Chapter Three
Bitches and Morons and Skanks, Oh My!
What Reality TV Teaches Us about Women
 
 
Women are bitches.
Women are stupid.
Women are incompetent at work and failures at home.
Women are gold diggers.
How do we know? Because reality TV tells us so.
 
 
Academics often talk about “hegemony,” the concept that describes how cultural stereotypes become unquestioned truth. In today’s society, mass media is our prime purveyor of that cultural hegemony—by which I mean that media is largely responsible for how we know what we know. In other words, media shape what we think of as “the truth” about “the way things are.”
In that context, reality television is as much a dissemination mechanism for ideological persuasion as it is a means of entertainment. I’m not talking about viewers believing that any one particular segment of “unscripted” (or traditionally scripted) entertainment is unvarnished reality; no solitary media moment has the power to totally transform our consciousness. It’s more macro than that. Media is our most common agent of socialization, shaping and informing our collective ideas about people, politics, and public policy. Pop culture images help us determine what to wear, whom to date, how to vote, how we feel about our bodies, how we see ourselves, and how we relate to racial, sexual, socioeconomic, and religious “others.”
Using the rubric of “reality” and authenticity, representations of groups of people on shows such as The Real Housewives of Atlanta, The Bachelor, and America’s Next Top Model have amplified the power to define perceptions of identity. Though no single episode of those or their copycats can do widespread damage, the potential effects of this type of media are disturbing when taken as a whole. From multiple channels, with varied commercially constructed products pumping similar messages through sheer repetition for years, this form of media has the power to influence our notions of normalcy versus difference, convince us that certain behaviors are “innate” for different groups of people, and present culturally constructed norms of gender, race, class, and sexuality as “natural,” rather than performances we’ve learned to adopt through societal education and expectation.
To illustrate the way media shapes what we think of as “the truth,” imagine that you’ve never in your life met an American woman or girl. How would you perceive American women as a group, if your impression was formed solely through reality television?
There are certain things the genre tells us women are supposed to just be. Reality writers, editors, and producers utilize a number of tropes to define a set of characteristics they want us to believe are innately female. What does contemporary television say it means to be “real” women? What do women think, how do they behave, who are they, at their core?

“I Know Better Than to Trust Women”

Trope 1: Women are catty, bitchy, manipulative, and not to be trusted—especially by other women.
 
