In the charming, “A day with the nagging wife whose husband put her up for sale,” intrepid reporter Matt Roper decides to see whether he can handle a wife so nagging that her husband, Gary, just “had” to put an ad in Trade It reading “”high maintenance, some rust, but free to collector.”
Donna’s reaction? “She gave me an ear-bashing about it but she’s seen the funny side now.” (Oh, and agreed to be humiliated in the ) In case you’re wondering, why, yes! She does nag the reporter! She makes him do all the household chores and wait on her and says a lot of stuff like, “Men need to be told what they’re doing wrong… they are so pathetic on their own” and “”Why can’t men do anything right?” and other things that are obviously not for the benefit of the reporter, leaving the cowed journalist to conclude, “Gary, she’s all yours!”
Beyond the fact that none of this is remotely funny to someone who doesn’t find “The Lockhorns” riotous, why the hell would this woman do this to herself? If she and her husband want to indulge in humiliating stunts on their own time, okay, I guess that’s their prerogative. Clearly, she’s not thinking about the larger social implications of disseminating this sort of cliche, and we’re not going to look to the Daily Mail for good judgment on this or any point, but really? Even if they were paid, could the sum have been enough to justify this sort of humiliation? This is a question I am often left pondering after watching a particularly disturbing episode of Wife Swap. Are people so desperate for their fifteen minutes that anything will do? Obviously I’m not the first to pose this question in the era of reality television, but something about this story – the degrading premise, the lameness of its “humor,” even the relative brevity of a piece that was probably shunted to somewhere mid-paper – is especially distressing. That said: we do see the appeal of making a tabloid reporter clean our toilet while we insult him…as long as we’re dealing in such elevated currencies.
A Day With The Nagging Wife [Mirror]
