Caity Weaver is such a good writer:
“Jackass” needed the infrastructure of American suburbia to exist: well-kept supermarket parking lots as vast as oceans, abandoned at night but illuminated for safety, divided by neatly planted ornamental bushes, encircled by curbs — curbs into which shopping carts could be rammed as violently fast as possible, upending human cargo. It needed middle-class parents who could attend to their offspring’s first few rungs on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, leaving those children nourished and carefree, with endless hours of empty time. It needed chain stores whose corporate anonymity made their property fair game for destruction. It needed camcorders to become so cheap and accessible to the average person that children could be given total unsupervised access to them. It needed skateboards, a terrifying American invention.
...
“When we first started, there was never going to be a girl in it,” he said. “We didn’t think it was funny for girls to get hurt. For us, it was like, ‘That’s not funny’ — hurting a girl.” Now, paradoxically, it would be in poor taste to not hurt a girl on “Jackass” — and so they do.