 
Once reality TV lays the groundwork of jealousy and insecurity by telling women that they can never physically measure up to an endless parade of younger, skinnier, sexier feminine rivals, producers are better able to convince women and girls that every other female is their natural adversary.
From “frenemies” on lifestyle series such as MTV’s The Hills and Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Orange County (and New York, Atlanta, and New Jersey ) to flat-out enemies on dating and modeling shows, reality television presents women as being in constant competition for romantic love, professional success, and personal fulfillment. Like the crabby villains in those old Scooby-Doo cartoons, everything a woman is supposed to want could be available to her . . . if not foiled by some meddling bitch.
“We’re all enemies, vying for the same prize,” one For Love or Money dater says of her sexed-up competitors. As proof, we’re treated to endless scenes of love-starved ladies badmouthing one another to the lone Y chromosome in their midst. Contestants attempt to convince their would-be prince that one gal is too immature and unrefined for him, another too old and boring, while a third hottie is too wild and slutty—leaving only the gossiper herself as a “classy” enough bridal candidate. Talk about your twisted take on Goldilocks.
“Women tend to be jealous and catty and bitchy,” one of Joe Millionaire’s so-called “gold diggers” insists. Another sneers, “I have never seen grown, independent, self-sufficient women act like such brats.” Angry at such smack talk, a Bachelor babe explains that “girls can be conniving, deceiving, and just vicious!” The men they fight over hardly hold their harems in higher esteem: “All they wanna do right now is fight. But you know what? There’s nothing like a good catfight,” Flavor Flav smirked during Flavor of Love’s third season. Second-season Bachelor Aaron grumbled, “The vindictive nature of all the women is starting to show.”
That’s right—all the women. That’s what reality TV does best: gender essentialism.au The concept of women’s inherent cattiness is coded into commercials: “The backstabbing begins!” a dating show narrator promises, as the phrase “BACK STABBING!” screams from the screen in big, bold letters. “The claws were bound to come out when one man is involved with more than one woman,” Chris Harrison, host of The Bachelor, announced in a montage.
Lest this prove too subtle, Joe Millionaire and other series have played sounds of hissing cats to underscore their gleeful promise that “the claws will come out!” When NY Giants quarterback Jesse Palmer was cast to make all the romantic passes, “coming soon” ads for The Bachelor featured glammed-up women in cocktail gowns on a ball field, dive-tackling a football made entirely of roses, again with the clamor of cats scratching in the background.av By season 7, ABC plastered the words “SIX CATTY WOMEN!” over half a dozen bachelorettes’ headshots, described D-list actor/Bachelor Charlie O’Connell as “ONE SCARED PUPPY,” and commanded, “LET THE CATFIGHTS BEGIN.” A narrator announced this in circus-master tones as Charlie smirked, “This could get ugly,” and “What’s New Pussycat?” played in the background.
Feline madness was also promised on Age of Love, which pitted “kittens” in their twenties against “cougars” in their forties so that “each week, you’ll see young versus old in a battle for love.” NBC primed us to believe the “decrepit” older women were destined to fail this epic battle of the wildcats: In the premiere, the “kittens” hang out in their apartment hula hooping in bikinis, while the “cougars” sew needlepoint, read, and do the laundry (because that’s what worn-out old crones do, yes?).
Trapped in a house in which they have no agency, no independent choice, and no contact with the outside world, harem girls on dating programs have literally nothing to do but get drunk and fantasize about snagging a diamond from their show’s Harlequin-esque hunk. Rather than question his intentions (or, heaven forbid, the contrived scenario’s unfairness), women, prodded by producers, redirect the shows’ intrinsic frustrations inward, against themselves and one another. Take it from a former Bachelor producer, who described herself to NPR as having been “involved in every aspect of the production; I was heavily involved with casting, interviewing the cast, and following/driving story.” On the condition of anonymity, she revealed to her friend Carrie Brownstein, riot grrrl icon and NPR contributor, how they get people to go “from seemingly normal to totally coo coo pants”:
In the private one on one interviews with a producer (like me) it is the producer’s job to get the sh*t talking started, like “tell me honestly what you think of Sally”—if the interviewee does not want to respond in a catty way then the producer will usually go to the next level, like “well I personally think she is a self absorbed, attention starved skank,” and then see if the person will take the bait . . . it is easy to start seeding conversations and gossip. Also, if the conversations linger too long on favorite movies and stuff the producers will step in and say, “ok we all know we signed up for a TV show—so if you don’t start talking about something more topical then you can’t have the sushi you requested tonight.” The smarter cast members start to realize that everything can be bartered. Like, “I will give you a good one-on-one interview about Sally, IF you let me listen to my iPod for the rest of the day.”2
And so they turn on each other, often based on off-camera misinformation, manipulation, and a false economy where trash talk is a participant’s only currency. Gesturing a mock punch in the direction of a woman edited as that Bachelor season’s resident villain, one hostile combatant says, “I want to kick her ass. I want to wring her neck. I want to so bad!” During a hunting lesson on Fox’s Farmer Wants a Wife, a lily-white city girl aims her rifle at some tin cans and talks of preemptive war: “I fight for men the way they do in the Middle East. Before somebody blows me up, I blow them up.”
Women’s antagonism toward one another is portrayed as innate even when a man isn’t in the mix—and, we learn, it starts early. A Toddlers & Tiaras promo announces, “If competition had a face, it would be hers,” over B-roll of a tot made up like a Gabor sister. Children are selectively edited to appear bratty with their parents and catty with their competitors. Bossy li’l beauty queen Madison (“stage name”: Tootie) competes in the ten-to-twelve category. She speaks about her split personalities in third person, treats her mom like a “slave,” and says she enjoys pageants because she loves to beat other girls. After she is framed as the villain of the episode, fans dutifully attack her in web recaps with titles such as, “Your Kid Is a Brat and That’s a Fact of Life!”aw
We’re told to watch out for claws on America’s Next Top Model, on Queen Bees (where participants are meant to “learn inner beauty”), and on every season of Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise. “Any time you put a bunch of ladies together who are not necessarily friends, there is going to be some drama,” Tamra Barney, self-declared “hottest housewife in Orange County,” wrote on a Bravo .com Real Housewives blog. “Catfights” are among the main viewership draws—and the primary promotional tactic—of Housewives. Editing plays up regional and ethnic stereotypes. Stuck-up snobbery and betrayal among wealthy white women is a major theme of Orange County. In contrast, we get “low-class” tantrums on The Real Housewives of New Jersey, in which Italian American women accuse each other of prostitution, kidnapping, and drug dealing while flipping over banquet tables. In Atlanta, African American Housewives get into verbal brawls with Black male employees and threaten and even hit one another. (One of the most talked-about scenes of season 2 was when divorcée Sheree Whitfield physically intimidates the only white cast member, Kim Zolciak, then tries to pull off Kim’s wig. During another wildly popular incident, Kim called the police to allege that NeNe Leakes grabbed her neck and choked her. The fight, which occurred off-camera, was widely reported in the entertainment press and online.) Tellingly, the one castmate who wouldn’t perform “diva antics” on cue was canned. DeShawn Snow, head of a girls’ self-esteem foundation, was the only original cast member not asked to return to Atlanta’s second season—because Bravo considered her too dignified. A producer “said that I was ‘too human for a circus show’ and that because the show did so well, they are about to pump up the drama and they didn’t think that I would fit in.”ax DeShawn was replaced by Kandi Burruss, a successful hip-hop songwriter who was repeatedly called “ghetto” throughout the second season.3
Producers ensure that women dutifully perform their bitch-tastic roles by egging them on with techniques that would make psyops intelligence officers proud. Based on interviews with two dozen reality TV stars, The New York Times reported that reality television has become “Hollywood’s sweatshop,” functioning behind the scenes like a “psychological experiment that keeps contestants off-balance and vulnerable . . . programs routinely use isolation, sleeplessness and alcohol to encourage wild behavior.”ay4And so, they snipe away. On dating and competition series, they attack each other in antagonistic confrontations (“You are all a bunch of catty-ass bitches!”—Flavor of Love). They conspire against each other like high school Mean Girls (“[She’s] a ho and she’s got to go. She’s a total bitch!”—Joe Millionaire). They mouth off in hateful, bleep-filled “confessionals” (“You f-cking worthless c-nt. You are so . . . wasteful, bitchy, stupid . . . you’re worthless. Your parents must be ashamed of you!”—America’s Next Top Model ). Whether they’re sloshed and overtired or sober and alert, such angry outbursts are stoked and edited to “prove” that no matter how sophisticated or sweet her facade, nearly every woman is a selfish schemer deep down.
