By Robert Park ’11, Contributor

Why is it socially unacceptable for a guy to watch Gossip Girl? Aside from the preconceived notion that Gossip Girl is meant for teenage girls, the show has a great storyline about privileged teens in the Upper East Side of New York City. As a guy, I thought that Gossip Girl was a cheesy teen angst drama like 90210 and Gilmore Girls. Boy was I wrong.

I guess my interest in Gossip Girl started the summer before my senior year of High School when I was taking classes at Northwestern. Seeing my roommate watching something on his laptop, I decided to take a little peek at the screen. To my surprise, it was Gossip Girl! At first glance, I thought it was just another ridiculous show meant to attract tween girls. I occasionally glanced back at the screen, and couldn’t help getting absorbed in the main characters’ scandalous love affairs. An example of one such “scandalous affair” was the unspoken tension between Nate and Serena, a driving force of season one. These feelings were confirmed when Nate confessed to Blair that he had “sexual relations” with Serena the night before she left, while at the same time Charles ‘Chuck’ Bass, the bad boy, revealed to Serena that he spied on them while they were having “sexual relations.” And all in one episode. The ability to squeeze so much drama into 60 minutes really opened my heart to Gossip Girl and inspired me to watch more.

After the Northwestern program was over, I went home with a need to finish the Gossip Girl saga. My neighbors lended me the first three seasons and I was enthralled. I witnessed the characters progress from juniors to seniors, and then to college students. The characters seemed very realistic because they dealt with  common teenage problems, only magnified and concentrated a thousand fold. Gossip Girl went from being just some ridiculous show to something I could relate to, albeit in the most general of terms. Like Tim Riggins of Friday Night Lights, Dr. House of House, or even Sue Sylvester from Glee, the characters from Gossip Girl will resonate with me for the rest of my life (or maybe till college).

Now that school has resumed, I guess my obsession has died down. But every now and then, especially on Mondays at 9 p.m., I turn on the television to watch a bit of Gossip Girl. Sure, I have homework to do, essays to write, applications to be filled, but I like to set aside a little time for myself to watch my favorite teen drama. I suppose it never really was an obsession after all, just a mechanism to distract my restless mind from the endless real pressures of high school. And both guys and girls need that kind of distraction.
XOXO, Robert Park

Photo courtesy of byterology.com