Chapter Seven

Violence against Women as Glamorous, Romantic Reality

Picture this, for a moment: You’re wandering, lost, in a foreign country. You don’t speak the language, you’re trying to get to a business meeting, and a random man approaches you on the street, clutches your leg, and tries to shove his hand up your skirt. Though you’re traveling with an entourage, not one person makes any effort to come to your aid as you attempt to fend him off.

Now, imagine that when you finally get to your gig (having been delayed by the attempted sexual assault), your bosses berate you as irresponsible for being late, rather than offering to call the police, get you a counselor, or even give you the afternoon off to compose yourself.

Wow, what a fairytale.

This pleasant little scenario was caught on tape during the first season of America’s Next Top Model. When Adrianne Curry—the working-class wild child eventually crowned best walking billboard of all—was accosted in France on her way to a “go-see” (fashion industry speak for a meeting with designers), the camera crew trailing her simply filmed the groper’s attack rather than intervening on her behalf, making the show complicit in this attempted crime. Worse, Top Model chose to run the footage on-air without any critical context, never once calling the incident an assault. In fact, the entire event was never even discussed beyond one brief comment from the shaken model, who missed one of her four required go-sees because “I was really upset—I was right there by the agency, but I couldn’t go in.”

Yet instead of giving Adrianne any space to process the impact of being accosted—or even acknowledging that it happened at all—the show used the incident against her in a twist on classic victim-blaming: Come evaluation time, one judge after another rebuked her for being tardy, warning that they wouldn’t tolerate any “excuses” for her lateness.

In the end, Top Model depicted attempted sexual assault as nothing more than a trivial, unremarkable annoyance. (What? Some creep tried to forcibly grab your crotch? Quit your bitching! Missing a meeting—now that’s unacceptable.)

Such is life in reality TV, where manufactured drama reigns, but bona fide reality—like the dangerous prevalence of unwanted sexual harassment and assault—is a little too messy, a little too ugly, and a little too, well, real to deal with.

These Are the “Most Eligible Bachelors in America”?

Ironically, even when producers have full control over casting, the crown princes of reality TV are often no better than Adrianne’s street harasser.

A veritable lineup of criminals and ex-cons have been installed as eligible bachelors on dating and mating shows. Take California criminal Ulrick Kevin White, sentenced to eight years in prison for rape and kidnapping, who was found by police only when his victim identified him after seeing him on TV . . . on an episode of Blind Date!¹

At least White was caught. On the fourteenth season of MTV’s The Real World: San Diego, which aired in 2004, a male friend of cast member Randy Barry picked up a twenty-two-year-old woman at a bar, drugged her, and brought her back to the Real World house. Then, while she was unconscious, the man—only IDed as “Justin” in the press—allegedly raped her in the bathroom, the only area not under surveillance. “I just hit that,” Justin was overheard saying as he sauntered out of the bathroom, where the woman was found naked and passed out on the floor.² Though this never made it to air, the cameras were rolling when the disoriented young woman was woken up and told—with a team of videographers in her face—that she might have been raped the night before, so the victim now has that shocking, dehumanizing revelation caught on tape for posterity. Police investigated and believed the rape had indeed occurred, but Bunim/ Murray Productions, creators of the show, didn’t immediately cooperate with law enforcement and initially prevented them from viewing the film from the day of the rape. A search warrant was eventually obtained, but no arrest was ever made. Though the case became a headline-generating scandal in print news and the entertainment press, a month of footage from that period of time was omitted from the show, as if it never happened. Producers never addressed it on air during the series’ run—which, according to Nielsen ratings, was the top-rated series on basic cable among viewers ages twelve to thirty-four, seen by approximately 3.7 million people during that TV season.³

The Real World rape controversy is by far the most egregious case of violence against women to (allegedly) take place during the filming of a reality TV show, but the genre has featured more than its share of abusive characters and sketchy situations. One classic example was For Love or Money stud Rob Campos, who, while presiding over a room full of romantic strivers, got drunk and demanded that his playthings line up to remove his boots for him, as if they were his personal geishas. As the first woman to do so got down on her knees facing him and tugged, she got a nasty whiff of his feet while he enjoyed peering at her cleavage down her low-cut shirt. Not content with some semifrontal, he instructed a second woman to pull his boots off backward, which entailed her bending over, taking his leg between her knees, and yanking on his heel while he positioned his other foot squarely against her ass and then kicked her. “While it was happening, I don’t think anyone was really realizing that that might be a little degrading, or not a cool thing to do,” the woman with the bruised behind mused to the cameras.

