Chapter One

Unraveling Reality TV’s Twisted Fairytales

Cinderellas and Cautionary Tales

Careful the wish you make. . . . Careful the path they take—wishes come true, not free. Careful the spell you cast. . . . Sometimes the spell may last beyond what you can see and turn against you.

—INTO THEWOODS

 

 

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I do believe in fairytales.

—ZORA , the “winner” on Joe Millionaire

The palace ballroom was massive, and they had it all to themselves. Lush royal green curtains fell over towering windows. Candles flickered on the mantel. Hundreds of golden lights glittered from a lavish chandelier spanning nearly the entire ceiling.

They seemed like the perfect couple. Like all good princes, Evan was tall, dark, and handsome. And, like every true princess, Zora had lustrous hair and a pure heart. As he took her in his arms and began a slow waltz, she gazed up at him as if he were the answer to all her dearest dreams.

Music swelled as they kissed. If you listened very carefully, you’d swear you could hear bluebirds chirping in the background, as if Cinderella’s animated helpers themselves might be the ones to roll out the words The End in calligraphy on the screen above the pair as the camera panned out and the credits rolled.

And then they never saw each other again.

See, it’s like this: No one ever skips off together into the sunset on reality TV, and Evan Marriott was not exactly a prince among men. In reality, he was just some schmo with a thin bank account and a full head of hair, hired by Fox to play the part of a single, moneyed stud looking for love on the “gold diggers get theirs” dating show, Joe Millionaire.

And what about Zora Andrich, the sweet-natured “good girl” who “won” the privilege of being selected by a guy who had done nothing but lie to her from the moment she met him? Turns out Evan was never the least bit interested in her, heartstrings-tugging finale notwithstanding. On the postshow interview circuit, he let it slip that he chose her only because “I had to pick one of the girls,” and the producers wanted Zora, a schoolteacher who did charity work, in order to stage a convincing fairytale ending. During an appearance on Live with Regis and Kelly, Zora confirmed that their “relationship ended as soon as the set lights went out.”¹ That was 2003. Seven years later, we’re still inundated with reality TV shows pitching us fairytales, and we’re still eating it up to the tune of millions of viewers per night.

As practiced storytellers, reality TV producers like Mike Darnell and Mike Fleiss (who we met in the introduction) understand that old cliché about being able to catch more flies with honey than vinegar. They know they can lure more viewers with the promise of possibility—romantic, economic, or otherwise—than with overt misogyny. That’s why they package their parade of sexist stereotypes as the embodiment of the “perfect fairytale.”

“This show really is kind of a reality version of Cinderella,” Ken Mok, executive producer of America’s Next Top Model, told E!’s True Hollywood Story,² describing a UPN-turned-CW series that regularly tells gorgeous, insecure young women that they’re too fat, too flawed, and, in the case of girls of color, too “ghetto” to make it as an advertiser’s muse.

This formula pops up wherever women are pivotal to a series: The central conceit of Fox’s The Swan, for example, was that “ugly ducklings” would be sliced and diced into “beautiful swans,” as if pitting emotionally unstable plastic surgery patients against one another in a bizarro-world beauty pageant were a modern Hans Christian Andersen fable rather than prime-time exploitation of body dysmorphia.

Nevertheless, “I felt like a princess!” has been a constant refrain from female reality stars, starting with the first winner of America’s Next Top Model, Adrianne Curry,³ and echoed by competitors every season thereafter. It doesn’t take much to prompt this exact proclamation—and not just from would-be models. Sometimes we hear it from bona fide stars, as when actress Debra Messing giddily described feeling “like a princess” on the red carpet after being frocked for an awards show by fashion stylist Rachel Zoe, on Bravo’s eponymous The Rachel Zoe Project. Other times, it’s a favorite phrase of star fuckers. For one of the fame-seekers on Paris Hilton’s My New BFF (MTV, natch), getting her hair cut according to the heiress’s specifications made her “feel like a princess.”^p

Really? Being bossed around by Paris Hilton is Cinderella treatment?

Well, yes, in the unreal world of “reality television,” where virtually anything that happens to any woman—no matter how crass, vindictive, or fleeting— can be presented as an idealized fairytale, so long as it is done to a woman rather than achieved by one.

On dating shows like ABC’s The Bachelor, prospective princesses sit on their aimless, tiny behinds, fend off fellow ladies in waiting, and hope to be whisked away by a network-approved knight in shining Armani. Stay-at-home moms, waitresses, and crime scene investigators depressed about their appearances are physically transformed by scalpels and silicone on programs like ABC’s Extreme Makeover and Fox’s The Swan. But the much-vaunted “journeys of self-discovery” these women undergo rarely involve much activity on their part. On Extreme Makeover, self-esteem is induced by surgeons, hairstylists, and makeup artists rather than the psychological heavy lifting of therapy. On The Swan, weight loss is the result of liposuction and tummy tucks rather than lifestyle-changing diet and exercise. Fashionistas on less physically intrusive makeover series such as TLC’s What Not to Wear and Bravo’s Tim Gunn’s Guide to Style instruct mom-jeans wearers that beauty comes from product-placement cosmetics and clothing, not from within—which is why participants’ overhauled “personal style” ends up reflecting producers’ and advertisers’ choices instead of their own tastes.

In real life, situations in which women have such little agency would be seen as pitiable, not enviable—yet in reality TV we’re prompted to believe that this is the stuff dreams are made of. This is never in as stark relief as when series center on (the flimsiest approximations of) love.

Princes for Hire, Princesses for Sale: Constructing the Fairytale

Just as in those classic stories from Disney to the Brothers Grimm, romance and finance are inextricably linked in dating, mating, and marriage shows, in which a bevy of doormat-y “gorgeous girls” is invariably paired with one supposedly “rich, successful” single man, as in this typical, scene-setting montage from season 2 of ABC’s The Bachelor:

“Aaron, a successful twenty-eight-year-old bank vice president, was introduced to twenty-five beautiful bachelorettes in hopes that one of them would become his wife.”

