Hot tubs! Hair-pulling! Boy-on-boy wrestling! Tila Tequila turned an MTV dating show into a gender-bending free-for-all. She’s 4 feet, 11 inches of trouble and 180 proof that reality is what you make it.
Tila Tequila. Boy, is there truth in
that namesake: stuff that sends your spirits
soaring, gets you acting like a moron, then leaves you sick and full of shame
the next day. After blazing into fame as a MySpace sensation—where her soft-core
photos and diligent accessibility won her a fame-launching 2 million
friends—Tila is now enjoying a new kind of celebrity: an obscure object of
desire, playing havoc with young libidos on
A
Shot at Love, the highest-rated show on MTV last year. With
A Shot at Love, Tila has become a bona fide
American phenomenon, a lightning rod for national discussions about gender and
desire, reality and illusion, mud-wrestling and Jell-O shots.
“Love”—or
at least its ADD-plagued, MySpace-floating avatar—is the engine of this
particularly cutting-edge reality show. Like
Flavor of and
Rock of,
A
Shot at Love assembles an array of twentysomething exhibitionists to
cohabitate, lounge about in swimwear, compete in messy challenges and try to win
the sole affections of the star. Its deceptively simple twists are that a) the
star is not an aging neo-Hefner but a young bisexual woman; and b) the
competitors, both male and female, genuinely lose their minds.
There’s no
sign of pathology at first. But by episode four, a rejected male schoolteacher
has been bounced from the house for brawling with a rival and is banging on
windows and lowing like a steer. By episode six, a rejected dancer has leaped
upon a blond rival to yank her hair, gotten dragged off by producers and dropped
sobbing on the carpet. All the while, the phrase “I’m in love with Tila” gets
tossed around like “Where’s my sunscreen?”—a testament to the irresistible,
omnisexual, brain-addling magnetism of a four-foot-eleven enigma wrapped in a
thong bikini and named after a Mexican liquor.
So it’s not without some
fear that
Blender comes calling on this
Tila Tequila. If the show is any indication, there’s a serious danger that we,
too, will fall in love with her.
We arrange to meet in public, in the
lounge of a posh Atlanta hotel. A jazz trio plays John Coltrane’s “Moment’s
Notice,” and lilacs fill the tables around us, as Nguyen, suited for later duty
as party hostess, enters to sit demurely across a table by the wall—so chosen
for its relative inaccessibility to Tila freaks. Right off the bat,
Blender shares our concern about falling for
this succubus of reality TV.
“You mean you’re not in love with me yet?”
asks Nguyen, mock scandalized. “Well, maybe after we kiss.”
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