I Don’t Need To Swap Out Husbands To Know I Have A Good One

Okay, the wife-swap shows are one more guilty pleasure for me. I think it’s a premise with a lot of interesting potential ramifications – on the positive end, promoting tolerance – but what possesses some of these people to sign up, I dunno. Last night there was an especially entertaining episode about a super-arty home-schooling organic food-eating family with no TV swapping moms with a pageant family who ate fast food every day, usually in front of the TV. Super-arty mom’s pet peeve was “anything matching,” and pageant mom wouldn’t let her kids out if they didn’t match. And she believed that TV was evil… not evil enough not to be on it, I guess, but evil enough. And the pageant mom made up this poor little girl like – so Jon Benet Ramsey, even though I think she was completely misguided about any benefit the pageants provided for her six-year-old child (who seemed way too concerned about winning one more crown and visibly upset when she thought she looked “like crap”), she seemed to be a loving parent. The thing here was that you could see what each had to gain from seeing the other’s lifestyle – the arty mom was actually more rigid than the pageant mom – saying stuff like “I don’t even brush my hair because I am against concerning myself with what other people think about how I look.” Huh? I’m always suspicious of anyone who says they don’t care about how they look. Even the most un-fashion-minded person makes a choice in the morning about what to put on. My dad wears pretty basic dad-like clothes, but he’s still making a decision not to dress like a punk. What I wonder is if any of what they claim to have benefited from the experience – the pageant family realized they needed a better diet and the arty family realized their marriage was in trouble – lasts long-term. Same thing with the extreme makeover houses and people. I really want to see the follow up shows in ten years.