 

 

Voiceover clip from Aaron: “I just had twenty-five supermodels walk by me. What do you say? They’re all beautiful; they all have so much going for them. I can’t find a flaw in any of them. They’re all into me, which is wonder ful. I never thought I would be so lucky.”

Yep, they’re all supermodels, and they’re all “into him,” whomever “him” happens to be. That, of course, is what princesses are expected to be: available, pretty, eager . . . and easily impressed.

“I understand each one of you is in love with him,” Bachelor host Chris Harrison says in mock-somber tone to a room of angsty bachelorettes on the show’s fourth installment. True to Grimms’ form, we’re never really shown why these irrationally attached lasses have gone all googly-eyed over relative strangers. The guys, after all, rarely expend any real effort to win their hearts. (Not that they need to: These men are almost afterthoughts, there to fulfill the role of symbolic Everyman without whom Every woman’s life is supposedly incomplete.) And mirroring the minimal information traditional fairytales impart about the dashing prince, reality programs rarely reveal much about their harem masters’ hopes and dreams beyond their desire to feel up as many princesses as possible in hot tubs, limos, and “fantasy suites.”

There’s a reason the male heroes of these shows don’t usually get all that emotionally invested: They’re not meant to. For the most part, a desire to fall in love and settle down isn’t among the criteria producers look for when casting Prince Charming. Evan Marriott got the Joe Millionaire gig, he explained to Entertainment Weekly, because “They needed a guy that was in construction but didn’t have kids, hadn’t been in jail, wasn’t on drugs. And basically I fit the bill. They said they would pay me $50,000, and I said, ‘Where do I sign?’ I wasn’t looking for the love of my life.”⁴ That, then, was Joe’s biggest lie of all. Viewers were told from the outset that Evan would be duping twenty women about his income bracket to determine whether they were “in it for true love” or just “greedy gold diggers.” Yet the show’s deeper deception was that Evan ever had any intention of finding a wife, or a girlfriend—or even anything more than a paycheck—from the program. And he was hardly alone in his disinterest in commitment. Dating show dudes tend to ooze insincerity while spouting platitudes about finding “the right girl for me,” like every Abercrombie-looking, line-throwing player at every bar on any given night.^q

Deviations from this script are rare. It wasn’t until season 13(!) in 2009 that The Bachelor chose a star who honestly seemed to want to find a wife.^r In contrast, dating shows emphasize women’s matrimonial motivations with a nearly endless stream of marriage-minded femmes professing some variation of the belief that being the last girl standing at a network altar—even though they’d be standing there with a virtual stranger—will make all their dreams come true.

While they don’t genuinely offer their hearts, reality TV men do play the proud provider. It hardly matters that what they provide is not theirs to give; they are simply handsome shills (for products as well as ideas), offering well-orchestrated infomercials disguised as courtship rituals. “This Tacori diamond ring symbolizes forever for me. I just hope that she will accept it,” snowboarder Jesse Csincsak said on the finale of The Bachelorette’s fourth season. He chose the 2.3-carat platinum and diamond engagement band for his potential paramour, DeAnna Pappas, with the help of a spokesperson for Tacori, which has provided jewelry for the Bachelor franchise for years.^s During their “romantic journeys,” these bachelors hand over many a prettily wrapped box containing various items advertisers have paid—or provided free in exchange for publicity—to position as fairytale linchpins. Starry-eyed future brides are dolled up in Badgley Mischka and Nicole Miller gowns; festooned with millions of dollars worth of Tacori, Harry Winston, and Chopard diamonds; chauffeured in $100,000 Maseratis; and swept off to book-your-spa-stay-now resorts by beaus who use Marqui Jet cards.

They’re not kidding about booking your spa stay now, by the way. Viewers who want to travel in these misguided daters’ luxurious footsteps—and are willing to blow $5,580 and up for five days, not including airfare—can plan “a posh, all-inclusive Bachelor Getaway package” at Kamalame Cay island, by clicking the “As Seen on The Bachelor” link at Bahamas.com.⁵ And for those of us who don’t have the cash for a luxe getaway, we can buy a pair of “Frankie & Johnny Fairytale Wedding” pajamas for $79 from various websites using that ubiquitous “As Seen on The Bachelor” tag. The sizing is for adults, even though the pink cotton PJs are decorated with childlike illustrations of diamond rings, pumpkin carriages, castles, hearts, and flowers, and of course, princesses kissing frogs.

Dating shows aren’t the only subgenre where commerce is the key to the fairytale. Sometimes the promise of a lucrative job prompts such illusions (America’s Next Top Model, American Idol, The Apprentice); other times a lower-rent version of happily ever after is offered via a new wardrobe that fits better than what a working mom can afford on a thrift store budget (What Not to Wear). And sometimes what contestants consider a “fairytale” can be downright heartbreaking, as when a plastic surgery show provided a root canal to a poor woman whose teeth were rotting after a decade without health insurance—but only if she agreed to undergo around a dozen unnecessary cosmetic procedures.

Mistaking the Trappings for Love

When they’re not marketing brand-specific jewelry, clothing, vacations, or dental veneers, reality TV shows advertise the same ideology about gender roles found in traditional fairytales. Both visual and verbal indicators are used to underscore the notion that women are poor damsels who can’t take care of themselves, while men are all-powerful studs ever ready to rescue them.

There’s something truly ridiculous about watching grown women masquerading as would-be princesses, abdicating all choices to a guy they hardly know and hoping their passivity will help them snag some suburban Prince Charming. This infantilization is especially ludicrous when the “girls” languishing in husband-hunting harems are mothers in their forties with mortgages, careers, and kids in college, as they’ve been on Who Wants to Marry My Dad? and Age of Love.

