Now, as you may recall, the Pussycat Dolls started as a group of not-quite-famous L.A. hotties who wanted an excuse to wear sexy lingerie onstage, but didn't necessarily want to get naked, girls who wanted to, like, perform and stuff, but they couldn't, like, sing or anything. In order to avoid singing, they lip-synched, and in order to make the whole thing seem vaguely dignified, they called it burlesque, and they performed at super-classy venues like "The Viper Room" and "Caesar's Palace." (Yes, in L.A. and Vegas, such places are actually considered classy, just so you understand the particular species of sea donkey we're talking about here.)
Even if you don't find a whole generation of aspiring sea donkeys all that scary a concept, that doesn't change the fact that a handful of glorified strippers transformed, rather seamlessly, into a Grammy-nominated pop group, and now that pop group has its very own one-hour infomercial running on the CW.
But since you don't care about such terrible shows, you probably don't care to know that, in the second hour of aforementioned infomercial, Pussycat founder Antin (sister of "Blow Out's" weepy, temperamental hair stylist Jonathan Antin) takes the girls out to a bar where women in lingerie are posing in lighted boxes, boxes that are strategically located behind the bar so that men will gather around and end up spending way too much cash on drinks while drooling over the goods on display. Soon after the group has arrived, Antin points to the embellished mannequins and says, "One of the ways to understand what confidence is all about is [by] doing things like that."
At first, some of the girls gasp in horror. After all, generational repercussions aside, many of them actually have good singing voices or they're trained dancers or both, and perhaps they only know the Pussycat Dolls from their hit songs and remain unaware of their exalted-stripper roots. Would it really be appropriate to dance like common whores, providing cheap eye candy for the middle-aged horndogs boozing it up around the bar?
But then Antin and some of the more "confident" girls make it crystal clear that it's not only acceptable but positively cool to pose and pout for randy strangers, and suddenly all the girls are ooing and ahing over the microscopic push-up bras and metalic thongs waiting for them in the dressing room. Oh my gosh, this silver butt floss has my name on it and everything!, they gush to each other, feeling very honored and special, and everyone happily climbs into the lighted boxes and then, afterwards, takes turns marveling at how much dignity and self-esteem this girl or that girl demonstrated when she kicked up her long legs or straddled the little chair or got on all fours and made porno faces.
But look, let's not jump to conclusions. Maybe these girls are just exercising their power by strutting their stuff. Maybe some of them are post-feminist scholars and they're subverting the dominant paradigm of objectification by taking ownership of the terms and symbols of the whore and repurposing those terms and symbols in deeply empowering ways... you know, like by imitating the storefront prostitutes of Amsterdam.
Even so, it's hard not to want to grab a big coat and cover up those mostly nude teenagers and take them out to a diner and buy them a nice, hot reuben and some chicken soup and explain to them that, even when you're "confident" or you're subverting the dominant paradigm, even when you're talented and extremely nice and you can do whatever you want and who cares what anyone thinks anyway, it's still not ultimately great for your self-respect to wear butt floss and make porno faces in public.
But I know you don't want to think about this awful show, so you especially don't even want to hear about the part where the sea donkeys' mentors and tutors draw very fine lines between what's acceptable and what's not acceptable in the sea donkey world. Take choreographer Mikey Minden, who shouts at one girl while she's dancing, "Don't be cheesy! Don't be cheesy! Don't bob your head like that!" as if it's possible to put on ass pants and sing a reimagineered, vastly inferior version of Donna Summer's "Hot Stuff" without being cheesy.
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