Just as much as his impossibly decorated and lengthy NBA career, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar will be remembered for being an unfailingly thoughtful, intelligent and passionate citizen, who is occasionally kind of a goof. And on Monday, he published a guest essay in The Hollywood Reporter on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette and their collective, negative impact on American society. It’s as perfectly Kareem as a sky hook.
Kareem’s central thesis is a sound one, and one many reasonable folks can agree on — the shows are harmless entertainment in a vacuum, but their ubiquity and popularity gives them an outsized impact on culture, and their insistence on mainstream body image and dialogue dumbed down for drama has a harmful effect when it’s broadcast to so many young, impressionable minds. Once he’s established his point, though, he launches into his wonderfully unique voice, which is pretty much him using laughably florid language to make points he’s quite serious about.
So, what’s so wrong with a little harmless entertainment of watching people scramble for “love” like ravenous crabs on a washed up seal corpse? In the short term, nothing. Just good, clean fun. But the long-term effects of their choices — from the types of people selected to be on the show to the promotion of a subversive, childish concept of love — is like smoking or listening to Kenny G: it can have serious consequences.
It’s like an 18th-century satirist giving an after-school special, and it is delightful. One more:
With all eyes firmly fixed on firm buttocks, the criteria for finding love becomes how high a quarter will bounce off rock-hard abs. Will we ever witness a conversation that isn’t so bland and vacuous that words seem to evaporate as soon as they are spoken? The rest — intimate outings, group dates, visiting hometowns — is window dressing to disguise the establishment of a laundry list for love so paltry and insubstantial that nearly anyone with a hipster beard or pert breasts can make the cut.
It’s important to bear in mind that this lecture is framed by Kareem finding a study that millennials have sex much less than previous generations. Kareem just wants us all to relax about being perfect and get laid already, and we love him for it.
(Via The Hollywood Reporter)
