Keeping Up With The Kardashians
This show has been on the air since 2007. There has been 17 seasons so far. I probably don't have to tell you that it is culturally influential. People have seen this show. Lots of people. For some reason, I had never watched this show - not even a little. I never even caught a few minutes of it flipping through stations. I think it mostly had to do with me not having cable for most of those years and thus never getting the chance to catch it. I would have had to intentionally choose it on a streaming service, and there were simply other things I was into. There's only so much time and a lot of great things to watch. I can't just willy nilly watch anything.
Then one day this summer me and Charlie just decided to start watching it - every episode from the beginning. We had a few friends that were discussing the finer point of KUWTK, and we realized that it was a large cultural phenomenon that we had no knowledge about. Plus, ya know, we were pretty certain from past experiences that if we started watching it, we would fully enjoy ourselves. So, we did it. It started when we had a choreographer friend visiting to work on a collaboration with Charlie. Her last night here we all decided to binge some reality TV, and we chose the Kardashians. That night, binge we did, and then me and Charlie continued. We're currently only on Season 7 (still pre-Kanye), but to be fair we are watching all the Kardashian reality series in order of how they originally aired, so we've also seen a fair amount of Kourtney and Khloe Take Miami, Kourtney and Kim Take New York, and Khloe and Lamar seasons.
I don't have to pay much attention to it, which is nice because I can get work done while I'm watching it, and do I enjoy it? Yes. If you ever want to discuss the Kardashians in detail, I'm in for that conversation. Are Kim and her mom Kris my very least favorite to be on screen? Yes, but I am not far enough into it to know if I dislike watching the 2 youngest daughters more. Do I generally prefer watching Scott and Kourtney over anyone else? Absolutely.
Here's the important thing though, there is usually 1, maybe 2, situations each season that involves discussion of lady-bation of some kind (mostly related to vibrators), and I like that. It also means I can SSL Review this show, which is what I'm about to do.
An SSL Review
Only depiction or discussion of female orgasm and/or female masturbation and/or the clit are eligible for SSL Review. Nothing else counts (unless I deem it counts because I want to talk about it), including plain 'ol sex if it doesn't include anything listed above. I specifically critique the realism (for instance, were the physical things happening to that women while she orgasmed things that could realistically cause orgasm for a woman?) and also speak on what the depiction/discussion reflects from and adds to the larger cultural discussion around lady-gasms and female sexuality.You can see all the SSL TV Reviews HERE (and as always you can find all the movie SSL Reviews HERE).
Vibrators, Vibrators, and Vibrators - The Scene Details
Season2 Episode4 - The search for mom's vibrator
For some reason the 3 girls get in a conversation with Jenner - their mom's spouse at the time and they mention their mom's vibrator. Jenner's like, 'nah, she doesn't have one,' and the girls become adamant that she does and she got it at a sex toy party. So, they all go into her room and start looking for it. Kris gets involved and she too denies it, and seems embarrassed. They don't find it in the end. Throughout, the daughters seem sure of their mom's vibrator and not in an accusatory way, but just that it existed and they find a lot of humor that their parents are being so weird and/or embarrased about it.
Season3 Episode8 - ibone myself
So Kim is in a long distance relationship and all 3 sisters are discussing this. Then Kourtney tells Khloe, "Kim takes vibrators to herself while they ibone." (aka video phones sex). Kim smiles.
Season4 Episode9 - Friends don't tape friend masturbating
Khloe is also in long distance relationship and she wants to make a video for him to take with him when he leaves. She's discussing this with her friend, and says maybe the friend could take her masturbating - and her friend said "I'm not going to take you masturbating." She did take her pretty much naked in a bubble bath and other ridiculous things, but not masturbation - or at least not that we saw on the show.
Season5 Episode6 - Vibe surprise
Looking at a houses for Kourtney, Khloe and Kim find vibrators in the master bedside drawers. They tell eachother about it, laugh, look at them. The camera does get a glimpse inside and it looks like a bunch of vibrators in there. At one point, they close the drawer and one of the vibrator starts up and they have to scramble to make it stop.
