JC
Ok. I am going out on a limb here for MMW. Never would I normally admit to watching MTV’s Room Raiders – and I can’t even call it a guilty pleasure since there is hardly anything very pleasing about it. Each episode is pretty much a replica of the next with very little variation. The basis of it is that a guy/girl gets the opportunity to find a date by searching the rooms of 3 girls/guys. Based on what the room raider finds in the rooms, he/she makes a decision. If it’s a guy, you can pretty much count on him checking out each girl’s underwear drawer with bulging eyes and a smirk that won’t quit. If it’s a girl checking out the rooms, she is usually looking for clues that will lead her to the buffest/richest guy. As you can see, the show is chock full of superficialities and cliches. It’s pretty horrendous. However, yesterday (to my surprise), there was an Asian guy as the room raider.

Carmen and I have talked on Addicted to Race about the fact that there are hardly any Asian guys in reality TV out there (of course going back to the fact that very rarely are Asian males sexualized or valued in mainstream media). Well, here is one of the only ones that I have seen! I couldn’t believe that he (Jon) was on it in the first place — usually the guys they have on the show are either jocks or players of some sort. But here was this average Asian guy! The girls whom he had to choose from were white and Asian (2 white girls, one Asian). And it was nice to see that they were really into him — in the beginning (as usually happens in this show), when the 3 contestants see the video of who will be searching their rooms, they were groaning and moaning about how cute he was. Surprising, yet nice to see an Asian brother out there! I guess we know that there is progress when we can all be on such horrendous and superficial MTV reality shows, huh?