As another user commented, this "is another quite funny episode", but it touches upon a subject that is very real, very painful and very inappropriate to milk for comedy. Let's call this The Beauty Insensitivity.
The Beauty Insensitivity goes something like this: Beautiful and popular girls often don't even realize they are hurting someone's feelings when they reject, or worse, say something hurtful to a person who to them is "just some weird geek". To them, the concept of living in a world where you are over the years subjected to ridicule time after time is so alien it is practically unfathomable. One girl, who was 20 at the time, told me that she had been picked upon only *once* during her *twelve years* of school. I haven't asked for an update of her years in an University, but it's a pretty good guess she hasn't been picked on while studying there.
Being on the receiving end of The Beauty Insensitivity is painful and can, when being subjected to often enough, lead to complete incapability to what we call "normal" social relationships. It is a very serious problem in our current beauty-obsessed world and there exists a similar phenomenon hurtful for girls that we could call The Wallpaper Imperceptibility - the one you see often discussed about on TV, while the harmful obsession with beauty is ironically created by all media.
It would be commendable to pay as much attention to The Beauty Insensitivity as is paid to The Wallpaper Imperceptibility, but neither should be made fun of. And that's exactly what this episode does. On top of that, there is a certain scene that only reinforces the pain caused by The Beauty Insensitivity, leading us to the conclusion that girls apologizing for their Beauty Insensitivity still will always look down upon "geeks". And while that is probably largely true in the real world, it offends me that it is used to "comedic" effect here. I was not laughing and I bet there were a lot of "geek" viewers of this show that weren't laughing either. This episode is an unwelcoming stain in an otherwise excellent series. I'm hoping this was just an Inevitable Continuum Anomaly.
The Beauty Insensitivity goes something like this: Beautiful and popular girls often don't even realize they are hurting someone's feelings when they reject, or worse, say something hurtful to a person who to them is "just some weird geek". To them, the concept of living in a world where you are over the years subjected to ridicule time after time is so alien it is practically unfathomable. One girl, who was 20 at the time, told me that she had been picked upon only *once* during her *twelve years* of school. I haven't asked for an update of her years in an University, but it's a pretty good guess she hasn't been picked on while studying there.
Being on the receiving end of The Beauty Insensitivity is painful and can, when being subjected to often enough, lead to complete incapability to what we call "normal" social relationships. It is a very serious problem in our current beauty-obsessed world and there exists a similar phenomenon hurtful for girls that we could call The Wallpaper Imperceptibility - the one you see often discussed about on TV, while the harmful obsession with beauty is ironically created by all media.
It would be commendable to pay as much attention to The Beauty Insensitivity as is paid to The Wallpaper Imperceptibility, but neither should be made fun of. And that's exactly what this episode does. On top of that, there is a certain scene that only reinforces the pain caused by The Beauty Insensitivity, leading us to the conclusion that girls apologizing for their Beauty Insensitivity still will always look down upon "geeks". And while that is probably largely true in the real world, it offends me that it is used to "comedic" effect here. I was not laughing and I bet there were a lot of "geek" viewers of this show that weren't laughing either. This episode is an unwelcoming stain in an otherwise excellent series. I'm hoping this was just an Inevitable Continuum Anomaly.