When I was a child, there was always a good family TV show on like Full House, Family Matters, Cosby Show, and Boy Meets World. Today the younger kids do not have anything like those positive television shows to look at, but they do have the reality television show like the Bad Girls Club (BGC). The Bad Girls Club first aired on December, 5TH, 2006; its original plot was to try to help seven behavior problem women change their self destructing antics. The series has done anything but rehabilitate the women. The women on the show have negatively influenced the younger viewers with the binge drinking, the promiscuity, and the constant fighting. The show fails to show the outcome of the actions the women on The Bad Girls Club will have to face, but instead it paints a picture that there are no real consequences to the actions.

The women on BGC range from twenty-one to twenty-seven, so they are all of the legal drinking age. Drinking would not be so bad if the women would do it sparingly, but the women on the show have taken drinking to a completely new level and have become alcoholics. They seem to wake up drinking and go to sleep drinking, and there is always the one girl who loves to drink but cannot contain herself if she is drinking. BGC shows clips of the girls out at clubs with bottles of alcohol in their hand having a grand time. My younger sister, who views the show, has said, “When I am twenty-one, I am going to party and drink just like the girls on the BGC!” The fact that she idealizes the women was shocking. It may look like a lot of fun to be out partying like they do, but the younger viewers do not see the after effects of the actions. On season one Ripsy had gotten so intoxicated that she blacked out. When Ripsy did black out, she started beating on her roommate Kerri. The other roommates tried to get Ripsy to stop beating on Kerri, but nothing seemed to have been working. Nothing seemed to work until Ripsy falls into the swimming pool. The segment was extremely entertaining but also sad at the same time because Ripsy could have easily drowned in the swimming pool. The younger viewers like my sister thought the way she was acting was one of the coolest things ever, “I could have done all of that, and not remember any of it in the morning? That is so awesome!” My younger sister failed to see the seniority of Ripsy’s actions. I explained to her that drinking in that manner could cause liver damage and emotional damage and that it could also lead to unwanted sexual advances.

Every season most of the women come in with a seemingly perfect relationship, and it never fails that they, “Hook UP,“ with someone else and regretting it. People with no real life experience would look at the women “hooking up” and think that in order to have a relationship with a man then she would have to be “easy.” The hooking up sessions make me feel uneasy because I know that being promiscuous like that has very serious consequences such as, STD’s, unwanted pregnancies, the fact that no man could ever really want anything to do with you because, you have been with so many other men. When the women go out to the clubs, it’s very rare that someone is going to end up brining a complete stranger home with her from the club. Most people from the age twenty-one through twenty-seven don’t go to a different club every night, let alone bringing a stranger home with them. When I see the actions like this, I can’t help but think of the shows younger viewers, and the fact that it is women like this who they look up to and want to be so much like. The show does not show all the pregnancy scares or the trips to a local free clinic that the women’s promiscuous actions come with. The younger viewers only get to see how much male attention the women actually get, even if it is for only that one night. On an episode in season four, Kate was madly in love with her boyfriend back home, and made a vow not to “hook up” with anyone while she was there. Everything was going well until she deiced that she was going to hook up with her best friend Trish while she is there visiting. The guilt of hooking up with Trish was eating at Kate, and she told her boyfriend that she did in fact hook up with her best friend. The two of them broke up but eventually got back together. Although there was some what of a reperciousion to Kate’s actions, the show still failed to show that there are always real repercussions to every action. When the girls are not drinking or being promiscuous they are fighting. When the show originated back in 2006, there were two rules you must keep a job, and you can not get into a physical altercation with your roommate. The second rule seems to have been done away with. Instead of talking it out like a normal adult, the women on BGC seem to want to just fight it out. Tanisha and Jennavecia decided to fight it out over juice in season two. What type of message is that sending to the youth? When I was on you tube one day, I ran across a skit called The Bad Kids Club. The skit had kids impersonating the fight between Tanisha and Jennavecia; they were pulling each other’s hair, cursing, and kicking at each other. The girls could not have been any older than ten, and the magnitude of fighting was unbelievable. It is so many different fights that you can see on you tube. All of the fights seem to steam from something like someone said something smart or had taken something from them, just like the women on the bad girls club. The show has influenced young women into fighting over just about anything. The young girls do not realizing that they could end up in jail with an assault charge on them, because they never see the women on BGC going to jail.

Reality Television has become a cult classic. Shows like The Bad Girls Club have become instant hits because people feel that is what really happens in life. The Bad Girls Club has had a negative effect on the young viewers because they feel they can drink, be promiscuous and fight all the time with no type of negative effect. The show is originally to try to help the women become productive strong females, but it has brought down the younger viewers because they are now imitating and idealizing the self destructive women. If the women on the show are being idealized, I would hate to see what the world would be like in fifteen years.