So you must not want children...

I am a very suggestible person. I blame moving around so much at a young age, but I take on the characteristics (including accents) of the people around me at warp speed. My first move to New Zealand at age 13 resulted in me replacing my accent in about 2 months after some kids laughed at me saying 'can't' (or 'cawn't') when we were reading aloud in class. The moment I realised it was a problem however, was when I worked in a prison and started thinking selling methamphetamine was a viable (and lucrative) career choice. But since then (and after promptly leaving that job) it hasn't been too much of a problem, mostly because I've associated with people who are like me or tolerant of difference. Unfortunately my move to Australia has brought me back into the danger zone.

But unlike being influenced by people with criminal records, these suggestions are a bit more benign. And these suggestions seem to be that a proper life for a woman is to marry young, change your surname, either stop working or do a few part time hours and have children as soon as possible after marriage. 

Now I'm aiming for neutrality in this discussion, and I hope that my anger at being judged doesn't manifest itself as judgment of the judgers (phew!). But I genuinely do not hold any judgment for these lifestyle choices. They are just not mine. And the objection I have is not that people make these choices, it is at the insistence that these are the only viable choices.

It's probably a combination of factors that had led me back here. The first is likely that I'm a new immigrant to a place where I don't know very many people, so my social circle is limited to people I or my husband works with and their friends (along with people we knew from New Zealand). The second is that I've never worked for an NGO before, and this world seems to attract a certain kind of person - one that doesn't mind the low pay and loves the flexible hours - perhaps because they are raising children or are married to someone who's income is enough that the pay is not that important. I don't know how justified the third one is, but I wonder if it is in part because the traditional paradigm is much stronger here than in New Zealand.

We all know Australia is the lucky country. Blessed with abundant natural resources (and a willingness to exploit the shit out of them), the wage gap between Australia and New Zealand is constantly on the Kiwi political agenda. But I wonder whether New Zealand's low wages and high cost of living has been both a blessing and a curse for the country. Beyond the obvious cheap exports and cheap labour stuff, from a sociological perspective, many New Zealanders would never be able to support a family long-term with one income. And maybe that financial pressure has led New Zealanders to be more open to non-traditional family situations. And maybe that has led us to be more open to women having a greater role outside the family.

I've spoken before about the much more extroverted nature of the Australian personality, so perhaps this is part of it. Perhaps my Kiwi compatriots also thought I was some kind of sexless unfeminine feminazi and were just too polite and reserved to mention it. But I don't think so. I think in general, that people in New Zealand are freer to lead the lives they want to without as much judgment. It's no utopia, but even looking at foreign policies (nuclear-free-NZ versus we'll-send-our-troops-to-a-war-we-have-nothing-to-do-with-to-please-you-Australia) New Zealanders seem a bit more OK with difference.

If anything, the recent Julia Gillard-Kevin Rudd debacle has illustrated to me the strong hold the traditional paradigm has here. Sure people were nasty to Helen Clark, but this vitriol has been unrelenting and shameless. An Age opinion piece questioned Australians' distrust of Gillard and whether it was due to their inability to reconcile political power and the role of a woman. There is so much not to trust about her. She is career-driven, atheist, childless and unmarried.

And unfortunately most of those terms can describe me. In my New Zealand life, most of these decisions never really warranted an eyebrow raise. But when asked how long I've been married, the most common follow up question is 'And no children yet! [horrified face!] So you must not want children!' When I corrected someone who assumed my surname was my husband's, I was met with more shock - 'But why? You're married!' 'Working and studying - why bother? It's a waste of time!' 

But in what I hope is a marker of me growing up, this time I've been a lot firmer in my beliefs. I know that working and studying is important to me, I know that keeping our surnames was a mutual decision that my husband and I made together and has nothing to do with the quality of our marriage, and I know that we're not quite ready for children until we complete our studies and I have my chronic health condition a little better managed.

Sometimes I think it would be nice to comfortably fit in the dominant paradigm and that it would be nice to not have to explain my choices all the time. But society doesn't change by people making themselves fit where they don't. And who would run my methamphetamine business if I had a gaggle of kids to raise?

Kissing the girls and making them cry

I love reality TV. So much so that I'd say it's one my defining characteristics. 9 times out of 10 I'd rather be watching reality TV than almost anything else. It's embarrassing and I don't understand it but I've come to accept that I have incredibly low-brow tastes in television.

In fact, my tastes are so low-brow that I can't even handle good reality TV. You know the kind where you actually learn something, like Man vs Wild, or the kind where people with genuine talent compete for industry recognition, like Project Runway. None of that hoity toity stuff for me. My basic rule of thumb is if it isn't on VH1 or MTV, I'm not interested.

