Ugly Girls

On a recent episode of Charlie Sheen's new show Anger Management, the plot revolved around Charlie (former angry baseball player now shrink who handles anger management clients) coming face to face with a woman he used as a slumpbuster 16 years before.

If you don't know the term, a "slumpbuster" is an ugly woman that someone fucks in order to get them out of the "slump" of badness they happen to be in at the moment.  I'm not really sure what the logic behind it is. Maybe they believe that they're having some kind of karmatic reward for fucking someone who is ugly. Maybe they believe they are somehow sacrificing in some way because they did this horrible thing to themselves of sleeping with a less-than-beautiful woman.  Maybe they believe the vaginae of ugly women have some kind of magical powers.

Whatever the reasoning, the practice is offensive. The idea that someone would have sex with you just because you were the ugliest person they could find is horrible. Sex is an intimate act and to do that with someone while you are simultaneously making fun of them is shitty.

However, as bad as the practice is, the way the episode handled it was even worse. When this woman shows up to confront Charlie about doing this to her, she is presented as stereotypically as possible.  She is now a stalker who still wants to maintain a relationship with him. She even had a bunch of surgeries to become more attractive, the "joke" being that none of them worked.

No one really calls Charlie out for what he did. No one confronts him about how horrible it was to treat someone that way. They joke about it. They joke about him having sex with her. And they warn him about how she's a stalker now. In absolutely no way is this woman's dignity or feelings considered.

So instead of the 'life lesson' in the episode being something about how it is wrong to treat people like the butt of your joke, the lesson turns into 'don't fuck the ugly girls because they get obsessed with you and never leave you alone.' In other words, the only bastardly nature of your behavior isn't all that important.  However, ugly women are so desperate that if you pay them even the slightest bit of attention, they may follow you around for the rest of your life.

How could this have been a good episode? I think it would have worked better if Charlie met the woman by chance and remembered what he did to her. If he, 16 years later, realized that doing that kind of thing to someone was very immature and horrible. If he had some time where he really struggled with how he treats people based on their appearance and realized that he still has a lot of growing to do.

Of course, that would never happen on a show like this.  We treat ugly women like there is something morally wrong with them and because of this moral failing, it's completely okay to do anything at all to them.  In fact, it's best NOT to be nice to them because then they might start stalking you.  Sigh.