Um, really? ’Cause I can’t think of a clearer illustration of misogyny than making women line up to be kicked in the ass. Yet NBC could have predicted such inappropriate behavior from the crass Campos: Prior to landing the part of Prince Charming, he had been booted from the Marine Corps Judge Advocate General (JAG) unit for sexually assaulting a female officer.

According to TheSmokingGun.com—which researched Marine Corps records and conducted first-person interviews with the victim and others familiar with the incident—Campos derailed his once-promising military career by getting drunk, barging into a Navy officer’s room in the women’s dormitory, and grabbing her breasts. He advanced on her, but the officer fought back, knocking him out with a knee to the groin and bolting out the door.^ed She didn’t report the incident, but when word got out around the base, “she was approached and interviewed by Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) agents,” who yanked him out of the JAG program. He received a formal “non-judicial punishment” from the Marines, which shipped him off to a tax-filing unit and ordered him to enroll in a substance abuse treatment program.⁴

If a small website could expose such damning information in just a couple of days, surely NBC, with their vast resources, could have uncovered Campos’s dark past and ruled him out before duping fifteen women into believing he was happily-ever-after material. But For Love or Money didn’t bother to do such rudimentary legwork because the safety of their female cast members doesn’t seem to be much of a motivating factor to the people who put these programs on the air. (At the least, when you consider the technically competent visual components of these shows, producers appear to prioritize women’s well-being somewhere beneath wardrobe, lighting, and the constant free-flow of liquor.)

Too bad the contestants don’t seem to be in on that open secret. The women who appear on reality TV dating shows often say that they were motivated to compete for some stranger’s affection because they believe that the producers are offering up leading men with spotless legal, medical, and moral pedigrees. Explaining why she thought it was safer to let ABC arrange a boyfriend for her than to meet one on her own, Heather Cranford, a second-season castoff of The Bachelor, told TV Guide that the show offered a great way to avoid the “trust issues” she’d have meeting someone in a bar: “They do the FBI background checks and the drug testing and blood tests for diseases. They also do his college transcript and credit reports—so he’s screened through and through, and you know what you’re getting out of this guy.”⁵

Unfortunately, that’s just a crock. Despite perfunctory background checks, reality TV men have often had violent histories, just like that first false prince, Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire’s restraining-order-tainted Rick Rockwell, who (as mentioned in this book’s introduction) allegedly slapped, hit, and threw around a former girlfriend, threatened to kill her, vandalized her car, and broke into her home. In 2007, after America’s Most Smartest Model runner-up Andre Birleanu was arrested for harassment and sexual abuse charges, it was revealed that he had served several prison terms for assault, harassment, criminal contempt, criminal mischief, and trespassing before being cast on the VH1 show. Did producers 51 Minds learn their lesson and employ more thorough screenings to keep dangerous criminals off future shows?⁶

Sadly, no.

Two years later, Ryan Jenkins—who had a prior assault conviction and had been charged with “battery constituting domestic violence” against model Jasmine Fiore—was a semifinalist on VH1’s Megan Wants a Millionaire. He and Fiore got married in Vegas after Megan sent him packing. Then, three days after Jenkins picked up his check for appearing on I Love Money, a previously filmed 51 Minds show, Fiore’s body was found mutilated and stuffed in a suitcase. Her fingers and teeth were yanked out; she could only be identified by the serial numbers on her breast implants. Jenkins was charged with Fiore’s murder; he killed himself before he could be convicted. The network blamed “clerical errors” for their failure to uncover his criminal history not just once, but twice.⁷

In the weeks following this gruesome crime, numerous reporters called to ask me permutations of the same misguided question: “Had reality TV created a monster?” No, I responded, Jenkins was a monster long before he was cast on VH1. He may stand out as the most brutal, but he’s just one of a long line of abusive men who have appeared on reality TV dating shows and other unscripted programs where strangers live together.

Adam Shapiro, executive producer of CBS’s Big Brother, claims that if “somebody has restraining orders against them or has violent incidents in their background, no matter how good a candidate might be, they don’t get on the show. That’s something that we just don’t fool around with.” If only that were true. In 2001, Justin Sebik put a knife to fellow Big Brother 2 housemate Krista Stegall’s throat while kissing her and asked, “Would you get mad if I just killed you?” Six months after being kicked off the show, Sebik was arrested for attacking his girlfriend—just the most recent charge on a rap sheet that included five prior arrests for assault and theft. Stegall sued CBS for putting her in danger; the suit was settled out of court.⁸