These messages aren’t exactly subtle. Joe Millionaire is first introduced as he gallops toward his admiring throng on a stallion, looking like Gaston, the muscle-bound, animated hunk from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. As for Joe’s lovely suitors, we first encounter them squealing “Ohmigawd! It’s a castle!” as they arrive at the mansion.

Preferring not to leave viewers’ interpretation of this theme to chance, Fox assembled a montage to frame their Joe Millionaire reunion special. It began with the caption “The Fairy Tale” floating across the screen in wedding-invitation-style calligraphy, followed by seventeen out-of-context clips from “gold diggers” dishing about their Cinderella fantasies:

“We were put in a situation to see if we could find romance in a fairytale.”
“We’re gonna be in a fairytale.”
“In my fairytale, when you know, you know.”
“I expect the fairytale.”
“There’s this guy who resembles a fairytale prince riding up on a horse.”
“I can appreciate the fairytale idea now.”
“And it’s happening—it’s so real!”
“As far as the fairytale part of it?”
“It’s going to be a fairytale.”
“I’m a big fan of romance and fairytales.”
“It’s a fairytale come true.”
“Fairytale.”
“Fairytale.”
“Fairytale.”
“Fairytale.”
“Fairytale.”
“Fairytale.”

As if this montage didn’t sufficiently deflate these adults, it ended with one final cast member musing in full-on baby talk, “It’s a jour-ney. It’s a fai-rytale.” (Viewers subjected to this barrage might be forgiven for feeling less like they were being sold a fairytale and more like they were being trained at a school for unusually dense puppies.)

Where Fox partially passed this off as tongue in cheek, ABC’s packaging of The Bachelor has always been disingenuously earnest. As the Los Angeles Times noted, despite failing to actually produce long-term pairings, the show pretends to be “absolutely irony-free.”⁶ In one “where are they now?” clip, host Chris Harrison reminded the audience that sweet-natured bridal castoff Gwen had “watched her journey on season 2 of The Bachelor unfold like a fairytale, complete with horse-drawn carriage.” No shit—they actually roll tape of this babe riding off in a buggy decorated with Christmas lights to resemble the fairy-godmother-procured pumpkin carriage of cartoon fame. “I do feel like Cinderella,” Gwen says in her poufy princess ball gown.

After a while, the narrator’s breathless promises that every upcoming episode will contain “the most romantic rose ceremony ever!” ring hollow. It’s a letdown to fans—the viewership equivalent of a restaurant promising culinary delicacies and delivering greasy takeout. Talk about a recipe for heartburn.

The faux sincerity embedded in the structure of reality TV’s flagship dating show is insulting to its audience, who are lied to as boldly as are its contestants. During season 11, for example, producers knew full well the twist hidden from viewers until the finale: For the first time in series history, bachelor Brad Womack rejected each and every bachelorette, preferring to walk away single. Yet, despite his full house of broken hearts, the first episode opened with the narrator proclaiming that “in the end, only one woman will become Mrs. Brad Womack,” followed by edited audio snippets of the show’s star pledging, “I’m here to find true love. I will find my wife.”

All these pricey props and “princess for a day” primpings work manipulative magic on contestants. Sequestered from the outside world during weeks and sometimes months of filming, they respond predictably. When Billie Jeanne Houle, a sexually exuberant, free-spirited bartender, was seduced on Married by America, she thought it was her TV-arranged fiancé who was winning her heart. In reality, producers simply seized on her eagerness to fall in love to cajole her into believing she was living a real-life fairytale.

Here’s the formula: First, take a naive beauty who longs to get married and offer her a gorgeous guy who says he shares that wish. Next, send her to a series of bridal gown fittings, let her select a wedding ring, and eventually have her write vows with the other half of this arranged marriage equation. Throw in a healthy heaping of liquor-lubricated sex scenes and, voilà, “love”—reality TV style. “When we got to the show it just happened to be that we clicked. You got gourmet chefs, you got Jacuzzis, you got all the alcohol you could want. I really fell for the whole experience,” Houle told Entertainment Weekly (emphasis mine).⁷ Time and time again, this is how it’s done.

In a limo on the way to a date on a luxury yacht, a bubbly brunet gushed, “I have the dress, I have $1 million worth of jewelry on me, I have the prince, and I am feeling like Cinderella at the ball.” How could she not feel fireworks when fourth-season Bachelor Bob Guiney kissed her, considering how producers literally shot fireworks over their heads as the couple gazed at a starry horizon?

Such seeming attempts at posthypnotic suggestion appear to provoke Pavlovian responses in the women of reality TV (drape with diamonds, sprinkle fireworks, commence swooning), essentially telling female viewers that the measure of a man’s love can only be found in the gift receipts in his wallet. Not only shouldn’t we expect mental, emotional, or political rapport with our boyfriends, we’re told, we shouldn’t even want such a connection. Just as troubling, reality television teaches boys and men that without an array of posh and cheesily metaphoric props, most bachelors have nothing genuine to offer women.

Which brings us to the tenth season of The Bachelor, when an ingenue named Tessa Horst expressed doubts about remaining on the show. She liked Naval Lieutenant Andy Baldwin just fine when they were alone, but she vented, “When I’m back home and wondering about group dates that I’m not on, I get fed up with it.” Andy was increasingly aware that Tessa was getting ready to opt out of CrazyTown if she didn’t feel “a real connection” with him soon. Since this potential cardinal sin of female agency diverges from the usual script (princesses aren’t supposed to rescue themselves, after all), Prince Andy was tasked with luring the errant cutie safely back into his court. “[Tessa] doesn’t want to go the distance unless she knows that I truly am interested in her,” he told the cameras. “Tonight I need to convince her that I’m a man that she wants. I’m nervous, but I gotta go out there and give my all.”