Lifestyle series manipulate us in the opposite direction. Women who truly dislike one another are portrayed as “real life” friends. Thrown together as cameras trail their semiscripted—yet supposedly authentic—lives, they are rude and unkind. They betray their so-called friends’ trust, as when The Hills stars have semistaged arguments over men and jobs. The Housewives make fun of one another (Atlanta), flirt with each other’s men (Orange County), and reveal embarrassing, scandalous secrets about members of their social circle (New Jersey). “How can they treat each other that way?” we wonder, amused and disgusted, not realizing that the answer’s simple: “None of us are friends,” NeNe Leakes of The Real Housewives of Atlanta told Jet. “Friends don’t do what we have done to each other on the show. You have not seen one of us get the other one’s back. If you did see somebody get somebody’s back, the next week they were talking about them. . . . We are all clearly associates.”5
In contrast, competition show castoffs often speak fondly and at length in postelimination interviews about the bonds they developed with their fellow bachelorettes and Top Models. “I made some great friends on the show,” Kortnie Coles of ANTM has said. “We still keep in touch and hang out and all that good stuff.”6 You’d never guess that from watching what seems like “all catty, all the time” behavior. That’s intentional. Series producers who traffic in “drama” rarely allow viewers to see signs of real fondness and camaraderie between female castmates, whose mutual support is usually left on the cutting room floor. Instead, belying claims of “unscripted” storytelling, the phrase “I’m not here to make friends! I’m here to win!” echoes from the lips of numerous women through every season of nearly every “reality” series . . . ever since May 2003, when America’s Next Top Model titled their second ever episode, “The Girl Who Is Here to Win, Not Make Friends.”7
The moral of these sorry stories? If you don’t want to get stabbed in the back, heed this canny Bachelor babe’s advice: “I know better than to trust women.”
Who benefits when women are conditioned not to trust one another?
Reality TV depictions of women as inherently at war over female beauty and male booty mirror a broader media attack against women’s solidarity. These shows put an entertaining spin on decades of corporate news coverage that pits women against one another socially and economically, diverting attention from true problems we could be allying to solve.
Before we ever witnessed a Real Housewives catfight, news media spent many years trying to convince Americans that women are each other’s worst enemies. From an NBC morning news segment devoted to an author’s quest to “blow the lid off sisterhood,” we’ve learned that female rivalry is inescapable: “No matter what your life is like there’s always some kind of competition between you and your friends or female coworkers. Even mother.”az
Before Age of Love’s “kittens” and “cougars” came years of news stories egging on a generational divide among women. Time, Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, and hundreds of other outlers have claimed that feminism is “dead” and a “failure.” As this preferred media narrative goes, older women are disgusted by their daughters’ supposed rejection of feminism, while Gen X and Gen Y women consider their foremothers irrelevant relics. These stories consistently ignore young, progressive women’s activism alongside older feminist mentors in social justice movements for the rights of women, people of color, youth, workers, the LGBT community, immigrants, and the environment.8
Throw motherhood into the mix, and watch out. Print and broadcast media have spent the past twenty years pumping out nearly two thousand stories pitting “Mommy vs. Mommy” and decrying the “Scary Rise of the ‘Sanctimommy.’”ba “The Mommy War” seems to have made its journalistic debut in July 1989, when the Texas Monthly declared that “Working moms view stay-at-home moms as idle and silly, traitors in the battle to encourage men to assume more responsibility at home. Stay-at-home moms view working moms as selfish and greedy, cheating their own children out of a strong maternal bond.” Ever since, headlines such as The New York Times’ 2001 “LOVE & MONEY; Is My Mom Better Than Yours?” and 2003 “The Opt-Out Revolution” (which claimed that educated women were fleeing the workforce to stay home with their babies) have abounded.10 These antagonistic trend stories persist despite being widely and repeatedly debunked. The actual evidence paints a very different picture. “The ballyhooed Mommy Wars exist mainly in the minds—and the marketing machines—of the media and publishing industry,” according to E. J. Graff of the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism. The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that “working mothers with infants ha[ve] held steady at 53.5 percent” since 2000, Graff wrote in The Washington Post, “and most of their stay-at-home peers don’t hold it against them”:
Most women today have to work: it’s the only way their families are going to be fed, housed and educated. A new college-educated generation takes it for granted that women will both work and care for their families—and that men must be an integral part of their children’s lives . . . stay-at-home moms and working mothers aren’t firmly opposing philosophical stances but the same women in different life phases, moving in and out of the part-time and full-time workforce for the few years while their children are young.11
It may not be accurate, and it may not be good for women’s mental health, but ginning up a media-manufactured feud between women “is good for the news business. The Mommy Wars sell newspapers, magazines, TV shows and radio broadcasts,” Graff continues. “An especially inflammatory article or episode can increase Web site hits, achieve ‘most e-mailed’ status, drag more outraged viewers or listeners to the phone lines and burn a media brand more deeply into consumers’ minds.”
That anxiety-breeds-ratings formula also sells reality shows—but we’ll get to ABC’s Wife Swap in a bit.
What is The Bachelor and its legion of copycat dating series, if not a manifestation of all those articles in women’s mags like Cosmo and Allure warning older women to always be on guard lest some younger, sluttier floozy steal their men?bb It’s no coincidence that the same antiwrinkle creams and “age-defying” cosmetics that advertise in Glamour often run commercials during dating series.
In reality television as in corporate journalism, such representations divide and conquer. This isn’t just about depriving women of female friendships to foster desperation for male affection. All social, academic, professional, and political gains women have made in this country—suffrage, legality and availability of contraceptives, gender equity in education and sports, criminalization of sexual harassment and acquaintance rape, protections against gender and race-based employment discrimination, among others—have been won through hard-fought collective struggle with other women. If women are conditioned to consider other women lying backstabbers, we are less likely to organize together for better working conditions or pay equity.bc
Girls taught not to rely on each other will be less likely to want to play team sports together, or defend their rights to do so.bd Similarly, we’d be loath to reveal to one another the kinds of painful or embarrassing experiences of workplace assault that can lead to class action prosecution when we realize that we’re not the only ones who have been mistreated. And, as every counselor who works with battered women knows, one of the primary ways an abuser gains control over his girlfriend or wife is by isolating her from her friends and family. If the notion that women are not to be trusted permeates our culture, will domestic violence victims feel they can turn to female allies for aid to escape abusive relationships—and will men and women be more or less likely to believe them when they describe their situations?
The consequences of this “women as bitches” trope are not just political. If we start to believe the common reality TV premise that it’s better to hang out with men because “girls are jealous” and don’t want other women to be happy, as Charm School and Tough Love castmates insist, we will miss out on the laughter and love that so often accompany deep female friendships. Female friends prop up our self-esteem in times of frivolity (bikini season, first-date jitters) and provide emotional support to help us survive life’s inevitable crises (divorce, unemployment, death). Deep bonds between women can be crucial to our happiness and longevity: A 2006 study of nearly three thousand nurses with breast cancer found that “women without close friends were four times as likely to die from the disease as women with 10 or more friends.”14
If millions of TV viewers believe that sisterhood is not powerful but spiteful, it becomes all that much harder for women to achieve any further social progress in America.