Most of these criminal histories come to light only after trouble arises during or after a reality show. Not so with former Public Enemy hype man Flavor Flav, whose stints in prison for crack cocaine and burglary in the 1980s and ’90s are hardly a well-kept secret. But few Flavor of Love fans likely remember that fifteen years before VH1 anointed Flav to head their twenty-first-century minstrel revival, the star was locked up for domestic violence. In 1991, he pleaded guilty to assaulting his then-girlfriend, Karen Ross, served thirty days in jail, and lost custody of his kids. Or that in 1993, he spent another ninety days in jail for shooting at his neighbor; more domestic violence charges followed. None of this bothered Cris Abrego and Mark Cronin, creators and executive producers of The Surreal Life and Flavor of Love, who discovered Flav for VH1 less than a year after his last stint at Rikers Island. “We knew he had a history,” Cronin told Entertainment Weekly. “It’s almost expected when you’ve gotten to be an elder statesman of rock or hip-hop. There’s not a lot of clean living in music. The requirement for us is that you be in a positive place in your life.” (Translation from the original Producer Speak: If you can bring profits for our production company, our network partners, and their advertisers, you’re in a “positive place in your life.” We don’t care that you’re prone to beating your romantic partners, or that you’ve been in and out of prison for violent assault—we’ll give you your own dating show anyway. What could go wrong? Besides, “clean living”—not beating women, not doing time—isn’t big with “elder statesmen of hip-hop.” Come on, you expect us to find a Black man who hasn’t done any of those things? You think we’re Houdini or something?)⁹

Nothing as dramatic can be found in the past of Age of Love star Mark Philippoussis, a thirty-year-old tennis champ who set up the show’s smarmy “cougars versus kittens” premise by confessing that he’s only attracted to younger women and that his last serious girlfriend was just twenty years old. What he didn’t mention on air was that, as show host Mark Consuelos told TV Guide, Philippoussis was not long before engaged to an eighteen-year-old.¹⁰ It’s pretty easy to do that math: Unless he met, began dating, and proposed to this girl all in the same year, NBC’s legal department either made some very charitable assumptions about their chastity until she turned eighteen . . . or they simply were willing to overlook that the guy they described as “the most eligible bachelor in America”¹¹ could have been brought up on statutory rape charges in many states for having sex with a minor.^ee

Standards for entry into reality casts are so low because background checks aren’t intended to ensure contestants’ safety. Instead, they’re conducted primarily to absolve producers and networks of legal liability. If they throw a few bucks at some less-than-thorough security firm to screen potential participants, they’ll be less likely to be held financially accountable if the next version of Ryan Jenkins doesn’t wait until he’s kicked off a dating show to kill someone. In fact, casting directors often seek out participants who are prone to violence—including alcoholics, drug addicts, and emotionally unstable people—the better to ensure fights, tears, and that oh-so-important “drama.” One anonymous producer admitted as much to Entertainment Weekly: “The fact is, those shows work only because of the irresponsible casting. If you force people to cast upstanding citizens without criminal records, you’re not going to get the same show.”¹³

Liposuction and Silicone as Antiviolence Building Blocks

Still, despite the presence of batterers, rapists, and sexual assault perps on shows like Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? Blind Date, and For Love or Money, actual on-air violence has been rare (24-7 video surveillance makes people a bit less likely to act out felonious instincts on camera, after all). Yet even when acts of physical abuse do make it to the screen, they’re not treated as seriously inappropriate—they’re simply used as a promotional device. At least Campos lost his prestigious JAG job and got forced into rehab when he groped a woman against her will on a military base. In contrast, NBC didn’t dethrone the former Marine as head-of-harem after his inebriated ass-kicking incident; instead, they hyped his beer-fueled buffoonery in tune-in-next-week teaser ads tinged with a salacious, “you won’t believe this boys-will-be-boys moment!” tone.

It’s not just dating shows that trivialize abuse of women as a ploy for ratings: America’s Next Top Model regularly plumbs contestants’ sad stories of incest, rape, and even female genital mutilation as a cheap ploy to induce those all-important tears they promise to deliver each episode. Perhaps the single most vulgar example of women’s real life trauma being exploited for ratings appeared on Fox’s depressing cosmetic surgery/beauty pageant series The Swan, which introduced us to one contestant, a domestic violence survivor, via this video confessional:

My name is Belinda. I’m twenty-eight years old. I used to have the perfect body, and I used to be pretty, and I used to be able to walk down the street and have guys chasing me. And not having that now, it makes me feel horrible. Growing up I was so tall and so skinny, I heard from everybody, “You should be a model.” And so I thought, well I’ll try it—and it was great and I loved it. And unfortunately I ended up with the wrong guy. I’ve been married two times. I wouldn’t want to talk to any of the men in my past, because they’re not good people. I just kind of ended up in several abusive relationships. Alcoholics, drug users, something along those lines. My dream for myself is to learn to know that I deserve someone to treat me good.

