Flava of Haterade!

Has anyone in this here cozy MS senior seminar blogosphere seen the show Flava of Love? Here's a quick synopsis: Flava Flav (you may remember him from Public Enemy, or his short stint on VH1's The Surreal Life) is looking for a mate on a television show which is basically a mockery of The Bachelor (Flav gives giant clock necklaces instead of roses to continuing contestants), but a whole lot crazier. In the first episode, for example, not only was there a fist-fight between two contestants (which one girl later attempted to reconcile by offering, "You want some Lip Chap??"), but one girl seriously took a crap on Flav's floor.

Watching this show, to me, was a very personal guilty pleasure--obviously, this show is crap and lacks any real substance or critical worth. Apparently, though, I'm not the only one watching, as a large article in the New York Times showed this weekend. In the article, it appears that the show has received a serious amount of criticism regarding its treatment of women and its representation of minorities.

Does anyone have any comments on this? If you've seen the show, I mean, I can see that these issues are present, sure, but certainly Flava of Love is not the best example of sexism & poor racial representation on television. A woman poops on the floor, for crying out loud, and it has nothing to do with her being black and a woman, she just ate somethin bad, and I'm sure she wasn't thinking at the time about how her poop was poorly representing her race and gender. Now, if we're going to criticize Flava of Love for putting really really really ridiculous people with serious psychological flaws on television, that's one thing, but there isn't one reality show that isn't guilty of the same thing.