Amber Portwood has not had the best of months. Her two-year-old daughter, Leah, was recently declared a ward of the state of Indiana. She was charged last month with three counts of assault stemming from alleged attacks against Gary Shirley, her former fiancé. Gary, a husky, bearded, soft-tempered fellow who first proposed to Amber with a ring from Wal-Mart that cost $21.40, tax included, did not press charges against the 20-year-old woman he tried to marry.
Police in Anderson, Ind., rather, were alerted to the possible incidents of domestic violence by public complaints. Hundreds of them. They came from members of the television-viewing public, who had seen Amber punch Gary during an episode ofTeen Mom, an MTV reality show on which she is one of the main stars.
Ms. Portwood has since become a tabloid magazine subject to rival Kate Gosselin and Courteney Cox (though not quite to rival Angelina and Brad). Depending on which cover you looked at in recent weeks, she was either STEALING LEAH BACK! (OK Weekly) or GIVING UP HER BABY (Life& Style) or HEADED TO JAIL (Us Weekly).
(The answer to where little Leah is living at the moment depends on which gossip magazine you read.)
How did Ms. Portwood, a high-school dropout who aspires to work in a beauty salon, become, if one can use the term so loosely, such a celebrity?
It began thusly, as she explained to Gary on television, back when she was still with child:“We all know why I’m pregnant. Because you don’t like to wear condoms. And I was too stupid to make you put one on.”
From that, a career was born. Ms. Portwood was one of the girls who had their pregnancies tracked for the MTV show 16& Pregnant, which has since followed them into two seasons of Teen Mom. Both series have since brought in new casts of babes with babes. Other networks have caught the trend: Dad Camp, a series in which a psychologist is brought in to whip prospective young fathers into shape, aired in the United States in the spring and debuted on a new Canadian channel dedicated to“family” reality shows last month.
But the new genre of reality series has critics asking if such shows are exploiting children, glamourizing teen pregnancy, and even obscuring the reality it pretends to expose by making no references to abortion. Even gossip blogger Perez Hilton is wringing his hands:“This wouldn’t be so awful if it wasn’t sending a terrible, TERRIBLE message to young teenage girls,” he wrote following reports that Farrah Abraham, another of the Teen Moms, was heading to Hollywood. “You know, get pregnant, get on TV, and that will make you a movie star!” When Perez Hilton is looking down his nose at you, you know you’re controversial.
Although the girls of Teen Mom have achieved grocery-store-checkout-line levels of celebrity only recently, making it seem like Amber, Farrah and the rest have become culturally relevant from nowhere, the roots of their notoriety began with 16& Pregnant, which followed six teens and first aired on MTV in the spring of 2009. Four of the mothers formed the cast of the subsequent Teen Mom, but it wasn’t until Season 2 of that show, which aired this past fall, that the wider media gave the show much notice.
“The tabloid media were primed by 16& Pregnant to start paying attention,” says Jennifer L. Pozner, the author of Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV.
“Teen Mom had been the subject of many fan sites and hundreds of blog posts before they started to pay attention to it at Us Weekly,” she says, arguing that magazines such as Star and OK have given more focus to reality “stars” in recent years for primarily economic reasons.
“Just like it’s cheaper for CNN to run a story about Lindsay Lohan getting out of jail than to station a team in Baghdad, it’s cheaper for the tabloids to throw a few bucks at {the} paparazzi to take a picture of some D-List reality star or teen mom than it is to get a pic of Angelina and Brad.”
The teen moms live in places like Chattanooga, Tenn., and Council Bluffs, Iowa, for example, while the Jolie-Pitts spend a lot of their time overseas and are known to vacation in places like Tanzania.
“It’s not a terribly different phenomenon from political coverage in newspapers,” where it filters from one to the other, Ms. Pozner says. “If you see Kate Gosselin on the cover of Us Weekly, she’s going to be on the cover of People, she’s going to be on Access Hollywood. It’s a closedcircle.”
Not only is it cheap for the tabloid media to focus on these women, Ms. Pozner says, but it feeds what she calls“an existing media meme around ‘mommy wars’ ” that suggests mothers all want to criticize each other.