Anyone with a remedial knowledge of domestic violence could have inferred that Belinda might have been vulnerable to abusive relationships because she seems to measure her self-worth entirely by her physical measurements and by external male validation via possessive behavior such as street harassment. Defined by Holla Back NYC as “a form of sexual harassment that takes place in public spaces,” street harassment functions from and reinforces “a power dynamic that constantly reminds historically subordinated groups (women and LGBTQ folks, for example) of their vulnerability to assault in public spaces. Further, it reinforces the ubiquitous sexual objectification of these groups in everyday life.”¹⁴

After such a meaty introduction, did the show’s team of “medical experts”—including one described on air as “life coach” Nely Galán and another as therapist Dr. Lynn Ianni—discuss specific ways they might probe the psychology that led Belinda into a series of hazardous relationships or, hopefully, reorient her thinking in ways that might help her develop a healthier sense of self? Fat chance, considering that The Swan’s supposed dynamic duo of mental health were not qualified to counsel anyone about anything. As discussed in chapter 2, Galán was actually the series creator and executive producer, not a life coach, while the “doctor” got her degree from an unaccredited diploma mill. Instead, show host Amanda Byram posed this question to Galán, Ianni, and a gaggle of plastic surgeons: “She reminisces about having the guys chase her. Do you think we can have the guys chasing her up the street again?” The reply came unanimously, without a hint of irony: “Absolutely!”

Yet periodically throughout the hour, Byram repeatedly promised that The Swan would also help Belinda “break the cycle of violence,” “leav[e] her past behind,” and “break her cycle of abusive relationships.” How would they make good on this high-minded pledge? By putting her on a twelve-hundred-calorie-per-day diet and giving her, as Byram rattled off in rapid succession: a brow lift, a midface lift, fat transfer to her lips, lower eye and cheek fat removal, several visits to a dermatologist, Lasik eye surgery, breast reduction and lift, liposuction in six different areas, dental procedures including zoom bleaching, a bridge for her front teeth, da Vinci Veneers (™), gum tissue recontouring, cleaning, and a root canal, all of which the show’s panel of “experts” claimed she “needed” to feel better about herself.

Tagged on at the end of this ludicrously long litany of plastic surgery, almost as an afterthought, Byram added, “she will also undergo weekly therapy and coaching to improve her sense of self-worth and end her cycle of abusive relationships.”

The sum total viewers saw of any of this “counseling”? Over the course of the hour—in between numerous disparaging discussions about her appearance and several lengthy, explicit shots of Belinda going under the knife—viewers were treated to just one forty-five-second segment in which Galán sends Belinda to a gym to kickbox a punching bag plastered with photos of “all these men that have done you wrong,” and a seven-second snippet of Belinda telling “Dr.” Ianni that “I’ve been slapped, punched, kicked, and I’m ready to meet a decent, loving, caring man,” with the faux therapist telling her to end the sentence with the phrase, “And I deserve it.”

So, to recap: A battered woman tells The Swan’s producers that her “dream for myself is to learn to know that I deserve someone to treat me good” and that “the main thing I want to fix is my inability to pick a decent man. I always end up with men who are abusive and mean and wrong, and I don’t want to be in that situation again,” and they respond by informing her that she’s not feminine enough and that “she needs” a complete cosmetic overhaul to “correct” her many physical flaws and get men to chase her down the street again. (Verbal abuse and possible stalking by strangers, good. Physical abuse by loved ones, bad. Got it. Check.) According to reality TV, twenty surgical and dental procedures, seven seconds of “therapy,” and a role-playing exercise that would be far more useful for aerobic health than mental health are all that’s necessary to “break the cycle of violence.” Too bad the show itself reinforces it.

“Slap-Happy” Plot Devices

When violence against women isn’t being pumped for ratings-generating pathos, it’s being played for laughs. One of the most talked-about episodes in the history of MTV’s long-running The Real World franchise involved a male housemate from 1998’s Seattle season slapping a young woman in the face. The scene has been shown in numerous slo-mo “Let’s see that again!” highlight reels and clip shows, coming in at number nine on VHI’s two-hour special, “40 Greatest Reality TV Moments.” In response, rather than raising concerns about the cultural implications of such scenes, the corporate entertainment press treats moments like these as a source of endless amusement, as when this “bitch-slap” (so named by VHI) landed the number two spot in an Entertainment Weekly article listing the “5 BEST REALITY MOMENTS” ever for providing “the ultimate Starbucks spit take.” EW ’s caption? “A very slap-happy ‘Real World.’”¹⁵

Because, clearly, hitting women is a laugh riot.

