Entertainment

Would You Use The Walk of Shame Shuttle?

by Emma Cueto

Get ready America, because the Walk of Shame Shuttle is coming to a television near you! VH1 has officially picked up a reality program centered around the Walk of Shame Shuttle that started in Ann Arbor, Michigan. So this has no potential to be a disaster at all.

Kellyann Wargo, a University of Michigan graduate, first started the shuttle as an undergrad when she, as a habitual early riser, often found herself picking up her friends from various apartments after a wild night out, and letting them pay for her breakfast before dropping them off at home. She realized that what started as a nice gesture for her friends could become a business, so she started offering rides, a bottle of water, and a high-five to anyone who called for the price of five dollars.

After her video commercial for the service went viral, though, production company Brian Graden Media approached Wargo about making a show. Now, a year and a half later, VH1 is officially going ahead with it.

In general, I'm not a big fan of the term "walk of shame" and all that it implies. I think fellow Bustle writer Lucia Peters hit the nail on the head when she said:

I don’t believe in the Walk of Shame. I prefer to think of it as a Walk of Awesome, because why the hell should we be ashamed of exercising our right to have sex? Yeah, maybe our hair doesn’t look as amazing as it did when we left home to go out the night before .... But who the hell cares? “Walk of Shame” says “slut shaming” to me. “Walk of Awesome,” on the other hand, is… well, awesome.

So from that perspective, this show has a lot of potential to be awful, especially given the little we've seen of Wargo, who will be featured in the show's Ann Arbor portion (other filming locations include Boston, Los Angeles, and Miami).Although James Holmes, a senior producer at VH1, says that they think Wargo has a very "positive kind of comedic style," in the mock commercial that brought the whole thing to Hollywood attention, Wargo's brand of humor seems to skew a little slut-shamey. The commercial opens with Wargo sitting on the front porch of her apartment mocking women going by for their walk of shame attire, and at one point actually outright calling a girl a slut. The only guy she sees, on the other hand, gets a "good for you." Ugh.

On the other hand, it might not be fair to judge Wargo for a three-minute commercial she never expected to be seen by more than a handful of people. Plus she does include a high-five in her services. So maybe there's hope? With any luck VH1 will treat the walk of shame like a walk of awesome. And if not, we've survived this many seasons of Teen Mom, so I suppose we'll survive this, too.

Image: Ginger Ambition/YouTube