Uncle Jesse isn’t quite so family-friendly as he used to be. John Stamos, who played “Uncle Jesse” in the family-oriented hit TV show “Full House,” is set to host a new show in which he prompts friends and celebrities to open up about their first sexual experience.
Entitled “Losing Your Virginity,” the new show is launching as a Yahoo! webseries in which Stamos interviews mostly-celebrity guests to reveal the details about their “first time.” Stamos is interested in whether his guest’s experiences were “a loss of innocence,” or humorous, or … (wait for it) … “love.” Although he insists it will not be graphic, he also suggested the show will re-create the guest’s loss-of-virginity experiences “with puppets or dolls or something – animated possibly.”
Despite its full title of “Losing Your Virginity with John Stamos,” Stamos protests that the show won’t be dirty. But his promotional interviews indicate it’ll be pretty edgy. He pressured TODAY show host Matt Lauer, for instance, to describe his first experience, asking how old he was at the time and whether it was “in a cornfield.” Stamos took the same suggestive approach in his interview with HuffPo Live host Abby Huntsman, who declined the question.
Stamos’ explanation of where he got the idea for the show is both depressing and revealing: it came from the moment he barely recognized his “first” when they met again years afterwards. “I was at my parent’s house and this gal ... brought her sister over,” he explained, “... And I realized, ‘Oh, this girl looks familiar … wait a minute… now I know where I know her from.’ I figured out that that was the lady that I lost my virginity to. It was just interesting.”
Interesting? A better term might be simply TMI. But not for Stamos. “TMI doesn’t exist anymore,” he insisted. “There’s not ‘too much.’ ... This is a common denominator.” Even he had to admit, though, that the reunion with his “first” was “uncomfortable.” “My parents were standing right there,” he said, “... She started to tell me her side of the story but I said I didn’t want to hear it. Clearly we have two different viewpoints.”
Maybe it would have been less awkward if he reminded her that hook-ups like theirs can lead to lots of problems, like STDs. No doubt he’ll be sure to mention that fact in his new show, too.
It’s not too surprising, though, that Stamos’ career is taking this tasteless turn, since it was only a few years ago that he was playing a gay wedding planner in A&E’s gay-marriage-loving “Wedding Wars.” It looks like we can log this one away as just another attempt to make casual sex lighthearted or sentimental and force the normalization of sexual promiscuity.
