When Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson labeled Bachelor Juan Pablo Galavis “the most hated man in America,” perhaps he represented the feelings of the 10 million viewers of the finale. In that finale, Juan Pablo inverted the romantic premise of the show: that one handsome man will select a soul mate from a pool of 25 beautiful women who put themselves at the mercy of public humiliation in gladiatorial competition for his love. More than any scripted TV show, The Bachelor (2002) hews closely to the conservative marriage plot structure—at the end, we are promised, two people made socially dysfunctional by their singleton status will experience the relief of declared love. But by the finale, Galavis had tarnished his crown with smears of homophobia, slut-shaming, and general sleaziness. His decision to dump 32-year-old hairstylist Clare Crawley after a catastrophic final date and choose—but not propose—to 26-year-old nurse Nikki Ferrell summed up a season that wallowed in palpable cringe. After more than a decade of testing out all possible versions of hackneyed drama its romantic formula could produce, in its eighteenth season, The Bachelor had to dethrone its Prince Charming. The ensuing online backlash was spontaneous and merciless, but exemplified how the show paradoxically entices viewers to identify with the pleasures of rejecting its patently ideological fantasy. In recent seasons, the program’s increasingly self-reflexive, camp aesthetic has licensed critical viewers to watch from an ironic stance—establishing constructive forums for feminist discourse in spite of its ultimately misogynistic content.
Certainly for some viewers, Juan’s transgressions were tantamount to sacrilege against The Bachelor’s doctrine of true love, and their ire was directed towards his blatantly misogynistic behavior. However, others—like Bustle live-blogger Henning Fog and countless Twitter-users—seized upon the opportunity to critique the discrepancy between the show’s transparently staged, sexist spectacles and its earnest claims to authenticity ("'The Bachelor: After the Final Rose’”). One lifestyle blogger hailed the episode as “the equivalent of a Super-Bowl-sized home team win a long-time coming for all the progressive feminists who watch this show like a car crash” (Em & Lo). These viewers recognize that The Bachelor offers constructs of romantic love and femininity that cannot meet any standard of authenticity.
In her seminal 1964 essay, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Susan Sontag argues that camp is “the sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience” (10). Sontag suggests that camp therefore rests on a foundation of earnestness, which can only then be “corrupted” by self-conscious parody. Because The Bachelor’s format has hardly changed from its first season, at which time the program strove to gain legitimacy in the early 00s TV landscape, several baked-in mechanisms work to insist on the credibility of its romantic alternate reality—these form the “dead serious” kernels of camp (6). First, the program forces each competitor to invoke the importance of authenticity—those participating “for the wrong reasons” risk expulsion. Those wrong reasons include anything outside of finding the perfect soulmate: ulterior motives such as financial gain, social media fame, and sex. The program also normalizes the women’s required participation in a bizarre sexualized harem, but punishes those among them who express overt physical desire, jealousy, or seek sexual attention from the Bachelor. The contest therefore becomes who can most convincingly perform the sincerity of their feelings for the the Bachelor, but only within the stereotypical strictures of the competition. While these rules would be harmful if internalized by viewers, their explicit codification denaturalizes the women’s performance of gender, acknowledging the work required to maintain femininity.
Regarding female gender performativity, Alice Kuzniar argues that “camp is not only the excessive imitation of femininity but the awareness of the failure of imitation” (74). The Bachelor demands, mantra-like, that the women must “be themselves” and express their “true” feelings, but it is ironically the most sincere contestants whose behavior is portrayed as extreme and unacceptable. This is best illustrated in the case of Jubilee Sharpe, a contestant on season 20 with Bachelor Ben Higgins. From the get-go, Jubilee had a profile wildly divergent from that of the typical Bachelor contestant: black, the last surviving member of her Haitian family, and a military veteran. On a show that usually exploits sob stories as a shorthand for bachelor-contestant chemistry, her past actually appeared to emerge organically from her one-on-one conversation with Ben. He seemed genuinely touched by her vulnerability, later musing, “Jubilee’s willing to talk about the stuff in life most people aren’t willing to talk about,” and praising her “depth” (“Soccer Date”). Even infamous Bachelor-cynic and commentator “Reality Steve” declared the moment “honest” and “real” (Carbone). However, when two episodes later she expressed justified feelings of jealousy in a group date setting, her authenticity suddenly violated the code of the harem and earned her a swift ticket home. In abruptly rejecting Jubilee for not conforming to the show’s construct of femininity after praising her openness, Ben stumbles into campy, self-parodic territory (Shugart & Waggoner 2).
As media scholar Dana Cloud notes, this untenable contradiction between “self-disclosure and self-restraint” reveal the show’s demands for truth as cynical (422). These moments of contradiction break faith with realist frame of The Bachelor and invite viewers to enjoy the show from a detached or ironic stance. For example, Jubilee’s exit prompted Vulture journalist Ali Barthwell to name her “the only one on the show who seems like a real human rather than a robot built in a Lululemon powered by mimosas” ("The Bachelor Recap”). This approach clearly recognizes the manufactured character of the show’s reality. She draws attention to the robotic fashion in which the other contestants enact stereotypical white femininity, and opposes it to Jubilee’s “real” but out-of-bounds personality. Sowards and Renegar argue that the foundation of post-modern feminism should be irony because irony exploits the “debilitating contradictions of modernist feminisms,” a concept closely aligned with “reclaiming” harmful elements of the dominant culture (Cloud 431). Camp, a mode of reception which The Bachelor encourages through its form and content, lets audiences in on the joke—that traditional conceptions of romance and gender are incongruous and absurd. In this way, the program constitutes a virtual microcosm for feminist analysis, an alternate universe in which the often subtler mechanisms enabling the oppression of women take exaggerated form.
