Why We Love MTV’s “Jersey Shore”

By Heather Huntington on December 16th, 2009

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There’s been a lot of talk about “Jersey Shore” lately. We all know it’s a guilty pleasure, but deeper people are questioning if it propagates negative and potentially false stereotypes of Italian Americans. That it is made up, glorified for viewership purposes.

I am here to say that that concern is hooey. I say this because I am from the North Shore of Massachusetts, where Guido culture is as common as air.

The only shock to me about this show is that the existence of ‘guidos’ and ‘guidettes’ is shocking to others. Where I grew up, this term was used with abandon, and this was over 20 years ago. Boston is predominantly Italian- and Irish-Catholic, so much so that it wasn’t until I went to college in Michigan that I discovered that the whole country — nay, the whole world — wasn’t the same.

In my town, the guidos ruled the school, and all the most popular kids had last names like Venza and Guigliano. As one of the town’s few Jewish residents, I could only look on with envy.

In the ensuing years, I have lived in the rest of the country where guidos not only don’t rule, but are a rarity. This was brought home to me a year ago when a friend was working on a cruise ship that docked out of New York and was popular with the New Jersey crowd. “The guys all have aggressively waxed eyebrows and sculpted abs,” she remarked to me incredulously. “Yes. That is because they are guidos,” I tried to explain, to both her and her coworkers. They did not understand.

Now that “Jersey Shore” has come to the air waves, I feel vindicated. Finally the world will be able to understand tangibly what my youth was like. The protests that it represents a stereotype of Italian-American culture are inevitable and expected.

But the thing is, the guido culture is 100% real. It is one facet of the Italian-American experience, just like all the others. Not all Jews are Hassidic, not all Irish are part of a political machine. But in the meantime: welcome to my youth, America. Sit back and enjoy the abs.