The slapping scene was tops among thousands of hours of reality television, EW explained, because it showed “What happens when people stop being polite and start being real.” And so corporate media that follow, feed on, and fuel pop culture (from bottom-feeder VH1 clip shows to the often-critical EW ) are complicit in perpetuating the notion that violence against women is not only the stuff “good TV” is made of, but the kind of supposedly amusing behavior women and men should just consider normal in day-to-day life, unless they’re stuffy, uptight, and too “polite” for the “real world.”

Eleven years later MTV was still milking laughs from violence against women, but this time with more than a slap. When the network was launching its first season of Jersey Shore—marketed as a cross between The Hills and “Flavor of Love for Italians”—they released a promo clip of some drunk dude with a boxer’s arm punching a woman nicknamed Snookie in the face so hard that her head flew back several feet. The scene of this “guidette” getting viciously cold-cocked quickly went viral, with replays on popular entertainment news sites and thousands of YouTube page views. Bloggers anticipated the full episode would “go down as one of the greatest moments in the history of television,” replaying looped video of the sucker punch on pages headlined, “The Countdown to Snookie Getting Punched in the Face Is On!”¹⁶ After the clip had done its buzz-generating job, MTV announced plans to pull the scene, feigning concern that the violence was taken “out of context” online. Conveniently, they failed to acknowledge that they chose to release the contextless clip to get people talking about the new series. Compounding the exploitation, syndicated infotainment programs such as The Insider reported on MTV’s decision not to air the assault—by running footage of the punch five times in an eighteen-second segment .¹⁷

Where these sorts of “slap-happy” moments appear infrequently, abusive language is ever present. In classic fairytales, heroines are mistreated by wicked stepmothers and evil stepsisters, but in reality TV, would-be princesses are regularly degraded by none other than the handsome prince himself, who can usually be counted on to use a regular stream of gendered slurs like “bitch,” “slut,” “ho,” “whore,” and “feminazi” to describe the women around him. Additionally, run-of-the-mill insults like “vindictive,” “stupid,” “insane,” “psycho,” “gold digger,” and “loser” are hurled at female participants so often on these shows—by men and women alike—that they start to blend into the vernacular background, as if treating women with this level of disrespect is just a normal part of everyday speech. Crude appraisals from Mr. Right are common: Viewers tune in specifically to hear Flavor Flav call women “sexy items” and yell “I want them asses shaking!” during booty-dance-offs. But even one of the “nice guys” on NBC’s Average Joe called the supermodel he was wooing a “beaver” behind her back. (“I did use a word describing Larissa: It starts with a B, ends with an R, it’s an animal that builds dams, and there’s a show, Leave It to—It’s a slang term meaning a very beautiful, hot, sexy girl.”)^ef Way to class up the joint.

When behavioral and verbal abuse isn’t offered up by the bachelors themselves, producers turn to one of their favorite tools—humiliation—to keep women in their place, with scenarios carefully crafted to make them feel like crap—quite literally. For example, Joe Millionaire’s concubines were instructed to dress up for a glamorous, elegant date only to arrive at a horse farm, where they learned that they were expected to muck out shit-filled stables in their fancy duds before they could “earn” the privilege of going riding with Liar McFakebucks. Meanwhile, the object of their questionable affections was mocking their discomfort in one of those ubiquitous confessionals to the camera. Similar scenes have become a staple. During a “stinky barn challenge” on VHI’s Real Chance of Love, brothers Ahmad and Kamal Givens laugh from a sweet-smelling distance as the women scramble to clean up horse, sheep, pig, and goose droppings . . . which was only moderately less disgusting than the episode of the CW’s Farmer Wants a Wife in which “big city girls” have to prove themselves worthy of dating a hunky country boy by sticking their arms up a cow’s ass to check whether it was pregnant. (Quick, someone call PETA!)

Sometimes humiliation takes the form of complete subjugation of female identity. On Flavor of Love, identical twins Trisha and Tresha were only referred to by Flav, by other daters, and even by themselves as “Thing 1” and “Thing 2.” Pioneered on Flavor of Love, it is now standard practice for women on many cable dating shows to have their real names replaced with infantilized or sexualized nicknames assigned to them by men.

