The radical thing about Ashton Kutcher's "Blah Girls"

"Blah Girls," Ashton Kutcher's latest brainchild, is a modest project: a comical, animated celebrity gossip site. The site is built around a show featuring three celebrity-obsessed, sexually curious teenage cartoon girls who gossip about their idols — and try to meet them and date them, with disastrous results. (I did a mini-review here, and our Technology Blog interviewed Kutcher about it here).

There's South Park-style trash-talking, explosions, crashes and gross-out physical stuff. A new three-minute episode appears twice a week, and the girls — Tiffany, Krystle and Britney — also maintain a Perez-Hilton-like blog (along with their gay friend Stuart) that is updated pretty regularly. All in all, it's a nice twist on the increasingly surreal and cartoonish culture of celeb gossip.

But there's something less obvious going on too: These three cartoon characters are sexualized in a way we rarely—if ever—see teenage girls depicted. They're not sexed-up in an exploitive Bratz way, or in a judgmental cautionary-tale way. Instead the show gives us realistic teenage-girl sexuality as subject matter for lowbrow humor, the kind that can be seen as crass or as refreshingly honest, depending on your point of view.

The girls are trying to define their own fledging sexuality in the midst of our hypersexualized celebrity culture, and the embarrassment this usually leads to makes the show a gleeful satire of teenage girls' confused desires. Perhaps even more radically, the show doesn't have any impulse to protect its characters from the rest of the world's sometimes cruel or even menacing reaction to teenage girls' sexual curiosity. 

On TV, slapstick sexual humor is safe only for boys, as in, obviously, "South Park." (When "South Park" does turn its lens on girls' sexuality, as in the "Raisins" episode, where the boys visit a junior Hooters, the humor is in the boys' reaction to girls' sexuality -- it has nothing to do with what's going on inside the girls themselves.)

But consider a recent Blah Girls episode focused on the Jonas Brothers. Britney declares that if she could meet Kevin Jonas, she'd get down on her knees and — gasps from her friends — tie his shoes. The visual of her doing just that is mischievously ambiguous. That gag is followed by an "OMG!" from Tiffany, as she sends an e-mail to the JoBros saying she and her friends want to be their wives -- and gets a reply saying they'd be happy to marry the girls, and asking them to send pictures, which she does. The episode ends with a shot of a skeevy old guy looking at their pictures with a horny cackle.

That's risque stuff, and Kutcher knows it will draw some disapproval given the teenagers in the audience: He told Jessica Guynn in the interview I linked to above, "I don't think content should parent children. I think parents should parent children. This doesn't go too far."

"Blah girls" may not be going "too far," (wherever that line is nowadays), but it is going to a place that we haven't yet comfortably gone as a culture. When the screen pans out to the back of the pedophile's head as he ogles the Blah Girls' pictures, it's hard not to have a moment of visceral, involuntary fear and revulsion. (I know they're cartoon characters!)

Maybe it's a good thing, that all the vulnerability inherent in female sexuality is something we can joke about now. As far as I know, for example, nothing in the mainstream has yet mined the humor in the supposed Middle School oral sex epidemic, as this little episode does.

But I wonder whether the Blah Girls' humor is bumping up against some still-tenacious cultural taboos. I still can't picture that episode (in a longer version, obviously) on any imaginable TV network, even cable -- or even in a movie theater.

—Maria Russo

Comments

[elle]

hiya, interesting article - thanks. it got linked from jezebel and is an interesting topic.

i am a mega fan (aged 29 female) of teen girl squad over on homestarrunner.

it's been mocking teen girls' sexuality for years lol.