No One Wants to See a Brainiac in a Bikini: Women as Stupid

Trope 2: Women are stupid.
 
 
Women’s intellectual inferiority is among reality TV’s basest notions. Time and time again, we learn that the female half of the population is cringe-inducingly stupid. In embarrassing scenes across unscripted subgenres, women are portrayed as “the dumber sex.” For women, we learn from one Bridezilla, “Thinking is a waste of time. Thinking is for people who have no brains.”
Before we learn a thing about their personalities, we’re predisposed to deem them inane, idiotic, or at best, naive for signing up for reality TV humiliation in the first place. Producers build on our derision by carefully casting women who are, let’s just say, in no danger of being recruited to join Mensa. Once selected, editors play up their every ditzy interaction, leaving any expressions of intellect or clarity to the annals of unaired tape.
When the genre’s gender templates were first being created, reality TV taught us that “dumb blonds” exist for our comedic pleasure. In 2002, E! encouraged us to snicker at addle-brained former Playboy Playmate (and former trophy wife of an eighty-nine-year-old oil billionaire) Anna Nicole Smith. The original reality TV train wreck, The Anna Nicole Show mocked the steady mental and physical decline of the buxom and seemingly stoned Smith, whose slurred speech and erratic behavior fueled the show’s tagline, “It’s not supposed to be funny. It just is.” The cover of the first-season DVD described Anna Nicole—whose eventual drug overdose and death could have been forecast by this opportunistic spectacle—as “America’s Guiltiest Pleasure.”be
One year later, MTV introduced another reality option for those who wanted to laugh at “a clueless, rich blond bimbo” with none of The Anna Nicole Show’s tragedy-waiting-to-happen aftertaste. Welcome Newlyweds’ star Jessica Simpson, who boggled our minds with how little seemed to be in hers. She told the secretary of the interior, “You’ve done a nice job decorating the White House.” She believed Buffalo wings were made from Buffalo meat, not chicken—but her logic was always getting fouled up by fowl. In the series’ debut, the pop star picked at a meal made from a can of Chicken of the Sea and asked her hubby, Nick Lachey, “Is this chicken, what I have, or is this fish? I know it’s tuna, but it—it says Chicken by the Sea.” From that infamous moment on, her every confused quote became proof that, as Dateline put it, “Saying something really dumb was now ‘pulling a Jessica.’” Her presence on television was heralded as proof that the stereotype of the “‘dumb blond’ won’t go away” because “maybe it’s true.” Her father went so far as to suggest that his daughter’s queries were typical of silly broads everywhere. “Jessica represents all the questions that women across America want to ask their husbands but are afraid to,” he told the Arizona Daily Star.16
At the same time, Fox was unveiling their Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie vehicle The Simple Life, which, for five seasons, reveled in the “rich bitch” heiresses’ simpleminded ignorance (contrasted with their haughty elitism). Both Hilton and Simpson have said that they were just “playing characters” on The Simple Life and The Newlyweds. That’s likely true. These media-savvy young women have intentionally played up their airhead images to heighten their fame and their already-overflowing bank accounts. It’s a time-tested bait-and-switch: smart, professionally independent women become more successful by playing the part of the silly, dependent dimwit in the media. The phenomenally accomplished I Love Lucy star Lucille Ball, the first woman to head a Hollywood production company, is probably the most famous TV example.bf
Reality producers may have cut their teeth on “dumb blonds,” but they want viewers to believe female stupidity knows no racial limits. Five years after Joe Simpson told the press that his Newlywed daughter represented all American women, The Real Housewives of Atlanta—which features a predominately African American cast—revived the theme of husbands imparting knowledge to imbecilic wives. In one of the most talked-about scenes of the first season, NeNe Leakes futilely attempted to help her nine-year-old son with his math homework. Since she was cowed by basic fractions, her husband, Gregg, had to step in to tutor his spouse right alongside their son. Alas, not even his helpfully drawn pie graphs and patient tone could bring her comprehension up to sixth-grade level:
GREGG: Three thirds make a whole. This is the pizza. Three thirds. If John ate one, Cole ate one, do you have half of it left?
NENE: Yeah. He said yeah!
GREGG: No, you have a third of it left.
NENE: No you don’t!
GREGG [gently reads a line from the math textbook to underscore his point]: Sure you do, honey.
NENE: [confused] Okay . . .
GREGG: Would you rather have one third of something, or one half of something?
NENE: It just depends on what that something is. Still, I’m just, Gregg, I’m just—can we get a tutor?
While NeNe couldn’t pass grade-school algebra, we were to understand that Kim Zolciak, the sole white woman on the show, couldn’t pass elementary English. When she was asked, “How do you spell cat?” Kim’s matter-of-fact reply was, “K-A-T.” Producers pounce on such moments to portray the Real Housewives of Atlanta as fundamentally ignorant. Yet during RHOA’s entire first season, viewers never learned about original cast member DeShawn Snow’s postgraduate divinity studies. Why? Because filming a competent, intelligent African American woman pursuing a master’s degree would have broken producers’ preferred narrative: that Black women (and their wealthy white lady friends) are gossipy idiots.
Regional accents and cultural slang are often used to brand women of color as unintelligent. On America’s Next Top Model, Tyra Banks has told numerous Black girls that their speech patterns make them sound “ghetto,” or inferior to other (implied “normal-sounding”) girls with standard anchorwoman-style dialects. Danielle Evans, an African American teen from Arkansas, was browbeaten for her Southern drawl. Dani had poise, charm, and a vocabulary to put her competitors to shame (they said they were “bitches” when they got mad; she described herself as “cantankerous”). Yet Tyra harped on the eventual ANTM champ’s speech throughout the sixth season, referring to her as “the girl that takes beautiful pictures but the judges don’t trust when she opens her mouth.” Dani was a liability to advertisers, Tyra said: “That voice cannot necessarily sell makeup.”bg
Despite show runners’ best attempts to portray women—especially women of color—as ignorant, every once in a while a moment of rebellious clarity slips through the editorial cracks to disprove that depiction. Saaphyri, a low-income Black woman whose story we’ll hear more of in chapter 4, was portrayed as violent and crazy on Flavor of Love 2. Producers tried to stick with this script when they brought her back for Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School, employing editing and production devices to make her (and her fellow “classmates”) seem unintelligent. But Saaphyri defied her “hood” packaging and became the queen of the one-liners, displaying quick wit and regular rebellion against judges’ class-based insults. And during a business challenge, she was the “student” who figured out how to solve a key problem, much to the surprise of the rest of the cast. She quickly corrected their assumptions: “I feel that people take me as being stupid, because they figure ‘she’s not a college graduate, her speech isn’t perfect.’ All that together should equal dumb, but that’s not the case.”
Still, ever since Anna Nicole and Paris and Nicole, reality casting directors have sought out female participants likely to “pull a Jessica.” Producers pair them with male counterparts who expect to exploit their assumed stupidity to get off, or to get over. Sometimes this plays out through sexual conquest: for example, tag-team daters Kamal and Ahmad Givens on VH1’s Real Chance of Love act as if the less intelligent a woman is, the more likely they will be to bed her. Other times, financial gain is the goal, as when Survivor: Samoa castaway Russell Hantz bragged about “my dumb-ass girl alliance.”