Beyond the threat posed to female contestants’ safety by producers’ lack of real scrutiny into their male stars’ violent histories, the dangerous messages being sent to the viewing public are even more significant. By presenting an array of physically, verbally, and emotionally abusive men as the “princes” that “all girls dream of ”—and by presenting women as only lovable if they are willing to give up their identities and their ability to make self-defined choices—reality television is reinforcing dangerous power dynamics that lie at the heart of violent relationships. This genre is telling women that as long as a guy is rich enough or hot enough, we should simply overlook it if he knocks us around a little, puts us down, treats us like dirt. Meanwhile male viewers, young and old, are learning that they can get away with this kind of behavior—that women will even consider it a turn-on—as long as they can bring enough bling to a relationship. No one wins when men and women are defined in such debasing ways.

It’s tempting to dismiss this as “just television,” just escapist farce; tempting to believe that this sort of storytelling has no impact. But that’s not so easy in a country in which a woman is battered every fifteen seconds, usually by her intimate partner, and an average of three women are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends every day. According to the Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey, someone is sexually assaulted in America every two minutes—that’s 272,350 sexual assaults per year, a figure that doesn’t even include victims who are twelve years old or younger (meaning the numbers become even more extreme when child molestation and incest are taken into account). Three-quarters of these attacks are committed by intimate partners, relatives, friends, or acquaintances.¹⁸ As harsh as these sorts of statistics are, they only begin to paint the picture of what the reality of violence against women and girls looks like in the United States, the consequences of which never make it into the sanitized, advertiser-defined version of reality promoted by the shows discussed in this book.

Media images don’t directly cause this violence, but they certainly contribute to a culture that promotes it. Which, in turn, helps to maintain the kind of gender-based power differentials that allow such abuse to thrive. By glossing over, tacitly accepting, and sometimes even mocking verbal and physical violence and humiliation of women by men who claim to care about them—and doing so in the name of “reality”—this genre attempts to inure viewers to the impact and even the existence of real violence against women and girls, and to make the results of such violence seem less extreme, less damaging, and less objectionable than they really are.

In the late 1970s and through the 1980s, influenced by the women’s movement and by new ways of understanding gendered violence and abuses of power within intimate relationships, Hollywood began to produce provocative, engaging programming that entertained viewers while still challenging them to question their preconceived beliefs about date rape, sexual harassment, spousal abuse, and more. It’s not like the television landscape of twenty and thirty years ago was a bastion of feminist ideology (not by a long shot, with female characters falling in love with their rapists on soap operas like General Hospital ). But at least when these issues came up on “very special episodes” of sitcoms like All in the Family, The Facts of Life, Diff’rent Strokes, and Good Times, or in made-for-TV movies like The Burning Bed, they weren’t presented as a joke. Victims weren’t generally mocked, and degrading conduct didn’t tend to be explicitly condoned. The idea (well-intentioned though perhaps a bit naive) was that if popular media raised awareness about the nature of violence and treated these issues with the seriousness they deserved, entertainment could help our culture progress to a point where we might see a dramatic drop in the prevalence of rape and domestic violence and an end to the gender inequity such abuse perpetuates.

In contrast, reality TV is conditioning contemporary viewers to tolerate destructive language, manipulative situations, and actual physical abuse in their own relationships, even to consider this kind of treatment romantic. Responsible media representations—especially programming that claims to be about real people’s actual experiences—would lead us to perceive these kinds of behaviors as inappropriate, sometimes even criminal conduct to be rejected and rebelled against. Instead, too often, reality TV romances subtly reinforce some of our culture’s darkest (and, one would hope, most outdated) notions of love, in which male partners can mistreat women’s bodies, minds, and hearts with impunity, while women are expected to shut up and take it, even beg for it.

“House of Pain”

Of course, since shows like The Bachelor, Joe Millionaire, and Who Wants to Marry My Dad? are built around “happily ever after” mythology, producers can’t risk openly interrupting their fairytale narratives by explicitly telling women to expect physical, verbal, or emotional violence from the men who claim to love them. Instead, they sell that message through subtext and implication. In scene after scene and series after series, dating, mating, and marriage shows subtly reinforce regressive stereotypes about the dreck women should accept by presenting abusive language and behavior as normal, inoffensive, even loving.

Where do these implicit messages become explicit? For overt glorification of these same concepts, just flip your remote to beauty-based and product-placement-driven modeling shows, whose imagery and ideology are about as subtle as a 1970s slasher flick. And sometimes just as gory.

Of the hundreds of reality shows to litter our celluloid wasteland since Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? and Survivor’s debuts sparked a new genre in 2000, one series stands out among the throng as the ultimate in wish-fulfillment television for the fashion and beauty industry: America’s Next Top Model.