So when someone recommended Jennifer Pozner's Reality Bites Back to me, and I ordered it, I worried about my apparent masochistic tendencies. You don't purposefully ruin something you enjoy right? This book was going to be a takedown of everything I held sacred, my belief that I too could be a top model if only I were more fierce, or that my million dollar prize was one phonecall to a friend away. I prepared myself for my second major life disappointment (after Tom and Nicole of course).

Pozner's book is an excellent and conversational introduction to feminist media analysis. Her message isn't devastating to a reality TV fan such as myself. It's not to stop watching, but to instead watch with a critical eye. And most of her arguments aren't surprising. It isn't hard to see that a show like America's Next Top Model doesn't exactly promote an anti-racist or body acceptance agenda. Or to see how a show like Wife Swap promotes animosity between women, playing off the "ignorant" "pre-feminist" stay at home mums against the "selfish" "defeminised" childless or working mothers. Pozner paints a striking picture of a genre of TV that owes it's success to bringing racism, homophobia and 1950s stereotypes back into fashion. But what I wasn't expecting was the incredibly strange phenomenon of what I like to call 'Girl Crying Porn' on one of the most harmless and sterile of all the reality TV shows.

The Bachelor is one of my favourite reality TV shows. I love it all, the boozy cocktail parties to the over the top helicopter dates to the declarations of love within two minutes of meeting. I watched Ashley Herbert's season on the Bachelorette pre Reality Bites Back and was appalled by her humiliating rejection of the loveable but dorky Ben Flajnik. I was ecstatic to hear that he'd be the next Bachelor (I'm admitting a lot of stuff here...) but didn't anticipate my new reaction to the show with the insights Reality Bites Back had given me.

One of Pozner's major critiques of the Bachelor is the racial uniformity of the show. The show seems to exist in a world that is not only free of interracial dating, but free of minorities completely. For the first few seasons, one of two women of colour were cast amid twenty white women, and they stuck around for at least two episodes before that fatal rose ceremony. Nowadays they don't even bother with tokenism and for the past three seasons I watched at least, all contestants have been white. The Bachelor or Bachelorette is always white. For a show that is up to 23 seasons, this is no coincidence. Pozner believes the Bachelor is meant to be a kind of aspirational dating scenario. Its a fairytale where a beautiful woman meets her wealthy Prince Charming who woos her with helicopter dates and expensive jewelry, gives her the final rose and sweeps her off into the distance. And we all know there is no room for black people in fairytales. In contrast, dating shows who heavily feature minorities and are comfortable with interracial dating, like Flavor of Love, are modern minstrel shows. Dating in the black world, according to these shows, is characterised by promiscuity, physical violence and gold plated grilles in lieu of diamonds. In other words, it's a joke.

But a critique that Pozner only alludes to in her talk of the 'exquisite cruelty' and misogyny of reality TV is one that I haven't been able to get over, and that is the Bachelor's obsession with making girls cry. Watch the sneak peak of this season of the Bachelor, and see what you notice (especially at 1:36 and then again at 2:42):

One of the main selling point of this season seems to be that if you watch it, you will get to see lots of beautiful women crying over a dude they've known for five minutes. If Pozner's central argument is true (that reality TV owes its popularity to the fact that it plays to and reinforces our deeply ingrained societal biases about men and women) what does this season of the Bachelor tell us about ourselves? What are our beliefs about women? About dating? Let's take a look at some stills from the show:

And you know what? This is less than half the stills I had to choose from. In a show that has had six episodes so far.

If we like reality TV because it reinforces our beliefs about the world then, while Flavor of Love illustrates that we believe low socioeconomic women of colour are objects of ridicule, the Bachelor illustrates that we're obsessed with seeing beautiful white women put in their place and crying. My theory is that this is similar to the point made above regarding Wife Swap - that women are constantly being pitted against each other. It's schadenfreude mixed with misogyny mixed with classism and baked until we get a delightful shit-show of a mess that is the Bachelor. It breeds hatred and superiority while, almost by definition, excluding minorities from a world I'm pretty sure we don't even want a part of. In this world, men are the gatekeepers of relationships, of money, of power. Women are the flustered messes who lose all dignity and rationality in pursuit of a man. And who cry. A lot.

As I've watched the show I've been more and more shocked by its exploitation of its, often very young and very naive, female contestants. Last week a 23 year old woman was pressured into admitting she suffered an eating disorder so that she wouldn't be sent home. The week before that a contestant fainted and potentially injured herself, and this was a major selling point in the pre-season publicity. And the worst thing about it is that it pretends to be an aspirational show, a glamorous dream life we all desire. And it almost literally sells the tears of women.

Before I read Reality Bites Back I was aware of the exploitation and latent racism of shows like the Jersey Shore or Jerry Springer (showing my age here). But it's the Bachelor that I've reserved my true hatred for. Nobody wins when you have TV like this. TV that says men must buy women's love and women must do anything in return. TV that says there is no room for interracial dating, or any minorities in a dream dating world. Nobody wins, except maybe Mike Fleiss.