Works Cited
Barthwell, Ali. "The Bachelor Recap: Snatchin’ Roses". Vulture. Vulture, 2 Feb. 2017. Web. 21 Feb. 2017.
Carbone, Steve (RealitySteve). “An honest, real moment on the "Bachelor." Savor it, people. Probably won't get another one til around season 39.” 18 Jan. 2016, 6:23 PM. Tweet.
Cloud, Dana. "The Irony Bribe And Reality Television: Investment And Detachment In the Bachelor.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 27.5 (2010): 413-437. Web.
Fog, Henning. "'The Bachelor: After the Final Rose': Registering my Disgust With ABC." Bustle. Bustle, 12 May 2014. Web. 20 Feb. 2017.
Kuzniar, Alice A. The Queer German Cinema. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
Shugart, H. A., & Waggoner, C. E. (2008). Making camp: Rhetorics of transgression in U.S. popular culture. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
“Soccer Date.” The Bachelor, season 20, episode 3, ABC, 18 Jan. 2010. abc.go.com, http://abc.go.com/shows/the-bachelor/episode-guide/season-20/03-week-3-soccer-date
"The Bachelor’s Big Reveal: Juan Pablo & the Fantasy Suite Charade." Em & Lo. Em & Lo, 26 Feb. 2014. Web. 21 Feb. 2017.
The main argument as I see is that the the bachelor while being misogynistic is “constructive forums for feminist discourse” as stated in the original blog post. The post talks about how the women in the show are often very cookie cutter and that there is an unspoken set of rules that dictate how the contestants are supposed to act.
ReplyDeleteThe author of the post also fails to mention that the Bachelorette exists. The bachelorette is the equivalent of the Bachelor however it is one women and 25 men. Although the show may have been made as a gimmick the fact that it is not mentioned in the essay begs the question what the author would have to say about it. Is the bachelorette anti-man? Absolutely not however if one version of the show is misogynistic when its one man but then it is acceptable when just a single woman.
I agree that the program is rather reminiscent of a harem and that it has a set of rules that are not fair and are very far from realistic. However, it is all manufactured. Manufactured love has never been a concept that has worked. We can see this in arranged marriages and other societal structures that force marriage or love, historically this has disproportionately hurt women over men. To try and study the bachelor as if it is a realistic scenario is most likely not the best use of time as although there are some themes that would be valuable the vast majority of the show is a scam. The show was made to make money and it is still on Television because it can create drama that most often either pits women against each other or puts a woman or women on the show in a negative light. The show was created by Mike Fleiss a person who identifies as a human male. Because of this the structure was never made to facilitate positive interaction between the contestants, quite the opposite in fact.
I would recommend not watching the show as a forum for feminist discussion as that only gives money to the producers of the misogynistic content. Finding a different source for feminist discussion might lead to more beneficial outcomes because the alternative source could be significantly more realistic.
I think this argument is incredibly well constructed, but it is especially interesting to track the show’s evolution from inception to its current iteration and how the content has evolved. What began as a show that seeminly displayed pure “reality” and drew viewers in on the pretense of a happily-ever-after finale has increasingly become a point of discussion on the ironic and self-reflexive nature of television. It is also worth noting the extent to which these relationships broke down in the tabloids following the “fairy-tale endings” after each season. Viewers began to catch on to the false nature of the relationships as they continually dissipated in the public eye, and once they realized that it wasn't real, viewers could adapt to the notion of the Bachelor as ironic and “camp” with greater ease.
ReplyDeleteDespite this, the show still demands “honesty” from the contestants yet penalizes those who show their true feelings, like in the case of Jubilee. The show is rife with contradictions. When Ms. Smart argues that these female performances “denaturalize the women’s performance of gender, acknowledging the work required to maintain femininity”, I disagree because of the inherent danger involved in this. The femininity portrayed is not one of truth, but comes across as such. I believe that though many watch the show ironically, a substantial portion of viewers do not analyze the show in this critical lens and could easily be drawn into the perverted romantic world portrayed without a second thought for how damaging the behavior might be. The program can be a microcosm for feminist analyst, but it is worth noting that not every viewer performs this analysis or takes the show as “camp”. The Bachelor can certainly be studied at this angle but has not yet wholly adopted this persona among the general population.
A large part of the show is built on scripted drama and what will result in the highest ratings, not to invert the traditional norms of romantic relationships or redefine heterosexual relationships through an ironic lens. The argument that because the show is camp, “that traditional conceptions of romance and gender are [shown to be] incongruous and absurd” is a bit of a generalization, because the show doesn't show the absurdity of relationships on the whole as much as focusing on scripted dramatic people in unsustainable relationships. These relationships constitute a minority and cannot be argued to the point that traditional conceptions of romance are absurd, even if the traditions of romantic relationships are twisted and then put on display. The show is inherently manufactured, but it must be noted that some audience members may not be in on the joke just yet.