For decades, the advertising industry’s deep hostility toward women has manifested in a fetishization of images of beautifully bruised, beaten, raped, drugged, amputated, and murdered femmes. But until ANTM debuted in 2003, beauty and clothing companies had to rely on thirty-second broadcast spots and static print ads to beseech us to buy the mascara running down the bruised, tear-stained cheeks of models made up to resemble battered women in cosmetics and perfume commercials; sigh over the stilettos worn by women dangling heel-first from nooses or hanging out of the back of a car trunk as a man with a shovel digs a grave nearby in ads for Foot Petals and Jimmy Choo shoes; and covet the couture adorning lovely lasses locked in cages, glass-eyed victims of gang-rape, and corpselike waifs in death-themed fashion spreads for designers like Bebe, Dolce & Gabbana, and Marc Jacobs.¹⁹

The arrival of America’s Next Top Model has been a game changer, spawning numerous copycat modeling- and makeover-themed shows, from Bravo’s Make Me a Supermodel, Oxygen’s The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency, and VHI’s America’s Most Smartest Model to ABC’s Extreme Makeover and Fox’s The Swan. Now, beauty and fashion advertisers are able to work with reality producers to weave violent images—and the hateful beliefs that lie beneath them—into not only a TV show’s initial premise but also numerous episodes’ competitions, prizes, plot points, and dialogue plugs. In the case of Top Model, that’s meant one full hour of advertiser-crafted TV content per week, thirteen episodes per season (except for seasons 1, 2, and 14, which filmed nine, eleven, and twelve episodes respectively), for fourteen seasons and counting as of the spring of 2010—meaning that by the time this book went to press, fashion and beauty advertisers were presented with approximately 175 hours of prime-time network programming to play with . . . not to mention ad nauseam reruns on cable, where channels such as Oxygen regularly run “Top Model Obsessed” marathons. (And that’s just within the United States; thanks to corporate media imperialism, the series has spun off more than forty international versions—and generated more than ninety seasons—in Spain, Italy, France, and even such unlikely fashion outposts as Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, and Croatia.) Networks rake in record ratings among the eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old viewers beauty and fashion advertisers covet.²⁰ The biggest win for marketers? These hundreds of brand-rich programming hours can get to us on a deeper level than traditional ads, because most viewers are unaware that their favorite reality shows are simply series-long infomercials, repackaged in the name of “reality.”

For seven years and counting, America’s Next Top Model ’s infomercials have hyped an industry that has long gotten rich promulgating the kinds of “sexy torture” ads discussed above, making it a perfect case study of the way violent imagery plays out in the reality TV landscape. Where ANTM was quick to gloss over an actually unscripted (read: impossible to control) attempt at violence by Adrianne’s street harasser during the show’s first season,^eg the series has pioneered a whole new standard of placing women in danger, sometimes imaginary and sometimes all too real.

Sadism has been a recurring theme. Right from the get-go, ANTM ’s producers began manufacturing moments that would inevitably result in pain or injury to the girls. In May 2003, when “unscripted programming” still seemed like a bad phase networks would grow out of, the very first episode of Top Model featured an extended scene in which ten uncomfortable young women were forced to get Brazilian bikini waxes. Cameras flitted back and forth from their pained facial expressions to their nearly nude legs spread wide in the air, while the audio lingered at length on the models’ blood-curdling screams as hot wax was spread over their genitals and their pubic hair was ripped off.

As the series progressed, pain became not only a by-product but a basis upon which the girls were judged, in contests requiring the women to repeatedly fall from platforms and crash onto barely padded surfaces, recline in bikinis on ice sculptures in frigid rooms, and so on. In one particularly nasty sixth-cycle challenge, models were made to strut around in impossibly difficult ten-inch heels, while the judges mocked them as they twisted their ankles, grimaced in pain, and fell down. Their biggest belly laugh was reserved for a model named Danielle Evans, whose shoes sent her tumbling to the floor and literally crawling off set, gasping, “Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!” She ended up with a sprained toe and had to finish the episode on crutches. As luck would have it, Dani’s was the only injury, and no one broke any bones that night.

Speaking of luck, ANTM aspirants had better have it in spades. If fourteen seasons’ worth of footage of models being treated by medics or rushed to hospitals in ambulances tells us anything, it’s that luck is all these girls can count on to protect their safety on a show that plays fast and loose with women’s health and well-being. By cycle 7, four seriously skinny finalists were made to pose for an extended amount of time in a pool filled with freezing water. With the models having next to zero body fat for insulation, viewers got to voyeuristically peer at close-ups of their shivering lips, shaking limbs, and chattering teeth as they winced through the photo shoot. When one shuddering contestant complained about the extreme temperature, judge and series creator Tyra Banks taunted her: “CariDee, you’re from Fargo! Come on! This is real, real modeling, guys, being cold as heck!” We watched her beg for a short break as the cameras zoomed in on the moment her body began to shut down, convulsing from the cold, the color draining out of her face despite all the CoverGirl products slathered on her cheeks and mouth. Next thing we knew, the Fargo native was huddled under a blanket and judge Jay Manuel was assuring the cameras that she, not the show, had irresponsibly endangered her own health: “As a model, you need to tell people when you’re past your limit. It wasn’t just that she was cold; it wasn’t just that her teeth were chattering. She had reached the moment of hypothermia,” he groused.