So, how would our Bachelor boy get the job done? Was he funny enough to seduce her with that evergreen aphrodisiac, laughter? Would he attempt to bond over mutual shared interests, politics, or family stories? Perhaps he’d offer her new insights into his dreams, his worldview, his character?

Er . . . no.

Remember, a man’s character is considered irrelevant in the Bachelorverse (as are humor, intelligence, and fidelity). So when Andy needed to “give his all,” he resorted to the only tools producers put at his disposal: “the fairytale date.” (Or, as obsequious host Chris Harrison promised, “One pretty woman . . . gets the most romantic date, ever! ”)

First, Andy summoned Tessa to their first solo outing with a note instructing her to “Come as you are. I’ll take care of the rest.” Next, amid the jealous glares of all her evil stepsister competitors, he presented her with a $2 million Chopard diamond necklace, earrings, and bracelet set to wear for the night.^t From there, the pair sped off in a $600,000 Saleen S7 Twin Turbo to a Nicole Miller boutique, where cameras lingered on the storefront’s marquee and fashionable mannequins. “I thought along with your diamonds you could use a very elegant dress,” Andy said, as if he had anything to do with it. But, par for the television course, such distinctions didn’t seem to bother the formerly dubious Tessa, now giddy at the chance to model a series of designer cocktail gowns, while the Bachelor showered her with compliments. “This whole date I’ve wanted someone to pinch me. I think it’s every girl’s dream to, like, be brought over diamonds, and brought to a dress store, and pick out anything you want. I’m just excited!” she gushed.^u

So, let’s recap: To keep Tessa from walking off the show, a worried Andy has to “pull out all the stops” to show her “that she’s truly special to me.” Instead of sharing more of his authentic self with her, he simply offers a parade of product placement goods and activities as a proxy for actual feelings. Nevertheless, this stream of artifice does the trick. “It’s been an amazing, amazing, amazing date, and while I still have some reservations and doubts, he’s really putting himself out there, and I think it’s pushing me to do the same thing,” the formerly frustrated beauty tells the cameras. By the end of the night she’s fully convinced and lets him know she wants to bring him home to meet her parents.

Apparently “putting yourself out there” is defined in the Bachelorverse as “maxing out your spending limit.”

Hear that, guys? If you want a woman to fall in love with you, don’t worry about baring your soul or risking your heart. Just get out your credit card and prepare to score, because the girl of your dreams doesn’t care about who you really are. Not that it matters, since you don’t really care about her, either, so long as she looks hot in a halter top.

Pushing Culturally Ingrained Buttons

If reality dating shows portray women (and men) so shabbily, why do so many of us continue to watch them?

DISNEY FROM CRADLE TO GRAVE

It’s fitting that The Bachelor, which revived the princess fantasy for prime time, airs on Disney-owned ABC. In the 1970s, feminists began rethinking fairytales, creating new children’s stories with heroines like Atalanta, who explores the world before getting married. They hoped to pique kids’ imaginations and teach them that strength, adventure, and love are available to boys and girls alike.

Atalanta doesn’t live here anymore. Today, Disney wants women from cradle to grave, and they’re using their media properties to keep us in their thrall. They get us from preconsciousness: Before we’re old enough to speak in complete sentences, our parents read us Disney’s instructive morality plays about what it means to be “good little princesses” and “strong, daring boys.” They intrigue us as preadolescents with Cinderella and Snow White costumes at Halloween and Disney on Ice: Princess Classics shows at the local skating rink. As teens, Hannah Montana on the Disney channel teaches us that girl power = merchandizing.

Infantilizing us is so profitable that The Bachelor has attempted to provoke psychological regression in adults for fourteen seasons and counting. As the show’s popularity has grown, Disney’s commercial fairytale imagery has woven its way from network TV to cable. Brides on WETV’s My Fair Wedding with David Tutera twirl with glee in “Kirstie Kelly for Disney Fairy Tale Weddings” dresses. (Want to walk down the aisle in a ball gown named after Princesses Ariel, Belle, or Jasmine? You can—for a few thou.) Tutera even hosted a WE TV special called Disney Dream Weddings and spent a full hour hawking Disney’s “destination wedding” packages, including his own high-end “Couture Collection.” He and other Disney spokespeople effused about all the “magic” you can buy if you have Your Special Day at Disney World. This and other WE series such as Platinum Weddings want you to know that you, too, can ride up to your ceremony in a theme-park pumpkin carriage, say your vows in Cinderella’s Castle, and dance alongside a dozen waltzing Princes Charming and Snow Whites in full Disney regalia. All it costs is a hundred grand.^v

Disney has mastered media synergy to implant and co-opt our fantasies from pre-K to our wedding day. I wonder if they’re planning to stop there. Sleeping Beauty dozed for a hundred years in a glass coffin . . . can a Disney-branded line of caskets be far behind? Perhaps when reality TV shows have been on the air long enough for women to start dying from complications from their Extreme Makeovers, they’ll be buried in Disney couture coffins. And then we’ll all watch the funeral procession on ABC, during sweeps.

I’m asked this question constantly, by everyone from seasoned entertainment journalists to tenured professors of psychology to students who attend my media literacy workshops. Everyone seems to want one simple, clean answer. I can’t offer that. We tune in for numerous reasons, some conscious (mockery of reality series’ typecast characters is an amusing sport for many viewers) and some subconscious (from fantasy escapism to the superiority we feel when watching human train wrecks display their shortcomings under a national spotlight).

That said, I begin this book by discussing reality TV’s overreliance on fairytale narratives because this is the saccharine coating that masks the genre’s chauvinistic and anachronistic ideas about women and men, about love and sex, about marriage and money. As we saw earlier, Fox was panned as reaching a new low when they aired Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? but by repackaging the very same concepts under a fairytale gloss, ABC struck programmatic gold with The Bachelor.

