20SomethingMom chronicles of a young mom

NYC Prep: Sad RealityPosted by admin on July 2nd, 2009

If you subscribe to my belief about TV not melting your soul, you have probably heard about the ridiculous new show on Bravo, NYC Prep.  It is essentially the teenaged version of The Real Housewives.  There are so many problems with this new vista on teen life, some of which I will list for you.

1. The economy is floundering, yet these kids either don’t know or don’t have to care.  Nothing is more condescending than to show the inner workings of exaggerated wealth in America during a time when everyone else is sliding down the invisible scale of middle-classdom.  If you believe in trickle-down economics, you simply must tune in so that you can see, once and for all, that American socialites and their caviar-loving kids are not interested in laying their earnings beneath their pedicured feet so that the rest of us can try to reach for them.
2. Parents are all but absent from these rich kids’ lives.  One girl lives with her brother in a lavish apartment on the Upper East Side and sees her parents once a week when they make the trek from their estate in the Hamptons to check on their kids in the city.  It particularly irks me to contrast that with my most recent read, David K. Shipler’s The Working Poor: Invisible in America.  Numerous subjects in this book get their children taken from them by DCF because of alleged neglect, which includes leaving their young teens home alone because they must work the night shift.  So, the message here is that, so long as your children are being chauffered around the city at night or partying in a gold-encrusted pad, it is fine to leave them parentless for days or weeks on end.  If you live in a roach-infested apartment in the least desirable neighborhood, you are endangering your children by leaving the house to provide for them.
3. Though the show’s title suggests that it will be a saga about life at prep school, there is no school to be seen.  These kids of the hour never seem to step foot in a high school hallway, though they frequent NYC’s upscale restaurants and galleries like networking thirtysomethings.  The only mention of academics (at least in the one episode I could stand to watch) was one snob’s pronouncement that she must sneak in some community service hours so that she could get into Harvard.  She also lamented her less-than-perfect SAT scores, saying that she knew she could achieve perfection and she needed to take the test again.  While not surprising, it is still gut-wrenching that education means something far different for the privileged than for those struggling to exercise that elusive “equality of opportunity.”  For the kids of NYC Prep, school is more about setting oneself up for a prime social life than slaving away over Calculus homework, because all it will take for them to get into college is a quick wave of their parents’ checkbooks.
4. Not unlike their counterparts at private colleges around the country, the males on the show derive their self-worth from hooking up with as many females as possible.  Of course this occurs in lower economic circles as well, but who else but the rich could get away with confessing to “getting with” 16 girls in one month on network television?  If a poor and/or non-white kid said that on TV, social workers and politicians would have a field day trying to diagnose and heal this promiscuity problem.  These boys, though, are likely encouraged by their parents (or at least not discouraged), despite that fact that many of them will be prominent political or business figures of the future.  Reputation wins out over morality, and to Beemer-driving playboys, the future consists of tomorrow’s conquest.
5. The guys are only half the problem.  The females on the show compete for male attention by shunning the less worthy girls, the few who have parents breathing down their necks or who don’t shop nearly as often as they should.  They throw parties so that they can strut around like the pubescent animals they are and flirt mercilessly with every hair-flipping boy that shows up.  In many ways, gender stereotypes are worsened by wealth because women have the option of being trophy wives and pretending to be housewives with successful careers while their nannies raise the children.  NYC Prep doesn’t prep young girls for anything but a Mrs. degree.

Maybe I am ultra-sensitive to this scene because I have been exposed to it for so much of my life.  Even in public high school, the rich kids were the most visible and lived completely unfettered by normal teenaged concerns.  Attending a private college and tutoring prep school kids has shown me that this world exists beyond the set of an inane reality program.  In fact, it is much worse than the broadcasted portrayal.  I am annoyed, but mostly saddened, by our glorification of extravagance because it has real consequences that even the most intimate show can’t help us understand.

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