In 2009, TLC’s King of the Crown brought us their version of a “dumb-ass girl alliance” between former Miss South Carolina Teen USA and her pageant coach, Cy Frakes. Before she became the marketing hook for this men-behind-the-pageant series, Caitlin Upton garnered major media ridicule and more than 40 million YouTube views for spouting gibberish about geography (“education, like, such as in South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere, like, such as”) during the Miss Teen USA 2007 pageant. The premise of King of the Crown is that the beauty queen’s internationally recognized incoherence damaged Frakes’s “Complete Pageant Preparation” business, so he and his employees must now redeem themselves by guiding Upton (and their other clients) to victory once again. Frakes’s sequined shirts and Southern aphorisms are only so compelling, so TLC promised more moronic mumblings from Upton as ratings bait. In a preview video, Frakes tells us his job is “to make sure the next time she opens her mouth, a brick doesn’t fall out of it.” Cameras immediately cut to Upton in “interview boot camp.” What does she think of the swine flu epidemic? “All these people who don’t take their antibiotics when they had the flu or the cold, it creates new, new cat-a-strophes.” The series premiere implies that she really is as mindless as she seems. Her speech coach asks her opinion about the 2008 auto bailout (a major news story when the episode was filmed). Upton stares blankly, over har-dee-har-har music piped in by producers. He clarifies: “I mean, do you think the government should be bailing out automakers?” With a pained expression, Miss Teen South Carolina exhales deeply, then asks, “Auto [*blink*] makers?” “Yeah, like GM, Ford, Chrysler,” her coach offers, voice tinged with pity and exasperation. This time Upton accompanies her blank stare with a long, low “Hmmmmnnn . . . mmmmmm” that sounds like the moan of a wounded animal.
In describing King of the Crown, my intent is not to trash the beauty queen’s . . . seeming limitations . . . entertaining as they may be. Instead, the lesson we should take from this is that reality television makes stars out of certain kinds of young women (for example, those who don’t even know what automakers are, much less understand the complicated economic issues involved with a recession-era governmental bailout), while leaving female scholars, business leaders, community advocates, and other high achievers off the dial.
While we don’t get to see shows highlighting American women’s brilliance, sometimes their inherent idiocy is the concept around which an entire series is built. On Ashton Kutcher’s Beauty and the Geek, dim-witted hotties are paired with brainy but socially awkward boys, who are instructed to “teach” each other “valuable” life skills their partners “need.” The men instruct the women in math, science, grammar, geography, technology, and how to not be stuck-up bitches. The women teach the men how to find the right pair of good-ass jeans, construct the perfect pickup line, and dazzle at cocktail parties with breaking news about which celebutant is diddling whose ex-boyfriend. The point of this “social experiment”? One gender’s knowledge is vital to the workings of the world, while the other gender has a lock on all things superficial. Simply by benefit of being male, the “geeks” are supposed to know how to do things like pitch camping tents and fix cars (really? nerd boys are auto repair jocks?), while the “beauties” (code on the show for “bimbos”) are presumed to have zero expertise beyond cute outfits and pop culture trivia. At the series’ conclusion, the triumphant geeks emerge as newly well-rounded individuals with oh-so-much-better haircuts, fashion sense, and interpersonal confidence. The extent of the jiggly, giggly girls’ “transformation” is summed up in end-of-episode gushing about how they’ve looked deep inside and learned that even geeks can be good people. Wait, let me get that Harvard application.
Dating shows, too, bend over backward to convince us that women are as dumb as a pile of rocks. On NBC’s early reality series Meet My Folks, nubile young things attempted to win a European vacation fling with “the folks’” son. Old-time game show host Wink Martindale was on hand to conduct a patronizing “smarts test,” because “the parents would like to find out just how intelligent you ladies are.” The girl with the highest number of correct answers, Martindale condescended in baby talk, “gets a private wittle date with Dan!” Martindale’s tone wasn’t the only thing juvenile about the scenario. “How many states are there in the United States?” he asked, tacking on “I know this one. I know this one!” before their replies. When a dippy pigtailed girl correctly answered, “When was the war of 1812?” he cooed, “Veeery goood!” in the same voice one usually uses to praise a potty-training toddler. But, like every good patriarch, Martindale was ready to scold. “That’s embarrassing! I feel like I’m losing control here,” he told one babe who didn’t know which countries are separated by the Rio Grande. When another thought a year has 346 days, he snapped, “Are you blushing because you’re embarrassed? Because if you’re not, you should be!”
In a horrible catch-22, when reality TV women aren’t embarrassingly stupid, they’re condemned for that, too. Medical student Elyse was favored to be the first Top Model winner because her bony, underweight body was the preferred form of high-fashion designers. The comely future doc made it to the final episode, despite expressing frustration at “the most vapid conversations you’ve ever experienced going on around me all the time.” But in the season finale, this is what Tyra Banks told the frontrunner just before eliminating her:
Elyse, your look is really strong for the fashion world—for the die-hard, hardcore fashion world. . . . Elyse, I admire your intelligence. I think you are so smart. But one thing with that intelligence is that it can intimidate people, and there’s a way to use that intelligence in a way that doesn’t feel like you’re maybe putting down other people or sounding derogatory.
After a long, silent pause for dramatic effect, Tyra sent Elyse packing. Her tiny couture bod made the grade, but her big, fat brain cost her the title, and the $100,000 that comes with it. Get that, girls? Your mind is a terrible thing to use.
Apparently, no one wants to see a brainiac in a bikini. One wonders how a med student slipped through the casting process in the first place. Not to worry; future seasons have mostly avoided participants prone to such pesky habits as critical thinking. A rare exception was third-season runner-up (and later Ugly Betty supporting actress) Yaya DaCosta, an academically accomplished African American graduate of Brown University. For the sins of expressing pride in her ethnic heritage, her intelligence, and her degrees in International Relations and African Studies, Yaya was framed as “arrogant” and “snotty.” She represented a double whammy: not only intellectually driven, but Black; that’s a losing combination in the reality TV universe, which prefers its women of color loud, ignorant, and, as they’re too often described, “ghetto.” (We’ll learn more about Yaya in chapter 6.)
Mental acuity isn’t considered cute on dating shows, either. Usually this message is sent through omission, when dozens of desperate women usually express little to no professional or intellectual ambition beyond lounging around McMansions, peacocking for male attention. Thinking for a living is seen as a romantic handicap. “I’m a rocket scientist,” twenty-five-year-old Natasha said by way of introduction to bachelor Luke on the opener of plus-size dating series More to Love. “My goodness. That’s a little bit intimidating,” came Luke’s quick response. “Oh! Sorry!” she giggled self-consciously. He sent her home at the end of the first episode.
As if there was ever any doubt.
The reign of the Ditz Queen in reality TV is an attempt to reinforce a deeply held social belief (here’s looking at you, Mike Darnell!) that women have struggled for centuries to overcome. After all, less than one hundred years ago, American women were still denied the ability to vote, partly justified by the allegation that they were less intelligent than men.18 Today, class action lawsuits are still being levied against Fortune 500 corporations that refuse to promote women out of secretarial and retail positions based on institutional biases that consider women not as mentally prepared as men for achievement and leadership. And as recently as 2005, Lawrence Summers, then the president of Harvard University, publicly declared that women’s innate intellectual deficiencies are responsible for their disproportionate underrepresentation in the highest ranks of science, not the glass ceiling or other forms of systemic discrimination. Men, Summers said, are simply smarter. Summers left Harvard in part due to fallout from his blatant expression of bigotry against half his student population. Yet President Barack Obama awarded him his next gig, as director of the White House’s National Economic Council.bh
When pop culture underscores Summers’s notion of women’s mental inferiority to millions of Americans every week, continued efforts toward gender equity take a hit . . . as do young women growing up in a culture that would prefer they shut up and look pretty.