Why? Because this genre that calls itself “unscripted” is carefully crafted to push all our culturally ingrained buttons. In the case of dating shows, it’s precisely all the pretty-pretty-princess twaddle that allows us to accept these regressive notions as palatable, even ideal. Dating back to our earliest childhood instructions on gender, the call to these contrivances is powerful. The psychological underpinnings of fairytale imagery provoke a strong emotional response, and thus compel us to keep watching.

But at what cost?

For men, as Andy and Tessa’s experience illustrates, reality TV’s warped fairytales reinforce a limiting vision of masculinity in which they must be stoic providers of both pleasure and financial comfort, responsible for not only their own happiness and success but also that of their female companions. Male viewers learn relatively quickly that they should not expect (or desire) women as partners in love and in life, only as beautiful, compliant subjects in need of social, sexual, and interpersonal direction.

For women, these representations conjure our earliest memories—of the stories our parents read to us before bed, of the cartoons that danced in our imaginations, telling us what we could (and should) look forward to when we grew up. No matter how independent we might be as adults, how cynical we consider ourselves, or how hard we’ve worked to silence external cultural conditioning, decades of sheer repetition make it extremely difficult to fully purge societal standards from our psyches. Simply put, it’s damn near impossible to live completely outside the culture, no matter how well we try to shield ourselves from its impact. Buried deep inside many adult, single, heterosexual women’s minds is that internalized, conformist voice humming, “Someday my prince will come.”^w It’s an external tune borne of cultural conditioning, one that we may reject or work to silence. Even if some of us are soothed by its melody (“chick flick,” anyone?), most of us don’t live our lives in deference to it. Yet as many relationship counselors can attest, countless romantically dissatisfied women beg therapists to help them figure out why they haven’t found their Prince Charming yet.

Regardless of where we fall on this continuum—from conscious refusal to let childish notions inform our love lives to enthusiastic embrace of fantasies we’ve nursed since we were little girls—producers play on these deep-seated ideas about gender, love, and romance for ratings. This, in part, is what Mike Darnell was talking about when he told Entertainment Weekly that the secret to airing a successful reality TV show is to create a premise that is “steeped in some social belief.”⁹ And, as we’ll soon see, similar stereotypes about race, class, beauty, and sexual orientation are endemic, even necessary, to reality TV—in all its forms.

Exclusivity, Conformity, or Banishment

While reality TV picks at emotional wounds about the loneliness, poverty, and desperation that Grimms and Disney have told us await strong-willed women, the genre also reinforces the punitive proscriptions for their “bad” girls in these classic stories. With few exceptions (Disney’s Mulan and Tiana of The Princess and the Frog are two; the ogre Fiona from DreamWorks’ Shrek is another), fairytale females who stand up for themselves, or who are confident, active, or powerful, are typically depicted as bitchy, catty, cruel, and unworthy—and they are almost always punished for their sins. Only the prettiest, most passive girls, without agency or voice, without ambition or individuality, are rewarded with love, financial success, and the ultimate prize: being picked by the prince.^x

And so it goes in reality TV, where women are portrayed as virtually interchangeable in body type and personality alike. Those who deviate from the norm in appearance or behavior are immediately banished. These prefab fairytales are exclusive to a fault, and anyone who hopes to qualify must subscribe to a litany of regressive social mores. Producers act as gatekeepers, allowing inside only those participants who conform to the strict gender, ethnic, and sexual codes that this genre is attempting to recodify as American “reality.”

Do you transgress these codes by daring to have a healthy relationship with food? Are you simply larger than a size 6? Well, ladies, you’re not allowed to visualize yourself as a princess—or even a member of her court. Only thin, often surgically enhanced women have been cast on network dating shows, which we’ll discuss in more detail in the following chapter. The only exception came in the summer of 2009, when average-size and heavier women were cast to compete for the heart of a three-hundred-pound real estate dude on More to Love, a “plus-size” dating show from the minds that brought us The Bachelor and Joe Millionaire. Though they promoted the show as a Bachelor-style fairytale with a bit of extra padding, producers framed the women as self-loathing losers who could do little more than sob about hating their bodies, stuff their faces with meat on a stick, and declare that their weight prevented them from ever having a happy relationship.

The princess crown is also off-limits to women of color, who are underrepresented and typically eliminated after just a couple of episodes on network reality casts. Women of color are, however, very present in cable dating shows—where the fairytale packaging is missing. There’s zero earnestness in the framing of programs like VH1’s Flavor of Love, I Love New York, Real Chance of Love, or MTV’s For the Love of Ray J, for example, which celebrate the exploitation of both women and men of color, each in different ways (as we’ll see in chapter 5). Likewise, there has never been a Black, Asian, Latino, Native American, or Middle Eastern Bachelor, nor have men of color headlined any dating shows on network television, where such programs are sold as offering a chance at finding “true love.” When men of color are the stars of their own dating shows, it’s only on cable nets, where salacious hookups and racist throwbacks to Stepin Fetchit are much more the focus than classic notions of romance.

Are you lesbian, gay, or bisexual? In the world of reality TV, Americans can see people like you decorating homes (Top Design), designing clothing (Project Runway), cutting hair (Shear Genius), whipping people into shape (Work Out), telling sloppy straight men how to dress (Queer Eye for the Straight Guy), being campy divas (RuPaul’s Drag Race on LOGO), navigating the globe (The Amazing Race), and eating bugs (Survivor), but you can never seek “fairytale love.” Oh, you can get laid, as on VH1’s STD-chasing A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila and A Double Shot at Love, where dating challenges involved bikini foam parties and licking hot fudge off mannequins, but love? That’s out of the question.

