2022
Reality television has never been my thing. I find it boring and performative, and particularly dislike the negativity and backstabbing on elimination shows that make even me—thousands of miles away, safely on my couch, presumably indifferent—feel crappy and hopeless about humanity. Save for the warm friendships and alluring science of The Great British Baking Show, or the occasional uplifting, hilarious transformation story on Queer Eye, I'm out.
Dating shows are no exception, and in fact probably the worst offenders in my book, of the make-you-feel-shitty and bad-role-model-for-humanity effects. But this year, an old classmate was cast on The Bachelor and everyone was talking about it. Suddenly this low-substance, high-spectacle extravaganza became personal, intriguing, and culturally important for me, so I started watching. Very quickly, I got angry—then, I started doing some research (thank you TV Insider).
Crash course for those who share my allergy: The Bachelor is an American reality show currently airing its twenty-sixth season. Its success has spawned an international franchise with many variations and spinoffs. The plot centers around a male bachelor who is expected to select a female partner from among a pool of 25 to 30 romantic interests who appear at the start of the show. What ensues is a cringeworthy series of events, parties, and dates during which the women fawn over and jealously compete for the love of one man, who eliminates women in each round until he chooses one, presumably as a long-term partner, in the final episode.
Let's take the more obvious horrors off the table first. Forget the embarrassment that any self-respecting female might feel in watching 30 women squabbling and backstabbing each other in competition for a man they just met. Forget the commodification of love and privacy issues in attempting to create real romantic intimacy on national television. Forget the catty, cringey dialogue totally devoid of substance that highlights and encourages inauthentic, performative versions of female personality. Forget that the purpose of the show is to find partnership, yet these relationships last less than four months on average, and only two of the last twenty-five seasons' couples are still together (one from last year).
The issues go much deeper. Ultimately, it's a show about assimilation: less than 20% of contestants on the last ten seasons of the show were people of color (with recent seasons bringing up the average after many well-deserved PR nightmares about lack of representation), and they were often mixed race and white-presenting. Even worse, women of color are almost always eliminated in the first few episodes of the show, and only one (half-Filipina) has ever won, furthering a white-centric narrative that normalizes not only the power of white men, but their desire to make "exotic stops," as one critic put it, on the way to ultimately white partners. Even worse, on this current season, some of the women of color are absolutely badass—two with impressive graduate degrees and one Olympian—among a sea of white nurses and spray tanners, which perpetuates a narrative that minorities have to work twice as hard to get half as far.
On top of the race issue is a lingering ignorance around mental health (this season featured baseless accusations of ADHD) and age (women over 27 were dubbed as "cougars" and the average age of female contestants is 26 for an average 31-year-old bachelor). Moreover, the show's Christian undertones of sex and marriage are also out-of-date: sex is reserved for the final three women on the show, who are ceremoniously given keys to the "fantasy suites" where they can spend a night with The Bachelor sans cameras. On what basis are the producers choosing to dictate when sex is appropriate, and to restrict and commodify it as such?
Next in my line of fire is the reinforcement of traditional beauty and sexuality standards. The female contestants are almost always conventionally and heavily made-up, in sparkly heels and traditional ball gowns, dolled up to fawn over a man. Much worse, there is zero body diversity: there has only ever been one plus-size contestant (she was white, and eliminated in the first week of season 19) while two-thirds of American women are plus-size.
At the end of the day, when we justify all this not-so-subtle dissonance by telling ourselves that shows like The Bachelor are just "guilty pleasures," we're actually reinforcing and celebrating social values that inform our instincts and biases in real life. And it's terrifyingly easy to normalize these problematic trends—many of my (mostly female) friends who watch the show admit that they were at first appalled, then settled into the fun of the interpersonal drama, easily able to forget the horrific ways that race, beauty, and gender are portrayed.
Entertainment for entertainment's sake is a wonderful luxury, but its influence extends way beyond the couch. Ignoring these utterly outdated but mass-appeal cultural standards is holding us back and limiting any hard-earned cultural and gender progress we're making off the couch.