Weak Workers, Wicked Wives, Mediocre Moms: Women as Incompetent

Trope 3: Women are incompetent at work and at home.
 
 
The logical extension of women’s stupidity is women’s incompetence. From these shows, we learn that women are too intellectually, professionally, and socially unequipped to function effectively in the “real” world (not to mention The Real World).
Reality TV has very clear, archaic notions about what a “woman’s place” is, and what it isn’t: The personal sphere is singularly female, the public sphere predominantly male. Or, as one Wife Swap husband put it, fathers shouldn’t do housework or cook for their children because “cavemen, the dad would go out there, work, and mom would stay home, cook, clean, and take care of the kids.”
Women, the genre suggests ad nauseam, should be confined to their rightful realms of hearth and home (and, of course, hot tubs and strip clubs). But a funny thing happened on the way to prime time: Even when we’ve shed any last indicators of pesky ambition for the confinement of reality TV approved domesticity, we still can’t perform our “natural” roles with any efficacy.
We’re losers while we’re single, imply The Bachelor, More to Love, and Flavor of Love. Of course, we’re all the more pathetic if unmarried after thirty-five, as per cautionary tales such as Age of Love, Who Wants to Marry My Dad? and The Cougar.
We’re terrors before we wed: “There’s three kinds of Bridezillas stalking the streets of America: the Princess Bride, the Neurotic Bride, and the Obsessive Bride,” a narrator warned in horror movie tones on the premiere episode of Bridezillas.
If we work outside the home (whether for fulfillment or from economic necessity), we’re slovenly housekeepers and bossy tyrants to wimpy husbands. At least, that’s what we learn about nearly every nonhomemaker among the two women traded like chattel on most episodes of Wife Swap, a televised version of those trumped-up “Mommy Wars.”
We’re piss-poor parents to our out-of-control children on shows like Supernanny and Nanny 9-11, where “experts” from central casting whip our rug rats into shape with well-chosen parenting book platitudes. Mothers are so witless, these shows posit, that strangers can accomplish more with our kids in just a few days than we could in all the years since we birthed them.
And as the Real Housewives are meant to illustrate, women with money are horrid human beings who care more about our implants, mansions, galas, and feuds than our kids, husbands, families, and communities. (Only a handful of women—including those with careers they downplay in order to call themselves “housewives”—participate in the filming of The Real Housewives of Orange County, yet producers clearly want us to believe the behavior of these few is representative of a great many. Why else would they include a random title screen reading, “7 million families live in gated communities” before a mansion’s gate opens during the show’s intro credits?)
As a whole, the reality TV landscape paints us as failures in the domestic domain that we’re supposed to believe is our sole responsibility.
If this television genre wants us to believe that women can’t even function in the classically female terrain of homemaker, wife, and mother—often described on Wife Swap as our “God-given roles”—just imagine how much worse its messages are about female performance in professional and public life.
In business competitions, producers carefully construct narratives in which women’s good looks are their primary—sometimes their only—asset. Boob-power, not brainpower, is the key to women’s success on The Apprentice, where ambitious (and always gorgeous) female executives are often shown relying on their physical appearances and, in some cases, their overt sexuality to compete against men’s supposedly inherent problem-solving abilities. They flirt with clients to raise donations for charity. They flash their belly buttons to sell lemonade. They even drop their skirts to sell M&Ms . . . because they can’t think of a better way to get men to give them money. By the same token, they’re often portrayed as inept when unable to coast on the feminine wiles that, we are meant to understand, were partially responsible for their being cast in the first place.bi If host and executive producer Donald Trump behaved toward female staffers of the Trump Organization the way he does on his show, promoting women for sexy stunts and ignoring or rewarding the sort of treatment women have received from male Apprentice candidates over the years, he’d be setting himself up for sexual harassment lawsuits.
With its emphasis on mock-professional marketing challenges for high-end corporate advertisers such as Marquis Jets, Lamborghini cars, and natch, the Trump Organization, NBC’s mainstay business competition has the undeserved reputation of being more sophisticated fare than cable reality sleaze-fests. Yet the same notions about women and work hawked on The Apprentice can be found at the low-rent end of the TV dial. Take Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School, which split contestants into teams for a “business lesson” in how to create and sell perfume. Inevitably for a franchise that revels in debasing women (especially women of color), the episode read more like a tutorial in workplace discrimination. A “CEO” chose a “skanky” woman to “work” for her team “because you are sexy and I think you will use your assets to your advantage.” And so she did: Her team let random men sniff their cleavage as incentive to buy the scent and eventually stripped nearly naked on the sidewalk to market their perfume. “They did what they do—selling tits and ass. They just added perfume to the ho-selling business!” a competing Flavor of Love Girl groused. Never fear: Charm School “dean” Mikki Taylor, also Essence magazine’s beauty director and cover editor, was on hand to reassure the audience that “us[ing] their sexuality to sell the perfume” was a perfectly acceptable sales strategy because “It was tasteful and not slutacious.” Um, okay.
What did promise to be “slutacious”? The premise for the Fox “comedy/ reality hybrid” show Anchorwoman, which simultaneously pinched two of my biggest pet peeves as a journalist and media critic: reality TV misogyny, coupled with the marginalization of qualified women in the news biz. It started with Fox giving busty blond bikini model and former W WE wrestler Lauren Jones a job as a local news anchor for KYTX, a flailing CBS news affiliate in Tyler, Texas. Until that point, Jones’s most notable experience outside the wrestling ring was as one of “Barker’s Beauties” on the game show The Price Is Right, and as “Hobo Bikini Model” on Wonder Showzen. Promotional materials called her an “über-vixen” and included pictures of the model perched seductively on a news desk wearing a low-cut, leopard-print halter top and red micromini. Pretty girl = ratings gold, CBS believed, so they let Fox convince them to give Jones a news gig . . . not despite her lack of journalistic expertise but specifically because of those nonexistent credentials, to serve as conflict-generating fodder for Anchorwoman. Here’s how Fox’s promotional material described the series:
Can this bombshell make it as a serious reporter? Will she save KYTX, or make it the laughingstock of the Lone Star State? Lauren wants to show everyone she’s no airhead, and this is her big chance to prove she’s more than just a pretty face. The entire newsroom thinks the boss has made a giant mistake. Reigning anchor Annalisa Petraglia is not about to lose her Queen Bee status to some L.A. hottie. News Director Dan Delgado is fit to be tied as his beloved journalistic standards go out the window. . . . How will it all turn out? Only the ratings will tell, so stay tuned. . . .
How fun! A bikini model will try to read news copy from cue cards! Let’s place bets on how badly she’ll mangle the news! And, oooh, get ready for catfights from coworkers jealous that she’s hotter than they are!
This may have been seen as “comedy/reality” by Fox, but it’s anything but funny that for an entire month, residents of Tyler, Texas, had their local news delivered by someone with zero journalistic merit. It’s bad enough that so many news stations hire “über-vixens” as “weathergirls”—now, thanks to reality TV producers, opportunistic station managers are casting them as pseudojournalists (if only for the amount of time it takes to film a reality series about the news). I wish this were the stuff of satire, as when The Daily Show’s Samantha Bee spoofed the sexualization of women in journalism as “N.I.L.F.: News I’d Like to F@#k.” Even as scripted entertainment, Jones’s appointment would be far-fetched, but as “real-life” practice, hiring a news anchor based solely on her looks and setting her up to fail, while placing women on her team into a hostile workplace environment, smacks of employment discrimination. At best this would be improper, at worst illegal. But the impact on the news—or on citizens who rely on it to make sound decisions about elections, legislation, health, and public life—hardly matters to Fox or CBS. Degrading pretty bimbettes in business settings is usually a reliable ratings draw to networks that have long since abandoned anything resembling “beloved journalistic standards.”bj
Anchorwoman managed the trifecta: all three tropes—women as catty, ditzy, and incompetent—squeezed into one show. Luckily, reality viewers never did learn whether this insult to women journalists everywhere had any impact on the news in Tyler, Texas—Anchorwoman’s ratings were so abysmal that Fox canceled it after just one episode.
Credibly delivering the news is just one of many things reality TV tells women we just can’t do. We can’t wait tables, clean hotel rooms, milk cows, catch crayfish, unload a casket from a hearse, or manage not to desecrate cremated ashes (The Simple Life). We can’t remove rat carcasses, inseminate pigs, sling fast food burgers, or avoid getting drunk as a nudist colony staffer (New York Goes to Work). We can’t engage in shrewd sales negotiations. (“Apparently stripper clothes are worth more than I thought, unless she gave him a blow job. Damn crack whore!” one Flavor of Love Girl says of the large dollar figure her competitor scored for her fashions from a male thrift store manager.) We can’t serve and protect (“Female officers put people’s lives at risk,” a husband tells his “new wife,” a cop, on Wife Swap). We can’t work construction, or even assemble an out-of-the-box children’s playground safely (Charm School). We can’t cook as delectably as men (there has been only one female Top Chef among the winners of the culinary show’s first five seasons). We can’t prepare healthy meals (The Biggest Loser, Dance Your Ass Off . . . then again, neither can male contestants on weight loss shows). We can’t tell jokes without a handicap (Last Comic Standing). We can’t write or sing hip-hop (Real Chance of Love, Ego Trip’s The White Rapper Show). We can’t even dress ourselves appropriately for work, play, or the simple task of not embarrassing our loved ones (What Not to Wear).
THIS IS SHIRLEY CHISOLM’S LEGACY?
Correspondence between myself and Brian Gadinsky, executive producer of Fox’s Anchorwoman and an executive producer on several seasons of American Idol, is telling. After reading a critique I wrote about Anchorwoman’s prospects for both sexism and unethical journalism, Gadinsky sent me this email, hoping to convince me that his show wasn’t antifeminist. All spelling and punctuation [sic]:
 
wanted to tell you an interesting tidbit!
my mother, who passed away in 2000, was one floridas pioneer feminists and she served in the fla legislature for 22 years as a champion for abused women, women who wanted choice over their own bodies, women who were underpaid in the workplace, woman who wanted the ERA in the constitution, etc etc etc. . . . she was the first inductee into the florida womens hall of fame!!!
and so i was raised by her! i will never forget campaiging in 1972 for shirley chisholm for president!!
so for my creation to be slammed by a feminist organization certainly got my attention!
i asked my brother and sister awhile back if mom would be turning in her grave or laughing hystercally and we were unanimous it would be the latter. people need to lighten up! the irony is, as you will see on the show, you’re all wrong.
just like my mom, lauren jones, being a woman, is completely marginalized and underestimated. in my show, like my mom did . . . she shows ’em . . . and shows ’em good . . . that she is a bright college grad and with her perseverance and hard work she will triumph and leave everyone dumbfounded. . . .
. . . keep writing about my show!!!! it premieres august 21!!!
 
