Tool Academy

Tonight's been wonderful. I've read Cosmopolitan and Vice magazines, spoken to some old friends, drank the most exquisite hot chocolate ever made and spent all night on 4od. 

One of the shows I watched was the first episode of this year's Tool Academy. For anyone who hasn't seen it, the premise of the show is that girls who are sick of their boyfriends behaving badly nominate them for the show. If successful than the boys are enrolled in Tool Academy and are forced to work through relationship issues such as trust, honesty etc. One "tool" is disqualified every week for not trying hard enough to change or whatever, and eventually just one couple is left. Hopefully they are a lot happier and if that isn't the case than their £25,000 prize money will certainly help matters. Wonderful.

Of course I was engrossed. 

Anyway, the series kicked off with the boys going on a night out together to get to know each other. Secret cameras filmed their antics, just to make sure that the boys wouldn't hold back in case their girlfriends caught them out. Not aware that they were being observed then, the boys proceeded to get very drunk, dance, shout at random people and throw up. Whatever, not very unusual. However. One boy told a shot-girl that he was single, at least three kissed girls that they'd picked up in the bar and the rest spent the night pulling girls skirts up and drinking shots out of their cleavages. And this is not a stag party remember. This is their average night out. 

What?!

The show then moved on to interview the boy's girlfriends about the things they'd like to change about their fellas. Now if you ask me, which no one ever does, you shouldn't be with someone in the first place if there's anything you want to change about them but then what do I know? Oh yeah, I don't go out with dick heads in the first place. ANYWAY, one girl answered the question with "Oh well I'd quite like all the lying and cheating to stop..."

Excuse me?!?!?! You'd like it to stop? Surely, SURELY, it is a God given right to DEMAND your partner not to cheat on you in the first place, never mind any time after that!

You see, what annoyed me most about this show was not the boys and their disrespectful attitudes to women, especially the ones who are supposed to mean something but the women who basically condone this by lying down and allowing themselves to be walked all over time and time again. How much disrespect must you have for yourself to allow somebody to treat you in this way? It can't be a happy relationship surely? Even if only one of you has wandering eyes then it's a sign that something is missing so please, don't just cross your fingers and hope that your man will change because I'm sorry but if you aren't making him happy as you are than you never will and by sitting back and letting him get away with these things then he'll never change. 

What's worse is the actual psychology behind this. It's easy for me to sit back and criticise these women for putting up with this crap on a daily basis but when you hear them say that they deserve it because they're "not exactly the best looking woman in the world and not a size 4" it breaks my heart. In our media saturated world, where people can't escape photoshopped bodies of women who are so beautiful that they can't possibly exist, the average woman's self-esteem is already ridiculously low. What our women need is to be told they're beautiful, and for their man's actions to agree with his words. They don't need to feel that they deserve to be treated badly just because they aren't as physically attractive as a catwalk model. Since when was love just about aesthetics anyway? If I loved someone I'd feel no desire whatsoever to cheat because why pick a random cherry when you can have the whole pie? (Oh God, you can tell I'm tired haha).

Surely it's better to be single than to be with somebody who makes you feel worthless, lies to you, would rather go home with pretty much any girl except you and refuses to change? If somebody wants to live the single lifestyle then let them: just insist that they be single when they are doing it.

I'll probably carry on watching the show in the vain hope that some of the men see the error of their ways and change but I'm probably the only person that actually wants this to be the case because, let's be honest, this show was made for drama. People want tears and tantrums and they want them now. They seem to forget that what they're watching on television is actually a real person watching live footage of the person they love cheating on them in a toilet cubicle and just laugh along, praying for even more drama in the next episode.

And I'll probably even fall into that trap. I don't like to think that I will but it's not much different to what I do with Made in Chelsea and what I'll probably be doing with Shipwrecked. 

Conclusion? Reality TV not only ruins the lives of the people who take part in it but it also renders it's viewers as cold and detached individuals who lose all sense of morality for the sake of entertainment. It genuinely saddens me. 

(p.s. This is probably terrible. I'm bloody tired and I literally bashed this out in ten minutes. I can't even be bothered proof-reading it before I post so I do apologise that it is appallingly written. Some rants just need to be written when they need to be written.)