The MTV show “catfish” is either a reality show or a total illusion. Like much of the broad segment of America with nothing better to do, I have become completely consumed with the non-stop, digital-age drama of Catfish, the MTV reality series (spun off from a documentary of the same name) that connects young people who have been “dating” online but can’t manage to meet up in real life. Typically, that state of affairs arises because the person at one end of the relationship is not exactly who they claim to be. What the catfish wants to conceal themself varies greatly from case to case, but some of the deceptions conform to a rather striking pattern. When you get right down to it, the weirdness is in how much all these cover stories begin to sound the same. That might have something to do with how many idiots pretend to be fashion models, of all things.
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Oh, it makes a certain degree of sense. If you’re going to construct a fake Facebook profile using images of some unfathomably beautiful person, it stands to reason that you ought to go the whole nine yards and act like you’re a professionally attractive international jetsetter. After all, who is ever going to find out? Until you sign a Viacom Inc. release form, probably no one! Better to tell a grand, opulent, unsustainable lie than a lot of fairly innocuous fibs, the logic appears to be. And for some reason, the typical catfish victims—who are, god bless them, usually a bit slow on the uptake, if not living in outright denial—are more than inclined to accept this too-good-to-be-true bullshit as gospel.
But let’s think about what that means. Can it really be that so many of the so-called “millennial” generation believe whatever someone says on social media sites, and more importantly, is there some widespread assumption that “model” is, like, a common career? Furthermore, and most strangely, why on earth does some fat, bucktoothed, acne-scarred kid from the middle of nowhere think a scorching hot, pinup-worthy beauty queen in interested in him? That anyone is this optimistic about love tells me we haven’t done anything close to a good enough job shredding the pie-eyed hopes of our youth—and that they can look at a photo of a porn star and imagine she doesn’t have access to an IRL dating pool, which has forced her to carry out her romantic affairs online, well, that’s plain delusion.
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Imagine if Catfish’s hosts, Nev and Max, didn’t routinely unravel this familiar trail of dupery. What if the world actually had this many models in it? Why, 95% of the country would be in Miami 98% of the time. Every car would be a self-driving limousine (if everyone’s a model, there’s nobody left to chauffeur). The VIP lists at hot nightclubs would be complete manifests of all currently non-deceased Americans. Oh, and since we’d be so uniformly gorgeous, the nation’s babies would be astoundingly cute. But we’re not having babies, stupid—we’re models. The entire economy is predicated on the markets for hair gel, nipple tape, and cocaine. A presidential zit is a national emergency. Our sworn enemy is the French Riviera, which is just so over. Finally, in the true masterstroke of our model utopia, we’ve outlawed math classes. Who needs that stuff you look this good?