my best wishes
brian gadinsky
 
Hmm . . . I wonder what Gadinsky’s mom and her fellow Florida Women’s Hall of Famers would have said if they saw Fox’s promo materials portraying Lauren Jones as an unintelligent hottie who doesn’t deserve her job. But, maybe I should “lighten up.” I mean, I’m sure this unqualified model-posing-as-journalist is just as ready to “show ’em good” as a groundbreaking feminist ERA-campaigning, Chisholm-voting, battered-women-protecting, pay-equity-advocating, abortion-supporting politician.
Or . . . not. Neither Gadinsky’s late mother’s political persuasions nor his excessive use of exclamation points negate the fact that he built and marketed a show based on the premise that hot women are brainless and unprofessional, while smart women are catty and jealous of pretty young things. The original blog post Gadinsky responded to appeared at WIMN’s Voices. “Calling Texas TV viewers—WIMN needs your help! (Asinine ‘Anchorwoman’ sneek peek tonight makes mocking women journalists a primetime sport),” June 11, 2007.
With our limited initiative, intelligence, and ingenuity, reality TV tells us women are followers, not leaders. In ABC’s post-9/11 reality docu-series Profiles from the Front Line, Jerry Bruckheimer’s cameras followed members of the U.S. military in Afghanistan. The male heroes they chose to bring into our living rooms were brave soldiers, surgeons, and weapons inspectors. In contrast, the women they profiled were a blonde, ponytailed medic who bragged that military work keeps women thin, some grieving white war wives, widows, and moms who kept the home fires burning, and Sergeant First Class Danette Jones, an African American cook whose “job is to supervise the kitchen, ensure everything is getting done properly, and that the soldiers are happy and fed.” Segment title captioned on the screen? “Mission: Breakfast.”bk Powerful men fight the wars, find the weapons, and heal the soldiers, while nurturing women deliver their medicine, keep their bellies full, and pray for their safe return. Check.
Bruckheimer wasn’t the only big-name movie producer to bring Hollywood’s double standards to the small screen. When women are, rarely, allowed to show true talent or skill, they’re often portrayed as exceptions to the incompetent rule. This was the case with On the Lot, a highly hyped, low-rated quest for the next great American filmmaker, brought to us by Steven Spielberg and Survivor and Apprentice producer Mark Burnett. Throughout the series, judge Garry Marshall (director of Pretty Woman, Runaway Bride, and Exit to Eden) consistently gave male directors specific feedback about the quality or inadequacy of their short films, while offering mostly contentless comments to female directors. Marshall described those gals whose movies he fancied as credits to their gender; those whose work he found subpar were told they reflect poorly on “women filmmakers.” Because, as we all know, female filmmakers were responsible for notorious box-office bombs such as Howard the Duck, Showgirls, Glitter, and Gigli. Oh, wait... bl
Damning portrayals of women’s incompetence at home and at work can send messages that are truly toxic to women’s rights. If women are generally flakier, less talented, and less capable than men, why hire them, support their artwork, elect them as politicians, pay attention to their concerns as citizens, or respect them as equal life partners?bm
On the domestic front, we’re led to believe that if women would just quit their jobs and devote all their time to straightening out their bratty kids, they wouldn’t need a Supernanny to swoop in and save the day. Yet there’s rarely much indication that fathers should be considered equally responsible for the mental and emotional care of their children. On shows such as Wife Swap, financial provision is usually considered dads’ primary purpose within the family, as well as the occasional meting out of discipline. Stay-at-home dads and home-schooling fathers are often called “wimps” and attacked as emasculated.
Casting directors shine an intentional spotlight on wives who say they are happy being “obedient” to controlling, sometimes verbally abusive husbands. (In reality, female servitude and male domination are often the first indicators of a pattern of escalating abuse in domestic violence relationships; in reality television, domineering men and subservient women are contentedly upholding “family values.”)
When it comes to the public sphere, the messages become even more repressive to social progress. Why should we support antiharassment laws, viewers may wonder, if real women engage in, invite, and even rely on sexual behavior in the workplace? Through their ample product placements, Fortune 500 corporations such as Microsoft, Sony, Wal-Mart, and Home Depot tacitly approve the sexual-harassment-encouraging working conditions condoned on NBC’s The Apprentice. Young women preparing to enter the workforce are groomed by such shows to expect that their looks will be as important as their resumes, and that they may have to put up with come-ons from male colleagues and bosses if they hope to keep their jobs. Meanwhile, male reality fans who aspire to The Donald’s wealth are taught to regard their female colleagues as mentally deficient playthings. It’s the same office ethos that rules the fictional advertising agency of AMC’s 1960s period piece Mad Men—minus the feminist subtext included as a running critical commentary about the gender and racial injustices of that show’s era. But unlike the writers and producers of Mad Men, the (nonunion) writers and producers of unscripted programming are intentionally replicating those mid-twentieth-century values in the name of “reality” and insisting that this is just the way the modern world works.bn
In the reality TV universe, human beings are not a product of their environments and of cultural conditioning—they are simply acting out the roles preset for them by their DNA or their deity. “With millions of people watching shows like What Not to Wear, Wife Swap [and others]” author Shira Tarrant writes, “these become powerful vehicles for transmitting hegemonic ideals.”22 Over time, viewers may come to believe that women shoulder the bulk of the burden of housework and childcare because they’re naturally predisposed to do so, and that men are biologically destined for the worlds of commerce, politics, and the military. At the same time, these shows underscore the myth that women’s professional inferiority is responsible for their underrepresentation in corporate America’s executive suites and boardrooms, rather than still-prevalent systemic discrimination in hiring, promotion, and pay.23
Reality shows exploring the personal and public spheres too often promote the idea that the institutional problems facing contemporary women are simply the result of each individual woman’s poor choices at home and inability to perform up to par at work.
But just like poverty (a socioeconomic condition resulting from institutional imbalances, reinforced by structural policies benefiting wealthy corporate and governmental interests), gender-based inequity is caused by societal circumstances and requires intentional public solutions, not just individual change.

I Ain’t Sayin’ She’s a Gold Digger . . .

Trope 4: Women are gold diggers.
 
