Bad Girls Club: Cheap Perfume and Boozy Breath

It is useless to ignoreThe Bad Girls Club, starting its third season on Tuesday. It is the crack cocaine of unhinged party-girl hatin’-and-disrespectin’ freakouts. It is the credit default swap frenzy before the meltdown. It is the meltdown, too. It is the cheap perfume, airless inanity and boozy breath in the Oxygen network atmosphere. It is for the unrepentant girl channel like an evil fembot lab, wrangling the hot and bothersome from around the country, shaking them up in a Los Angeles mansion, and sending them out into the public to wreak havoc on poor clubbers. It is pure and ferocious, dazzling and awful, stupid and shrewd. It is a trashcan symphony of the word “bitch,” which is for the assembled seven beauties what that polymorphic word “snow” is for Eskimos. It is a non-think drunk tank, a ’70s women-in-prison flick, and a bedlam melodrama combined, a teeny-brain-tini and yet as hearty as a steak-and-potatoes feast. It is for straight guys and lesbians a fatal attraction of crazy-chick eroticism, for gay guys a rip-snorting tell-off farce, and for straight women a what-if horror show. It is bad for you in ways that throttle your inner shame and drown it in a gold-plated, pimped-out bathtub. It is now an hour long, which is either the dream its fans have always wanted, or a sinister dare. It is on my TiVo. It wins.