Among broadcast and widely viewed cable networks, only four high-profile queer-themed reality TV dating shows have aired in the genre’s first full decade, two starring gay men and two starring bisexual women. Series starring bisexual women choosing between lesbians and straight men have played to straight male fantasies. Both incarnations of MTV’s A Shot at Love with drunken calendar girls have featured busty, bi babes with long fingernails and a penchant for feeling each other up in full view of panting, horny dudes. While those hormonal performances may help destigmatize hookups between mostly-straight sorority girls who enjoy teasing their boyfriends with a little “hot girl-on-girl action,” they hardly validate authentic lesbian and bisexual desire. MTV’s storytelling leaves little room for genuine yearning for romantic love between women, much less “happily ever after.” The debut episode of A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila was framed as the pinup girl’s quest to figure out whether she wanted to be “with a man or a woman.” But bisexuals are not confused about which gender they want to be with; they are sexually and romantically attracted to both women and men.^y By portraying Tila as trying to “choose” whether to be a lesbian or to have a heterosexual relationship, MTV rendered bisexuality into the exact misconception bisexuals have long fought: the notion that they can or should “pick a side” or “get off the fence.”

Still, A Shot at Love was the only mainstream-accessible dating show to even hint that not all women are interested in men. By early 2010, no major network had aired a single lesbian or a transgender dating series. Viewers can find such programming options only on Logo, a network launched by Viacom in 2006 to target the LGBT audience. Logo’s dating shows Curl Girls, Gimme Sugar, and Gimme Sugar: Miami have diverged from reality TV’s cult of compulsory heterosexuality and have featured more ethnically diverse casts than most network romances. Still, these shows placed more emphasis on the fun and drama of dating than the pursuit of genuine love and partnership. More groundbreaking was Logo’s Transamerican Love Story, starring transgender actress and writer Calpernia Addams, who sought love among a pool of straight, gay, bisexual, and transgender men with the help of her best friend, trans activist Andrea James. Unfortunately, institutional biases and media economics combine to keep millions of television viewers from being able to watch Logo programming. For example, Comcast has blocked Logo from its channel lineup in conservative-leaning media markets such as Jackson, Mississippi, and Monroe, Louisiana, and DISH customers didn’t have access to Logo until 2009—well after Curl Girls, Gimme Sugar, and Transamerican Love Story had aired.

Gay male dating shows have been light on happily ever after and heavy on cultural fears and stereotypes. On Bravo’s cruel Boy Meets Boy, a bachelor thought he was going to have a chance to find same-sex bliss among a group of men he believed were all gay. The catch? Half were secretly straight actors setting him up to be rejected. Then came Fox’s Playing It Straight, where a straight woman had to guess the sexual orientations of her male suitors based on whether they “acted gay” or seemed to behave like “normal” (i.e., “red-blooded heterosexual American”) guys. If a gay man fooled her, he’d win a million bucks and she’d go home empty-handed; if she chose a straight man at the end, they’d split the money between them. The pretense of romance fell away as the bachelorette was “expected to be more of a detective than a fair maiden,” trying to use her “gaydar” to decipher whether a man might be a big old homo because he owned a hair drier or danced well.¹⁰ Gay men embraced the closet, modeling presumptions of straight, macho masculinity and renouncing their true sexuality, while heterosexual men attempted to turn themselves into the clichéd limp-wristed queen from popular film and sitcoms.^z Playing It Straight was such a ratings flop that Fox yanked it after only three episodes, offering the series online years later on a pay-per-download basis. That was still more airtime than was received by the ill-fated gaysploitation special Seriously, Dude, I’m Gay, which Fox touted as “a heterosexual male’s worst nightmare: turning gay overnight.” The show was to follow the foibles of straight men moving into gay men’s apartments to “immerse themselves in ‘the gay lifestyle’”—defined by the network as bunking in West Hollywood lofts, dancing at gay clubs, and going on a “romantic blind date with another man.” If after all this they successfully conned “a jury of their queers” (as well as their friends and families) into believing that they were out and proud homosexuals, they’d win a chunk of cash. Fox’s press release called it “outrageously satirical,” “hilarious,” and “socially provocative.” But they didn’t count on the well-organized outrage of GLAAD, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, which blasted the “backward” premise as raising red flags. The show was canceled before it went to air.¹²

Clearly, the level of ethnic, sexual, and behavioral uniformity required of potential castmates excludes a huge portion of the American public from the “reality” landscape, and “others” anyone who diverges from TV’s cult of white, middle class heteronormativity. Just another way in which these shows are inauthentic in their depictions of modern life.

Humiliation: The Flip Side of the Fairytale

Unfortunately for those who are allowed into this genre’s surreal world, the fairytale is conditional. Reality TV exacts a steep price in exchange for the fantasy of happily ever after for one woman (however short-lived). That price is humiliation of all women.

Now, it’s undeniable that reality TV producers love nothing more than to make fools of their cast members. Any five minutes from NBC’s Fear Factor—which has made male and female contestants alike guzzle liquefied rats from a blender, gobble live cockroach and maggot sushi, and stick their heads into gallons of raw sewage—is proof enough that humiliation is aimed willy-nilly at any contestant who dares to appear on these sorts of game shows. But the goal of competition-based series like these is to shock or gross out viewers, not to sway them ideologically. For that sort of cerebral impact we need to turn to mating and makeover shows, where blatant degradation of women as women is persistent and inescapable.

The practice of humiliation functions structurally throughout gender-based series. It works both implicitly through show premises (for example, that scores of women are desperate enough to fight and weep over strangers just to avoid the shame of being single and female) and explicitly through manipulative editing, lying to contestants, and production tricks employed to portray women as stupid, pathetic losers. In fact, reality TV’s humiliation of women is so systematic that it’s almost mathematical. The formula is right out of those “if/then” logic proofs from high school math class:

IF A = advertising is at the root of the proliferation of these programs,

 

AND B = one of the ultimate ideological goals of reality TV is to bring back outdated biases about women’s rightful place in society,

 

THEN C = humiliation is both the preferred strategy of programmers (the means by which those goals are achieved) and the outcome (the emotional impact on show participants, and the implicit warning to female viewers).

