Day 432: Guilty Pleasures

So I have a MAJOR guilty pleasure here in Korea, and I'm quite embarrassed to admit it. But being the silly boy that I am I'm just gonna tell you about it anyway. There's this really bad - quite awful actually - TV show here that I've come to love watching. It's on the OnStyle network and is a show called 'Ambush Makeover.'

*blush!*

I don't know if you're familiar with it, or even if it's aired back home in North America at all, but it's on all the time here. It's this show where these self-declared 'style gurus' grab random people on the streets of various American cities and offer them free makeovers on the spot. If they accept, they whisk them away for an afternoon of haircuts and colouring, mad shopping in some fashionable store, and then debut them to their friends usually at some special even that evening. It's completely cheesy and lame and shallow and superficial but I've come to enjoy it way too much.

I feel quite conflicted when I do watch it though. Half of me feels all warm and fuzzy inside when they take some frumpy trailer park mom and transform her into a beaming, gleaming shimmering star looking all stylish and funky in only a matter of hours, and the other half screams out silently in protest, angry that I would succumb to such a show's material plasticness, supporting the belief that only some hair colour and makeup will make everything better, and therefore reinforcing mainstream society's unhealthy view of what is considered beautiful in today's already fucked-up insecure culture, where we're told we have to be skinny and buff and covered in makeup and consumption goods in order to be viewed as attractive and desirable by others. Isch! The dilemmas! The internal battles! The push and pull of the ying and the yang! I'm such a torn man! (that, and just the fact that there really isn't a whole lot of English programming on here in Korea, so your television standards drop considerably while living here!) :-)