I don't watch a lot of reality TV. No, really, I don't. I watched most of the episodes of "Joe Millionaire" and the first season of MTV's "Real World," but other than that I steer pretty much clear of it. I suppose I have some real interesting, philosophical problems with it (e.g., they're actors; it's meta-TV; it's the decline of western civilization; etc.), but it pretty much boils down to the fact that it just bores me. They all look the same, talk the same, there's no plot, no character development. There's just not much there.

However, the other night, waiting to go out drinking, I caught the first half hour of "Married to America." It got me thinking about men in America today. I'm not talking specifically about the women and men on "Married," but I started getting frustrated.

First off, we all understand that women's magazines are pretty bad things - in the sense that they tell women to spend lots of money, lose lots of weight, and be subservient to men. They are evil. But it seems that men are coming up against these same dilemmas.

It used to be (or some I'm told by older geezers) that rich men did better in life than normal guys. That was the norm for years: women had to be hot and men had to be rich. It was unfair, sure, but in a way it was equal. Each sex had to achieve something. Sure, the goals we were told to go after were more than a little stupid and sexist and all that, but we each had one goal. Occasionally, I suppose, a woman might be both hot and rich and a man might be good looking and rich, but those were exceptions. Remember the Kissinger quote, after all: "Power is an aphrodisiac."

With the advent of all these reality shows and the huge spike in lad mags like Maxim, men are being told to do double duty. We not only have to be successful, we have to be hot as well, or at the least have a washboard stomach. Women, however, more or less still have only one goal. ('’m talking pretty culturally generally here; I'm talking about what the media tells us to do and be, not real life). Of course, more and more men like a woman who has a good job but I really don't think too many care if she's super hot.

It doesn't really matter in the end, though: he couldn’t get the really hot girl unless he had buckets of money. Sucks to be a dude.