You heard it here first: Heidi from The Hills is a goner. I wonder who will fill the 80-pound void she's leaving behind.
Her fate has been sealed for a while. We, the acutely intelligent viewership of the MTV reality series, have watched as the doomed, petite blonde roommate of the show's petite blonde protagonist bit the hand that fed her.
It's not like she had much of a motive for acting out the way she did. She lives in a sweet and comfy L.A. pad, Horchow-ed beyond the point of no return. Her friends are gorgeous and happily employed. Her own career in event planning seems to be going well for her. And her social life has landed her the attention she clearly craves-the best magazine headline of all time just might be "MTV's Heidi Montag shows Off Her Own Hills."
No, there is no clear motive, and yet the impetus for the boot-in-scrawny-rear looming on the horizon is this: She went to the movies. With a boy.
God, don't EVEN talk to me about it.
Of course, the girls out there know that she didn't just "go to the movies." She went to the movies and, in one fell swoop, alienated her female friends by preferencing her boyfriend over her friends. Girls are zero-sum like that, you know.
The movie trip was just the last straw. Heidi also had breakfast with the boyfriend, Spencer, a "celebrity manager," and went to the beach with him for two days while main character Lauren worked. These no doubt carefully edited sequences of betrayals were meant to show the harm that boyfriends-especially, I should note, boyfriends that friends do not approve of-can do to gaggle-of-girl bonds.
MTV tried to parlay these shallow and angsty vibes-the show was ominously titled "Enough is enough"-into a live après-episode chat, which revealed that most girls agree with Lauren. Polling data was rushed from MTV.com, breaking down responses to the question, "Have you ever chosen your boyfriend over your best friend?" In what context, MTV did not say, but results suggested 18 percent of women have preffed boys over girl-time, while the remaining 82 percent profess stalwart loyalty to their gal pals.
As for Heidi and her wayfaring, boy-loving ways, the teenaged talking heads on the live after-show served only to sound the death knell.
"Girl, you need to get rid of [Heidi]," said one commentator, speaking to cast member Lauren on speakerphone. "Get her out of your life."
The friends-or-boyfriend debate is certainly not a new one, but it is the particular angle The Hills cast and their followers take up that is so interesting. Best friends, said one show commentator, will be there when men inevitably "break up with you and screw you over." They "stick with you through everything." To the commentators, it's not just about Heidi's flaking out one or two times, cementing her status as the most beautiful crappy friend to pound the L.A. pavement. It's about her failure to recognize male companionship as unstable, unfulfilling and, ultimately, unreliable. Choose the girls every time, all the time, and you're guaranteed not to get hurt.
"If it came down to it, if I had to choose between my boyfriend and my best friends, I would definitely choose my best friends," said Jenna, another commentator.
Hey Jenn: Who's asking you to choose?
In "Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both," Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Laura Session Stepp comes down hard on the love lives of the average woman in her late teens or early 20s. In the book, Stepp tries to explain why we as a generation tend to be wary of monogamous attachment, as well as a relationship's antecedent rituals (I think they call it "dating"). We don't have time for them, but moreover, we don't have time to get hurt. We thus hedge on the side of safety, preferring to devote our time to girlfriends, sports, academics and watching The Hills. On the side, we snipe blacked-out boys for the occasional cathartic romp-acts that we chalk up to physical practice for the future, when we have time for The Real Thing.
It seems ironic that we should feel this way. Before women had the luxury of appropriating time to friends and more-than-friends, we enjoyed a normative mandate: We'd stay surrounded exclusively by female friends and relatives until we reached marriageable age, after which we were shipped off with a trunkful of embroidered frippery to a completely foreign, friendless, patriarchal environment. Sayonara, girl-time. The popular catchphrase circa 1820 was "Hos, then bros, then death-end scene."
Now that we have the choice, is it really going to be all hos, all the time-or else? Aren't those options just as oppressive as being carted off by a landed gentleman before your Sweet 16?
If there's a balance to be found, it's not easy to strike without stepping on toes. As Celeste on The Hills after-show put it: "It's hard. You have to use your brain, and, like."
Sarah Ball is a Trinity junior and former editorial page editor of The Chronicle. Her column runs every Thursday.
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