From the team that brought you the tasteless and tacky Orange Is The New Black, whose raw depiction of prison lesbian sex quickly morphed from a one-trick pony into a rotting carcass of a dead horse by the second episode, comes the equally tasteless and tacky GLOW, a wholly fictional but hilarious account of the 1980’s television show Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (GLOW).
Not that tastelessness and tacky is unilkeablein the right context. Those were the 1980’s after all: hairspray, spandex, synthesizers, corporate America, Michael Bolton and Hulk Hogan. For Orange Is The New Black, the tasteless and tacky borderlines on the Buzzfeed feminists getting their inner Picasso on with period blood, but a show about Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, tasteless and tacky goes with the territory.
That’s why I had a great time watching the opening episodes of GLOW, whose first season debuted on Netflix last week. I dug the energy of Alison Brie (Community) as the struggling actress whose dead-end of a career led her to body-slamming maidens for a paycheck. I dug Marc Maron as the D-list filmmaker whose better days of movies about lesbian vampires have long past him. I dug the cat fights, the hair-pulling, the anarchy, the satire, and even the sweetness to some of it all, a sort of League of their Own for misfits.
But then I remembered something: Feminists were helming this show, and my boyish chuckles were quickly undercut with nauseating anticipation for the moment they’d halt the reel to splice a Planned Parenthood PSA into the mix for a throw-back to the “word from our sponsor” days with Cecile Richards looking like Ronald Reagan on Texaco Star Theater.
Against all odds, against reason itself, against my better nature even, I hoped GLOW would be the one show feminists would not taint with their shrewish agenda. I even looked past their standard trope of making every male character a selfish douche who fancies “grab ’em by the p–ssy” as a tactful pick-up line. After seven episodes, my hopes were looking up. “Could it be?” I thought. “Did they finally get the memo?” Then episode eight came along, and like the fox trusting the scorpion, I was played for a fool.
To avoid spoilers, I’ll keep it incognito, but yes, a main character does get pregnant and winds up on a Planned Parenthood operating table less than 10 minutes later. Refinery 29 would later celebrate this moment for its casual display depicting abortion as just another procedure for desperate women to undergo in desperate situations; even more to their liking, the character spent little time in distress contemplating it. No post-traumatic stress, no regrets, no sadness, no remorse. It’s a feminist’s dream, and a fantasy for that matter.
Perhaps even more subversive was the show’s message to men in this scenario. Up until this moment, none of them had shown any redemptive qualities, but one character, a sleaze bag by all accounts, finally showed his softer, gentler side by kindly accompanying the woman to the clinic with no questions asked. He even posed as her husband so she wouldn’t feel embarrassed.
If these are the men feminists roll with, then no wonder they live in such misery.
All in all, Netflix’s GLOW represents another bright, shining example of what happens when nefarious leftists kill a fun concept by injecting their anti-social worldview into the mix. The equivalent of enjoying a bowl of fruit punch while rocking out to Billy Idol only to have the DJ switch the track over to Barbara Streisand and pour arsenic in your cup. Feminists really do ruin everything.