“We’ve seen this for 30 to 40 years in the news media about how we love nothing more than to judge how women parent, when they choose to parent, if they choose to parent, and no matter what they do they can never parent well enough. Whatever choices they make it’s the wrong choice. Moms are all supposed to hate each other, which is just ridiculous,” she says.
“So the teen mom thing is an easier, cheaper, flashier way to keep the whole mommy wars thing going on, even into the tabloids. ‘This teen mom is shirking her responsibilities because she went out on a date! This teen mom has a troubled relationship with her boyfriend!’”
Here’s a sample of the cover story from the latest issue of Life& Style:“In a shocking move, Amber — who’s found plenty of time to spend rowdy nights with her friends and a series of new men — says she’s too overwhelmed to look after Leah. Amber insists it’s in Leah’s best interests for the toddler to stay with her father for the time being. But it’s yetanother example of the reality star saying she feels terrible about the situation and being unwilling to do anything about it.” (Emphasis not mine.) Throw $100 at a photographer to hang out in Anderson, Ind., and there you go.
MTV has said that 16 and Pregnant and its successors are intended to be thought-provoking and informative, rather than exploitative. To that end, it has aired specials with therapist Dr. Drew Pinsky (also a host on MTV reality shows such as Celebrity Rehab) where he discusses the problems the teens have encountered. Dad Camp goes a step further, putting Dr. Jeff Gardere in a house with a group of young men (and the women they accidentally impregnated) and having Dr. Jeff call them out for being lazy and unprepared for parenthood.“I’ve been with my chick for six months. And she’s been pregnant for six months,” one says.
“We’ve gotten some very tough critics,” Dr. Jeff says in an interview. “These were people who said this was pure exploitation, that we were selling a bill of goods in that there was no way we would be able to fix these guys.”
“Not all of it turned out perfect,” he says. “But 95% of them were better at the end than they were at the start.”
He acknowledges that the construct of a television show may suggest that a father-to-be is“ready” at the end of a series, while being far from it in real life — “You can push and pull these people as much as you want to, but in the end they will do what they want,” he says — but he insists that even in the cases of the train wrecks there’s “a lesson for the general population,” where absentee fathers are not uncommon.
“Dad Camp was a very eye-opening experience,” says Vanessa Case, vice-president of content for Twist TV, which began airing the show when the new specialty channel launched in Canada this month. “It’s fairly gritty at times, with guys who shouldn’t be faced with this reality right now, butare forced to step up to the plate.”
Twist TV features reality programming about people who have been thrust into unfamiliar situations, from Wife Swap to Raising Sextuplets, and Ms. Case says there are plans in the works for other series along the“new parent” lines of Dad Camp.
Viewers respond to such shows because“there’s a lot of living vicariously through other people’s lives,” she says, but also because they can relate at some level. “It can be a more dramatic version of what goes on in their lives,” she says.
Ms. Pozner, though, says the young mom shows skew reality in one major way by entirely sidestepping the topic of abortion.
“On the one hand, they present the show as being reflective of vast array of decisions and choices and experiences that teen mothers have in America,” she says. “But that is wildly limiting, because they never mention — never mention, let alone deal with — that a huge percentage of teens do get abortions.” Indeed, the Teen Mom girls wrestle only with questions about whether to give the baby up for adoption or raise it themselves.
Oddly, given that reality shows have always courted controversy— MTV famously created buzz for Jersey Shore by releasing a teaser clip of Snooki getting punched in the face at a nightclub — this seems to be the one area where the producers will not go.
“I think it’s that they are scared of abortion, scared of the knee-jerk organizing that would happen {against it}, because usually they are fine with {controversy},” she says.
And Ms. Pozner suggests the avoidance of abortion as a topic on such shows is a bigger problem than the unlikely scenario in which a teenager chooses to become pregnant to get on TV, as Perez Hilton and others have worried.
“It seems like one of the main messages is that if you have sex, you’re stuck,” she says.
“This is a series of shows that has codified through pop culture the political and medical invisibility of abortion and family planning.”
sstinson@nationalpost.com
Watch a trailer for Teen Mom at nationalpost.com/posted
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