and sensitive matter, and societies exist largely to shelter and hopefully cultivate stronger bonds than the ones we see strained by the cartoonish violence of a dumb, chunky girl on MTV.
Et tu, Amber?
Tommy Maple is an international communications graduate student. His column appears every Tuesday.
