14 DAY TRIAL // I will preface this with a solid warning: if you were ever a fan of TLC’s hit reality show, the now-defunct Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, you will not agree with any of the things written here. This is a personal rant that has been in the making for years, since the network greenlit the show following the success of the original Toddlers & Tiaras.
Why was Mama June ever allowed celebrity status? What was it about an overweight, illiterate, unwashed, unmannered, absolutely gross woman human being and her entire family that made the world stop and mindlessly watch a reality series basically showing us just how low people could go to get rich?
Mama June is famous because we made her so, even though she embodies the very worst in today’s landscape of “entertainment.” So, what does that say about us as society?
Mama June should have never been any kind of role model or celebrity
This isn’t about Mama June being grossly overweight and neither is it about her teaching her children the very same eating habits that made her so. To understand that all her girls will become her in a matter of years, you only have to look at Honey Boo Boo, once the cute and bubbly and, yes, plump kid who used to appear in kiddie beauty pageants: she is not even in her teen years and she already has an obvious weight problem.
That’s because Mama June taught her that “cooking” and “real food” mean “sketti,” i.e. spaghetti with sauce made from ketchup and microwave melted butter, or Cranberry Goodness, aka canned cranberry sauce sliced, covered in sugar, and refrigerated to serve later.
I am in my early thirties now, and while I don’t have kids, I would not feed that to my younger self, let alone a kid left in my care – let alone my own flesh and blood! And I’m not even what you might call a health fanatic, but I do try to make healthy choices whenever I can.
With all that, we all watched as Mama June poured thousands of calories into her already overweight offspring, and we found it funny and we found it fascinating to watch, to the point where their reality show became the network’s most watched.
As the money continued to come in, Mama June became more than a celebrity: she was a role model, because she was somehow everything we would not see on TV otherwise. She was overweight, but she was embraced for it because other reality stars were so skinny. She was feeding her kids crap but people applauded her because, hey, who doesn’t like to indulge in unhealthy treats every once in a while?
She was uneducated, but the people loved her because at the very least she didn’t pretend to be more than she was. She was filthy and nasty and gross, but somehow viewers found that relatable and endearing: who hasn’t farted in the privacy of their own home, or had snot accidentally come out of the nose when they sneezed real hard?
By going against the norm, Mama June was put up on a pedestal, and I think that it happened because we failed to notice the grotesque of the situation. This is a woman who had insects buzzing around her unwashed, infected toes. She should have never ever been a celebrity or any kind of real model. Ever!
Mama June is no mother, she’s a monster
So now, besides being all these things, we find out that Mama June is also dating a pedophile. The worst part of it all is that she’s dating a man (like, she bought him a car and went house hunting with him, so it was serious) who did 10 years in prison after he was sentenced for forcing himself on her own daughter, when she was 8.
The mere thought of it makes me sick to my stomach and my skin crawl. Mama June is no mother, she is the real monster here, perhaps even a bigger one than the pedophile. Not only is she sleeping with the man who robbed her daughter of her innocence, but she’s also risking the childhood (or what’s left of it) of her other 3 minor kids, by exposing them to this man.
If you thought that Mama June was disgusting because of all the things mentioned above, think of it this way: this person calls herself a mother, and then she exposes her children to the biggest danger all parents have nightmares about, that of a pedophile preying on them. And she does it knowingly.
To make matters worse, this isn’t the first pedophile she dates: Michael Anthony Ford, who is Chubbs’ father, served a 2-year sentence on charges of sexual exploitation of a child over the Internet.
The lowest scums are our celebrities of today
This scandal only emphasizes a point many voices have been trying to raise, to almost no avail: reality television and our celebrity culture in general have come to celebrate the lowest scum and the most grotesque deviations from what you might call “normalcy.”
We have shows about morbidly obese people eating themselves to death, we have shows about raging alcoholics who go on benders instead of rehab, we have shows where already-deformed people get even more plastic surgery and thus become more deformed, we have shows about people like Mama June.
To draw this to a conclusion, her biggest crime isn’t that she’s fat, or nasty, or illiterate: she is guilty of being selfish enough to condemn her children from the start to the same life. But her biggest crime is that she didn’t just fail to protect them from a known danger: she willingly exposed them to it.
Again, we have made this woman into a star – and I can already imagine the diehard Honey Boo Boo fans feigning shock at the news that Mama June was really as despicable a human being as she seemed to me from the get-go. Again, if we made her into a star, what does it say about us as society?
