Love yourself first

‘The Bachelor’ is here for the wrong reasons

When it originally aired, the concept of “The Bachelor” must have seemed as novel as it was simple. 

A handsome, successful stud takes on a stable of beautiful young women who are eager to win his heart. The girls would be wined and dined, all while dating the same man and living together. It would create situations ripe for catfights, tears, and nervous breakdowns. It was a real-life soap opera, and America had a front-row seat. 

Now, the concept of “The Bachelor” has transcended its novelty status and become a veritable boilerplate for reality television. Its well-worn concept has spurred imitators (“Are You the One?”), parodies (“Burning Love”), and, most recently, a damn fine scripted series, “UnReal”(on Lifetime, of all places). 

So it’s perhaps shocking, given my love of all things schlock, that I hadn’t seen a single episode of the show until last Saturday. Me! Who tuned into every episode of VH1’s “Flavor of Love” and “Rock of Love” with reverent, rabid devotion. And still, I’d not yet dug into the ur-dating-show. 

At first blush, “Flavor/Rock of Love” might seem more exploitative and salacious than “The Bachelor,” with their washed-up stars and a contestant pool disproportionately populated by current/former strippers. But there is something much more insidious and sinister about the lies being propagated by “The Bachelor.”

Shows like “Flavor” and “Rock” seem to eschew any pretense of sincerity, and hardly bother with suspending audience disbelief. After all, how can you really believe that Public Enemy’s former hype man Flavor Flav will live happily ever after with a woman he nicknamed “Thing 2”? (Spoiler alert?)

By contrast, on “The Bachelor,” sincerity and honesty are king. In talking head interviews, the bachelor and contestants alike insist, with tear-stained cheeks, the gravity and import of every decision they make on the show. The women constantly accuse each other of being there “for the wrong reasons.” 

The men and women on the show are suspended in a state of hyper-reality—every date amazing, every emotion heightened, and every minor slight unforgivable.  This is understandable, given the conditions in which the contestants live: under the same roof with their competition, unable to escape each others’ company, and not allowed access to phones or other media. The environment is a pressure cooker in which even some of the most mentally sound people would crack, forget about the bundles of insecurities disguised as grown women who populate the show. 

I began my research with season 19, in which former “Bachelorette” contestant Chris Soules takes on the solemn, weighty mantle of “The Bachelor.” Nicknamed Prince Farming because he is a hot farmer, Chris is mostly a ruggedly handsome, good-hearted dud who bumbled his way from one clumsy, platitude-riddled attempt at courtship to another. 

What I found most perplexing is the notion that the women will find the titular Bachelor irresistible. His desirability is taken for granted, so the onus of proving one’s worth is entirely on the contestants. The girls and the audience go into the competition already equipped with the understanding that the man is a bonafide catch. 

This is a dangerous lesson in one-sided romance. The overall structure of the program frames romantic relationships as games in which there are necessary winners and losers, and in a rigid, binary system like that, there’s no room for the nuances of compatibility, or love.

In the end, our bachelor Chris chooses a woman to propose to, leaving a slew of rejected, emotionally distraught women in his wake. It’s in the moments where Chris publicly rejects a girl who has developed “real” feelings for him that the show begins to show its true colors. This is a show that hides behind a noble search for true love as an excuse to put women through an emotional meat grinder, and ultimately teaches men and women that you can be as irresponsible as you want as long as you do it in the name of romantic love.

Ultimately, the show perpetuates the damaging myth that the greatest happiness a woman can achieve comes only through beating other women for the hand of a suitor. After all, as young girls, we are generally fed fairy tales that teach us romance should be our ultimate end goal, and other women are the only obstacles that stand between us and success. 

Why engage with a show like this? As feminists, it’s our duty to step outside of the Internet echo chambers we’ve built for ourselves and engage with popular media. This is the world we live in; we can’t just reel in outrage, sound off on Jezebel and then shut it out. “The Bachelor” commands over six million viewers a week, most of them women. Regardless of how much it offends our sensibilities, we can’t change the paradigm if we dismiss or ignore such a vital pop culture phenomenon. 

In the end, I find myself wanting to take all the women on “The Bachelor,” wrap them up in a blanket, and tell them, in the immortal words of season 20 contestant Lace: “It’s like my tattoo says, you can’t love someone else until you learn to love yourself.”

For more from Claire, read her review of Kelly Sue DeConnick's comic book satire, "Bitch Planet."