.all natural.
.authored by something.of.substance.
(originally posted on WL 11/11/08)
I’d like to make an announcement: it’s time to retire the term “fake”.
No, I don’t mean you have to give up fake to describe things such as the chicken in Kentucky Fried, Pamela Anderson’s boobs or the orgasm you had last night. Fake as a retrospective of personality, however, needs to go.
Before I go any further, I would like to present “fake” as defined in the Urban Dictionary:
“if your bitch moans and looks you in the eye its fake”
“Sometimes applied to people who are accused of being something they are not. See poser.”
“A person, the vast majority of the time a female, who acts too nice to be real in order to lure in pathetic dopes and use/betray them, frequently crushing the victim’s soul in the process. Symptoms of fakeness include wearing a huge, phony, Botox-looking smile the entire time, saying “Hiiiiii! How are you!” a lot, using an overly sweet tone of voice that’s so dripping with sap it makes you want to vomit, and just generally being overly perky all the time. A fake chooses her victims very carefully, usually very naive individuals, waits until the victim has divulged their deepest, darkest secrets, then spreads them all over the school and makes sure the victim is absolutely miserable. AVOID AT ALL COSTS.”
It certainly goes without saying that all of these definitions represent a slang use of the word and not the legitimate dictionary definition any of which usually reference fraud or counterfeit items or practices. If that’s true and we can apply “fake” to refer to people’s fraudulent or counterfeit personalities, how would we really, genuinely prove such a thing?
Last week I happened upon the program “I Want to Be Paris Hilton’s New BFF” on MTV. MTV, always known for their pioneering programming (after all, they kicked the reality genre off with “The Real World” over a dozen years ago!) must be suffering along with Wall St. during these economic times and have been unable to hire either decent writers or story editors. The episode of this insanely drivel race to excess that I witnessed was one in which all the “future best friends” had to compete by making a commercial featuring one of Paris’ products and then sit down to gossip to the self-proclaimed Queen of All Media, the flamboyantly “fake” Perez Hilton (nee Mario Armando Lavandeira, Jr.) about everyone else in the competition. At the end of this dish session, Perez asks every contestant who the “fakest” in the house is and then rates them for Paris as a way of seeing who, in another phrase that needs to be retired from the cultural lexicon, “is really here for her”.
When one contestant was asked why the house virgin was “fake”, the following response followed:
“She’s too quiet. That’s fake to me. You don’t know what she’s thinking.”
Paris herself took all such ratings seriously into consideration by saying: “It’s hard because I don’t want a bff that everyone thinks is fake.” At this point I’m honestly confused. I mean, does someone who has built a career on advertising and hair extensions have any right to reject the very premise that made her famous in the first place?
Abandoning the Paris Hilton Desperation Project for a moment, I stopped to reflect on pretty much every other aspect of pop culture. From reality television to magazine articles to gossip blogging to conversations overheard at the local mall, everyone is desperate to appear “real” and find the “fake”. In years past, the “fake” person is someone who was a bitch (not necessarily gender dependant) or a gossip or both. That person was typically ostracized for their catty ways and cast out of more genuine associations. In the present culture, however, “fake” only seems to refer to someone who is unliked- for whatever reason. When a “fake” personality is associated with those who don’t shove others out of the spotlight, something has become warped within our cultures way of perceiving ourselves and what we consider entertainment.
It wouldn’t be going too far out on the proverbial limb to say that everyone and anyone who is in show business (especially the showy business of “reality” contest programs) has some aspect of their personality which is fraudulent or counterfeit. But, to base whole shows around trying to decide who seems most genuine in a giant game of strategy is ludicrous. In fact, for Paris Hilton to choose a BFF (actual job responsibilities unknown and unspecified) who isn’t as manufactured as she is would hurt her career.
So, when Paris wants to know who the “fakest” is, she’s really asking who is most unliked. Calling someone “fake” is simply yet another way to put someone down and insult them without actually insulting them. From this deduction, to call someone out as being “fake”, you would, by definition, be just as “fake” yourself. Just what our culture needs: another way NOT to be nice while promoting hypocrisy at the same time.
