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.