Humiliation is the tactic by which reality TV spreads antifeminist backlash ideology. As a structural device, it is used to offer women an ugly, unstated, and all-too-clear message: “This is where independence leads, ladies—to failure and misery.”

This cautionary tale is present at every stage. It starts with the season opener of series such as The Bachelor, when one single dude is told how handsome and manly and perfect he is by twenty-five overdressed, overeager chicks who emerge from a couple of limousines as if from glammed-up clown cars. Our first introductions to these women assure us that they have no sense of self beyond a willingness to please some guy—any guy.

From there, we watch women sink to sickening depths as they perform one mortifying stunt after another in pursuit of male validation. City girls stick their hands up cows’ asses to prove their romantic fitness for a cute country bumpkin on Fox’s Farmer Wants a Wife. On VH1’s Real Chance of Love, they’re ordered to muck out a barn filled with horse, sheep, pig, and goose manure, while the cocky brothers they’re vying to date mock them from a distance.^aa Though most reality show stunts aren’t so stinky, “group dates” are a staple. Like a flashback to some horrid high school popularity contest, women are made to jockey for “one-on-one time” to sell themselves as the prettiest, most easygoing, and most lovable of the bunch in five minutes or less, before one of their competitors can interrupt with a stream of insults.

For every shiny, happy moment where a wide-eyed waif gets to play-act as Cinderella at the ball, we get a litany of bitter, nasty scenes where dozens of female castmates are tormented as mercilessly as Cinderella was before she met her fairy godmother. Reality TV women are debased in any number of ways. They cry in limos after being kicked to the curb. They hyperventilate when the guy they’ve known for, oh, three hours says he doesn’t see forever in their future. They abandon their belief systems to suit their men: For example, a vegetarian described eating meat for the first time in twelve years just because Andrew Firestone (star of The Bachelor’s third season) fed it to her. “My stomach will probably never be the same, but at least I touched his hand,” she said, grateful for crumbs. After she got the heave-ho, she batted her big, brown eyes at the camera and moaned: “You wanna see a girl that’s crushed, you got her.”

The cautionary tale of female humiliation is embedded in the DNA of reality television. Whole series are dedicated to it. Take Fox’s Married by America, where gorgeous would-be bride Billie Jeanne Houle (discussed earlier) was jilted at the altar of an elaborate sham of a “wedding” with all the fairytale trimmings. We watched her excited pursuit of the “perfect” bridal gown, the “perfect” ring, and the “perfect fairytale love.” The catch? The groom clearly never cared about her or intended to marry her—and viewers knew this from the start. “Silly bimbo!” we were primed to laugh (and cringe) as we watched the naive sexpot fall for, fawn over, and fuck her distant but randy “fiancé.”

After weeks of buildup, the inevitable happened: She said “I do” in earnest vows in front of her family, friends, and millions of viewers—and he replied, in effect, “Um… no thanks.” Cameras pursued her as she fled the scene, a sobbing blur of satin, tulle, and smeared mascara. “When I woke up this morning I felt like all my dreams were gonna come true. I felt so alive and so happy,” Billie Jeanne cried, choking out her words before collapsing in a heap. Viewers were treated to approximately ten full minutes of bawling—that’s major prime-time real estate devoted to our voyeuristic peek into the misery of a woman set up to feel this very way.

Eventually, the moment producers had been waiting for all season finally arrived. Granted no privacy or ability to seek solace from her friends, the hysterical bride hid in a closet in an attempt to elude the show’s intrusive glare. No luck. Fox’s unblinking celluloid eye found her cowering there, still in her gown and veil. As her crying and shaking finally subsided, she stared off into space, glass-eyed and emotionally broken. “I’m a joke,” she whispered. Not wanting that little gem to go by unnoticed, producers slapped Billie Jeanne’s self-flagellating comment into a caption under her despairing face.

And there you go. The money shot in porn flicks usually involves male ejaculation. In reality TV dating shows, it comes when cameras zoom in on the tear-soaked face of some woman shattered by romantic rejection.^ab Producers bank on such scenes to reinforce the notion that single women are simpering spinsters who can never possibly be fulfilled without husbands. From casting to editing to reunion shows, everything builds to that moment when some sad sack sobs miserably from embarrassment and self-doubt, bemoaning her broken heart. Glowing about the star of their fourth season, Bachelor producer Mike Fleiss told Entertainment Weekly that he was thrilled with the opening episode because “Normally, there’s nothing more challenging than getting girls to cry when they’ve only known the guy for three hours. Not this time.”

Showcasing these moments is exactly what’s behind the “Women Tell All” reunion specials ABC airs before every Bachelor finale. It’s a simple premise: Producers bring back all the rejectees and force them to sit with strained smiles as montages of their most pitiful moments play for a live studio audience. Handy-dandy split screens offer close-ups of their disgraced faces as they watch clips of themselves making out with, professing undying love for, and then being unceremoniously dumped by that season’s star. The goal is to make TV’s sexiest sacrificial lambs squirm uncomfortably, accept their place as the butts of our collective jokes, and possibly start to cry all over again. All the while, the host says in mock concern, “Wow, that must be uncomfortable for you to watch.” Cue applause from the live studio audience.

This suffering is part of what viewers tune in to see, learning from promo ads that this or that particular season will feature “more crying girls than ever!” And the narrators deliver, framing most dating series’ premieres and finales with promises that “hearts were broken along the way,” over clips of women whimpering, “What have I done wrong? What did I do to deserve this?” and the ever-popular cautionary tale, “I’m not going to be okay!”

