I Watched “Dating Naked” - New Yorker

By Ian Crouch

VH1 is currently airing a reality show called “Dating Naked,” and you would be forgiven for assuming—or even, let’s be honest, hoping—that it was the stage for a hedonistic, debauched scene of young singles gone wild. The nervous folks at the Parents Television Council certainly did; they issued a statement condemning McDonald’s for sponsoring such obvious filth. But this is light cable TV, suitable, as the show’s rating tells us, for anyone over fifteen: the bodies are mostly waxed and safely blurred, and the bad words bleeped. And the singles, though they have signed up to travel to an oceanfront resort in Panama and naked-date nominal strangers for the viewing enjoyment of other strangers, are a circumspect, conservative bunch.

“I want the whole white-picket fence, a dog, some kids, you know, everything,” Joe, a twenty-four-year-old from Long Island who is the male contestant on the first episode, says. He’d been married once, but it didn’t work out. “Dating naked gives me a way to trust someone possibly again.” His female counterpart, a thirty-six-year-old woman named Wee Wee, appeared to be a likely match: “I do have a ticking clock, so it is important for me to meet someone who would like to have children.” Later, she tears up when telling the camera, “I want a family of my own.”

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