Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
A recent college grad is being called “ingenius” for starting the “Walk of Shame Shuttle” service which provides “post-hookup” rides and coupons for Plan B for friends after a night out partying – and now VH1 wants to make her business into a reality show!
The plunging standards of morality on the nation’s campuses could not be more evident than in the story of Kellyann Wargo, 23, who began her “Walk of Shame Shuttle” during her senior year at the University of Michigan. The Catholic high school graduate who proudly boasts about wearing her uniform for Halloween every year, says she got the idea after helping out friends who woke up in a strange bed after a night of drinking and were in need of a lift home. Being an early riser, she was their “go to” person who would spare them the shame of having to walk home looking disheveled and wreaking of booze.
At first, Wargo said she would just pick them up and let them buy her breakfast, but she became so popular that she decided to turn it into a business.
“It hit me: if I can get money out of my friends, I can definitely make money off strangers,” she told HerCampus.com.
“So my roommates helped me come up with the name, I made a poster, went viral… and then I had to follow the law and get a chauffeur license.”
Rides with Wargo will now cost you $5 but you’ll get a bottle of water and a coupon for Plan B.
The business got a real boost after Wargo made a YouTube video in which she filmed herself with some of her hapless riders. One woman threw up, another looked like she was ready to slap Wargo into silence. All of them looked upset and dazed and wondering what they might have done the night before.
Not surprisingly, the video went viral and an executive at VH1 contacted her about doing a reality show.
Jill Holmes, a senior vice president at VH1 and an executive producer of the Walk of Shame Shuttle show, said that the station knew once it saw the “sizzle reel” that Wargo could carry the show.
“We just fell in love with her,” said Jill Holmes, senior vice president at VH1.
“She has such a fresh take on things and has such a positive kind of comedic style… She could take any situation and turn it into a positive. We thought ‘we have to meet her and do a show about this.’”
And so it happened. Now everyone gets to see how badly college students behave in a show produced by people who think it’s just another great comic routine. No wonder this age group is experiencing an epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, unwanted pregnancies, depression and suicide. This is serious pain! Are we really willing to laugh at this?
And then there’s the other argument, about how casual sex is so “liberating.”
“Listen ladies, no one’s judging you for your one night stands,” writes Hannah Gordon for HerCampus.com. “In fact, those of us who go home each night to drunkenly binge on mac n’ cheese applaud you. It’s girls like you who make our fore-mothers, the feminists who fought for sexual freedom, proud. You do you, girls (or should I say, you do them?).”
No, Hannah, he’s doing you and, deep down inside, you know it.
This is also why mandatory reading for every college coed ought to be Dr. Miriam Grossman’s book, Unprotected, which details the sickness, mental illness, and drug abuse going on inside college clinics as a result of the “hook-up” culture that VH1 is celebrating.
Now that’s a real reality story – and one that needs to be told!
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