Because humiliation is their money shot, when producers find a woman like Heather, a thirty-one-year-old flight attendant petrified of ending up like one of “those horror stories, forty and single!” they milk her for all she’s worth. “I think tomorrow I’ll be okay, but tonight it’s like, ‘God, I’m a loser.’ That’s what you feel like. I wonder, what is so wrong with me that someone cannot love me for who I am?” she blubbered tearfully to the ubiquitous confessional cam after being eliminated by The Bachelor. ABC reran that clip numerous times, just like Fox made the most of Billie Jean’s left-at-the-altar aftermath.

That’s just the kind of anxiety reality TV hopes to inspire in female viewers. After all, as advertisers have long understood, it’s far easier to shill cosmetics and clothing—not to mention Match.com and Bally Fitness memberships—to insecure women scared of being alone than it is to self-confident people who believe they’re beautiful, lovable, and capable of being happy just as they are.

So Much for Happily Ever After

Part of the danger of the “hey, look over here!” misdirection of beautiful princesses and brave princes is that it dissuades us from thinking critically about the dangerous messages these shows are sending.

Structurally, reality television’s sweet fairytale imagery coupled with its dark, degrading underpinnings work to convince the audience that the women we see on these shows have no self-respect. And because a central premise is that contestants are “real people” behaving as they normally would in “real life,” the none-too-subtle implication is that women in general may not deserve any more respect than is shown to the ones on the TV.

Worse yet, the cumulative effect of this one-part-honey, ten-parts-vinegar formula is that it leaves female viewers with the impression that exploitation, contempt, and emotional abuse are just par for the course of women’s romantic experience. “You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince,” the old saying goes; in reality TV’s updated version, happily ever after only occurs when men have all the power and women do all the groveling.

Perhaps saddest of all, “true love”—that ultimate payoff promised by classic fairytales—is wholly absent from these crass, commodified mating dances. In the classic fables, once the heroine was whisked away by the prince, she was assured a life of happiness, adoration, and wealth, so long as she abandoned anything resembling ambition, independence, or individuality. This uneven exchange doesn’t serve women (or men) well, for reasons too numerous to elaborate here.^ac But at least Disney’s princesses ended up with “true love” that was sure to last “forever more.” In contrast, these revisionist fairytales from the likes of Mike Darnell and Mike Fleiss demand all the same self-sacrifice from their female protagonists—but they deny them actual love.

Virtually all of us, women and men, young and old, straight, gay, or bi, feel a very human yearning for affection and intimacy. There’s nothing wrong with that, and everything wrong with the way reality TV producers manipulate these needs. To understand how deeply this genre bastardizes our earliest depictions of desire, think back for a moment to a time when you were an innocent child having Cinderella read to you at bedtime, or when Disney’s Snow White magically danced on the big screen. Try to remember how you felt as you imagined your perfect fairytale romance, that magical moment when your true love would ride up and whisk you away to happily ever after (or, if you were a little boy, when you imagined doing the whisking).

Now, as you recall those childhood daydreams, tell me: Was the Prince Charming of your fantasies some shallow, egotistical, lying dimwit who stuck his tongue down twenty-five other women’s throats until he reluctantly settled for you? And if you hoped to grow up to be the prince, did you yearn to leave a trail of broken hearts behind you as you screwed your way through a throng of insincere hotties?

That’s the thing about fairytales . . . they’re not real. Of the dozens of reality couples who’ve pledged to “make each other happy for the rest of our lives” on ABC, NBC, Fox, VH1, and MTV, only three—the first Bachelorette, the thirteenth Bachelor, and the pair from Outback Jack—ended up married. After all the happily-ever-after buildup, after all the pathetic pandering to be picked, nearly every dating show hero has dumped his chosen “princess,” even those from shows with proposals at the end. (No one married anyone’s dad, either.) It shouldn’t come as a shock that tennis champ and Age of Love star Mark Philippoussis ended up with luv, not love, from the NBC series or that Evan “$50,000? Where do I sign?” Marriott admitted that aside from one uncomfortable reunion segment, he has “never seen the girl” he chose even once since Joe Millionaire wrapped production.¹³ Aside from these three outliers, the pattern is always the same: Every feted TV couple announce their breakup just as soon as they are no longer contractually obligated to canoodle on the couch in postshow interviews on Access Hollywood and The View. Even the yentas who used to sit on the stoop of my Brooklyn apartment building wanting to fix up every pretty girl they met with their bucktoothed nephews and balding accountant sons would have been more trustworthy matchmakers.

There’s a silver lining here, though, if you look hard enough for it. The one positive thing I can say about reality TV’s dating shows is that, read a certain way, they can be seen as a strong argument for legalizing gay marriage. Stay with me . . . opponents of gay marriage claim that granting equal legal rights to gay couples would degrade the sanctity of a sacred familial institution. What they don’t seem to notice is that Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? Married by America, and The Bachelor have been degrading the notion of marriage on prime time for an entire decade . . . especially during sweeps. If desperate, lonely women can get engaged—and sometimes even legally wed—to complete strangers who pluck them from harems on national TV for the profit of advertisers and corporate media, then perhaps we should consider allowing committed gay couples who actually love one another, own homes together, and raise families together to marry their life partners. Just a thought.¹⁴

In the end, reality TV’s twisted fairytales are terribly unromantic at their core. They’ve popularized a trivial and depressing depiction of the concept of love itself. Real love involves a foundation of respect, honesty, and trust, concepts wholly missing from the pale imitations hawked to us by the folks who script “unscripted” entertainment. The equation Fat Wallet + Skinny Chick = Love robs us all of our humanity and erases the possibility of true emotional connection.

But who needs true emotional connection when you can have—or be—a “perfect 10”?