I'm sure that was a just a dumb scenario they thought up that they thought would be funny, so they got permission, planted the vibes and had their funny little scene, but either way, they got vibrators into the show, and I appreciate that.
Season5 Episode11 - Don't share vibrators
Kourtney and Scott are hanging out in New York with her brother Rob's ex deciding if they should move to NY. The 2 women said a perk would be that they could start sharing shoes and clothes and then they said panties. Then Scott chimes in and said 'vibrators' and they said 'vibrators, sometimes in the weekend.' They're all laughing.
Junk in the Trunk 2 - Baskasm
This show is the deleted scenes show they have after some seasons, and this is a deleted scene. Kim has a break up and her sisters got her a sex basket and said it was her new boyfriend and all acting silly and laughing about it. There was a vibrating caterpillar, anal beads, edible panties dental damn. There were no dildos.
My Thoughts - i.e. the actual SSL review
First off, I'm in another country right now and I can't get access to the Kardashian episodes here. I didn't think of that when I was planning to use some time to go back into the episodes to re-check the scenes and pull out quotes. That's normally how I do these, but this one is just from my notes. Luckily I also didn't watch it too long ago, so I remember what my notes mean pretty well.
Okay, so seven women in these varied episodes of Keeping Up With The Kardashians were confronted with either their own or some other woman's vibrator masturbation habit: Kris, Kim, Kourtney, Khloe, Khloe's friend, the brother's ex, and whatever lady lived in the house in which they found the bedside vibes. Of those, only Kris, the mother, in the very first instance of vibratory masturbation insinuations on this show - seemed the least bit phased by it. Her denial, however, seemed softened to me by how adamant her daughters were that she had one and how nonchalant they were about it. I mean they brought it up because they thought it was funny, but to me it wasn't because they were bothered by it, but because they knew it would get their mother riled. It was as if they clearly knew she had one because they had discussed it, but they also knew that her spouse wasn't aware. I felt like the real cultural impact was showing a generational difference in feelings about vibrators - that their mother was embarrassed and afraid to let her spouse know that she masturbated was ridiculed. I feel like the overall impact of that scene implied that it's oldschool and silly to not be into vibrators (for yourself or your spouse) and to be worried about using them or including them in partnered sex life.
All the other discussion drops about vibrators and masturbation were either matter of fact or dropped for laughs but not in a masturbation-is-pathetic-and-I'm-making-fun-of-your-patheticness sort of way, but just a bringing-private-things-up-and-it's-a-little-taboo-and-embarrassing-but-we-all-do-it way. In, fact, I particularly liked that for all of the Kardashian sisters, it was implied that their significant others either knew about or were involved in their vibrator use, which I am incredibly happy about because it normalizes men being fine, even excited, about women taking their orgasms and/or pleasure into their own hands. This is important because there is a long history and lots of media depictions/discussions that normalizes men being threatened by vibrators because supposedly it means that the men aren't fucking their woman right. That needs to go away because that fear is grounded in the absolutely incorrect assumption that a man's dick is going to ever fuck a woman into orgasm. It's not. Any orgasm a woman has with or without a dude around her is most likely (and probably only) going to come from stimulation of the clitoral/vulva area where her actual organ of sexual pleasure is located (because contrary to popular belief the vagina is not the female organ of sexual pleasure).
I also like that in every single one of these scenes there is a woman that knows about another woman's use of vibrators. It insinuates that women talk about these things together and aren't worried about other women judging them for that practice - even if they are worried about what males in their life might think.
The Vulva Rating
I never thought I'd be giving Keeping Up With The Kardashians a 5 vulva rating, but here it is. I think in this show there is a particular nonchalant attitude about masturbation - while in a relationship and when outside of one. I think it is particularly impactful because even though there are clearly set-up, partially scripted scenarios, people feel like it's real life. That feeling of it being a rare look into these women's 'real life' makes it seem like masturbation is a very 'real' thing, and that's meaningful to people.
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