 
OK, so, reality TV has taught us that women are stupid, bitchy, incompetent idiots. What else is there? Oh, that’s right—they’re also “money grubbing, gold-digging whores.”
At least, that’s how Trish Schneider, the “most hated bachelorette in history,” was described on season 5 of The Bachelor. Who’s Trish, you ask? She’s the babe who sinned against reality TV’s version of womankind by mentioning she didn’t want kids and wearing a retro-look T-shirt that said, “Gold digger: Like a hooker . . . just smarter.”bo
That slogan was the entire basis of Fox’s Joe Millionaire, which didn’t hide its contempt for female cast members. The show’s conceit started with deceit: Producers tricked a couple dozen women into agreeing to participate by telling them they were going to star in a reality-based version of Sex and the City in France. Participants were misled by an ironically feminist pitch, finalist Sarah Kozer said on a Bravo exposé: “I wasn’t aware that there was going to be a man there who was choosing amongst us. They had this female producer come to me and say ‘We’re so sick of the way women are being portrayed on reality TV. We want really confident, together, classy, sophisticated’” women.
What they really wanted were guinea pigs that could be sacrificed to the ratings gods. Contestants who thought they’d be trading spit with a spate of European Casanovas and girl talk with fellow castmates learned—too late—that they were there to compete for one man’s affections. Once the cameras were rolling and they couldn’t back out, they were told that the bloke had “inherited $50 million” and was “looking for love” with “someone he could trust,” who didn’t “want him only for his money.” Of course, the conspiratorial inside joke between Fox and viewers was that Evan Marriott was a workaday construction jock with an annual salary of just $19,000—and contrary to his talk of trust, he’d be deceiving them for the duration of the show. From the get-go, producers played these women as laughingstocks, a series-long adventure in Schadenfreude. From the outset, our complicity made the joke complete.
A buzz-generating campaign to demonize these dames for our viewing pleasure started well before the series premiered. Fox’s marketing strategy involved pretending to take their own “gold diggers v. true love” setup seriously one day and claiming to be a tongue-in-cheek send-up of reality TV clichés the next. Yet many corporate media outlets discussed the show’s premise without irony. Headlines like “Gold Diggers Get Comeuppance on FOX Reality Show” were typical. Newspapers, magazines, and blogs ran stories implying that while Joe was a faker, the show realistically exposed the supposedly mercenary nature of single American woman. USA Today even used the show as a springboard for an online article headlined, “How to marry your own millionaire.” Here’s how the story opened: “What if Joe Millionaire really was filthy rich? Yes, we’re waiting for [the finalists] to get their comeuppance when they learn he’s just a poor construction worker. But wouldn’t it be more fun if they really were going to land Mr. Moneybags?” The series garnered its share of criticism, but the entertainment press too often used Joe Millionaire as “proof ” that, when it comes down to it, many—if not most—real women are merely greedy sluts who can’t be trusted to do anything other than feign affection to use men for money.26
Producers were hardly subtle about it, marshaling female contestants’ comments to underscore the message that “They’re all gold diggers, I don’t care what you say.” Another competitor went further: “It was pretty cool to hear that he inherited $50 million,” she said. “That’s obviously appealing to women. Come on! I mean, we’re women!” Contestants didn’t do all the thematic dirty work—the first episode’s narration set the tone. “Once this Average Joe has made his choice, he will have to confess the truth. Will love or money prevail?”
NBC framed crass copycat For Love or Money in an equally disparaging way. “Fifteen women are on a quest for true love that begins and ends in this palatial estate. But, there’s a twist. What he can never know is that the girl he chooses will win One. Million. Dollars! ” we learned from a Mr. Moviefone sound-alike in the show’s opening montage. “Will these women lie, backstab, and break hearts for cold, hard cash?” Contestants were edited to suit producers’ purposes. Pragmatic participants announced that “Smart girls finish rich,” and “It’s only about the money!” Mr. Moviefone returned with the final whammy: “The man or the money—they can’t have both. See how far these women will go—for love, or money.” At that, we spied a wide-eyed beauty batting her eyes and trying to convince prince-poseur Rob Campos to choose her, promising, “You will get the farthest with me.”bp
Marketing mean-spirited misogyny as mischievous fun paid off for Fox, as Joe Millionaire became a gargantuan hit. With 40 million viewers, the finale was not only Fox’s most-watched show of 2003, it was the third-most-watched television episode of the entire decade. As Reuters reflected, why should networks tell women the truth “when fooling them is so much more fun?”27 For Love or Money dominated its time slot with 12.9 million viewers, making its July 2003 finale that summer’s number one reality series and the highest-rated entertainment program NBC had aired since 1999. Even though both networks failed to achieve strong numbers with their second seasons, the “gold digger” concept has influenced dating shows ever since, especially on later cable series such as VH1’s Flavor of Love, Real Chance of Love, and Rock of Love franchises, and MTV’s For the Love of Ray J, where the concept has been translated into Black and Latina women as “hos.” Or, as Tiffany “New York” Pollard described a competitor on Flavor of Love: “she’s a gold digger, she’s a slut, she’s a whore . . . she’s totally fake.”
But why did Fox and NBC initially believe this premise had legs? Because they constructed Joe Millionaire and For Love or Money to play on virulent cultural hostility toward women—in particular, the notions that men should distrust female partners, women should be jealous of romantic rivals, and every woman has a price.
Packaged as fluffy fun, the premises of such programming fall apart without deep, irrational, and abiding prejudice. To get into such shows, viewers must assume that not only are women inherently stupid and heartless, but that they can and should “fall in love” under constant surveillance while being disparaged by the guy they’re pursuing. After weeks of this sort of treatment, if the “lucky lady” chosen at the end doesn’t profess pure, endless emotion for an offensive jerk, she’s considered an evil “gold digger.” Producers allow no room for the normal emotional response of anyone who, in reality, learned they’d been deceived and mocked by someone pretending to care about them. Any signs of anger, disillusionment, or disgust at their betrayal are either left on the cutting room floor or edited to make the aggrieved dater appear disappointed that she wasn’t in for a financial windfall. Yet what person in her right mind could ever truly “fall in love” in a couple of camera-laden weeks with a himbo who was snogging fifteen of her friends and lying to her from the moment they met?
These shows posit women as inherently calculating and unfeeling about sex in ways they imply men are not. This is particularly manipulative when we consider that their male stars admit publicly, as Evan Marriott did, that they do shows like Joe Millionaire for paychecks, not life partners. The idea that women are mercenary when it comes to love is a convenient way to deflect uncomfortable, unacknowledged economic realities that complicate gender relations in and outside of the romantic sphere. Beyond the confines of the reality TV universe, it is by and large men who utilize the services of (female, male, and transgendered) prostitutes, and mostly men who stuff their hard-earned bills down exotic dancers’ G-strings. Further, American men fuel an illegal, abusive, billion-dollar sex trade, in which women and children are sexually enslaved domestically and internationally for the equivalent of the cost of a couple of triple tall Starbucks lattes.28 Women’s bodies are still used by advertisers to sell everything from soap to SUVs. And as we’ll see in chapter 4, women still make only 77 cents for every dollar men earn, an inequity that becomes even more steep for women of color. Women are more likely to be poor, less likely to own their own homes, and still face financial and institutional disparities in employment and healthcare, all widely documented aspects of the feminization of poverty. Such economic indicators are major draws for (straight, lesbian, and bisexual) women and girls who work in the sex industry, often from necessity, sometimes by choice, and sometimes under force or coercion.29 At the same time, more and more blue- and white-collar working women are striving to be financially self-sufficient than ever before, as the age of first marriage continues to rise.30 Reality TV producers want nothing to do with these economic realities, when it’s so much easier and more lucrative to direct men’s distrust and women’s scorn onto so-called “gold diggers” and “hos.”

The Bottom Line about Reality TV’s “Bitches,” “Morons,” and “Incompetent Skanks”

Author Shira Tarrant argues that shows such as Wife Swap are “modern fables” that “are filled with repressive prescriptions about who we are.” Because this genre “lacks any critical reflection on social injustice,” Tarrant describes reality TV as “a component of what bell hooks calls the politics of domination.”31
Media images have impact on adults as well as on youth, as any advertising executive can attest. Long-term exposure to tropes about women as stupid, incompetent, gold-digging bitches may begin to affect the way adults see themselves, their relationships to friends, loved ones, and coworkers, and their own place in public and private life.
According to Nielsen research,32 U.S. television viewership hit record highs in 2008 and continues to rise. By 2009, the average American watched more than thirty-one hours of TV per week. Now, consider that reality shows are especially popular among young viewers. Typical U.S. teenagers watch three hours and twenty minutes of TV per day, “more than ever before,” with reality shows being among their favorites.bq If reality TV’s tropes about women are troubling for adults, they’re even more disturbing when we consider viewers who have grown up with these shows shaping their worldview. Young women and men who reached voting age in 2008 would have been just ten years old when reality shows such as Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? and Survivor debuted. If they’ve had TVs in their homes (or on their computers), those young people have potentially consumed a steady diet of thousands of hours of programming in which female solidarity doesn’t exist, women’s problems are not structural but the result of individual weakness, and gender equality is a fiction. The likely psychological and political impact of this televised “reality,” where the pursuit of women’s rights is inherently futile, should be as obvious as it is damaging.