Then, maybe as a sop to the network ’s lawyers, Top Model ’s executive producer attempted to cover her ass. Having previously ignored CariDee’s complaints and egged her on even while she was visibly quaking, Tyra reproached her with faux concern: “You have to listen to your body, and you have to tell us, okay? Because all we know is go-go-go-go-go, go-go-go-go-go, but you have to tell us no.” Yet come evaluation time Top Model flipped that script to play the other side of the victim blame game. Just like the judges scolded Adrianne after she was grabbed by a stranger on the street, CariDee’s hypothermia was framed as self-indulgence, rather than as a natural biological response to extreme physical conditions unnecessarily imposed on her by drama-seeking producers. (The pool couldn’t have been heated? Set dressers or show techs couldn’t have found a few heat lamps? Come on.) The hypothermic hottie was “high maintenance” and “needs a lot of attention,” judge Nigel Barker griped, while fellow judge J. Alexander sniped, “With CariDee it’s all about me, me, me, me, me, me, me.” After pushing this underweight beauty’s body past its breaking point and then telling her it was her fault for not quitting sooner, Tyra Queen-of-the-Mixed-Message Banks banished her to the dreaded “bottom two” as punishment for “her weakness” in the pool. The model narrowly escaped elimination; viewers couldn’t escape the message that women in pain bring it on themselves.²¹

When Top Model producers aren’t making sadistic sport of literally hurting women, they’re concocting photo shoot challenges in which pain is supposed to be the models’ motivation, terror and violence the backstory, and the image of a woman in jeopardy an advertiser’s ultimate “money shot.”

In an episode titled “House of Pain,” Mama Tyra offered cycle 10 contenders this bit of wisdom she picked up after decades as an advertiser’s muse: “The biggest modeling secret trick/tip that you can get,” she told the girls, is to “pose with pain . . . when you’re stuck and you don’t know what to do and [a photographer] is yelling at you . . . think pain, but beauty.”

Sure, because as anyone who’s ever thumbed through Vogue is supposed to believe, the more agony a woman’s in, the more attractive she is.

To demonstrate how stunning suffering can be, Victoria’s Secret’s former meal ticket led a little tutorial, clutching at various parts of her body and moaning, “Ow! It hurts so bad! It hurts so bad!” Then came a pain-themed “pose-off,” with Tyra instructing each model to embody a different variety of physical anguish: menstrual cramps, migraine, chest pain, sprained ankle, fingers slammed in a door, and even, for a contestant named Claire, an ache that came with this helpful backstory: “You did a movie and you had to do a scene with a man who strangled you, and your neck hurts.”

But pain isn’t women’s only route to beauty: According to Top Model, fear is fierce, too. “You’re scared! Something’s chasing you! Something’s coming to get you!” judge Jay Manuel coaches the models in cycle 5, who had to play “fashion victims” fleeing from some threatening force that would later be digitally inserted into their pictures. “You can’t believe this is happening to you! . . . You’re running for your life!” Echoing every creepy cultural equation of female beauty with helplessness and danger, Manuel repeatedly reminded the girls of their primary goal: to look “scared and pretty . . . pretty, but still scared.” Tyra offered that same phrase—“You’re scared but still pretty. That’s hard to do!”—to model Jayla Rubinelli as her highest mark of praise during that week’s judging. On another episode, Tyra told cycle 11 winner Brittany “McKey” Sullivan that her “signature pose” should be to look like “the girl that’s getting punched.”

“Death Becomes You, Young Lady”

Like many high-fashion advertising spreads, ANTM ’s many seasons have unfolded like a serialized thriller, with women’s (symbolic) pain and fear leading to their abuse, torture, and eventually, their death. So it came as no surprise when a cycle 4 photo shoot involved lowering the models into coffins at the bottom of a shallow grave in a cemetery, while various onlookers gushed about how hot they looked in their caskets. Guest photographer Johann Wolf wasn’t immediately impressed, though. When one of the judges asked him if he thought the models were pretty, the shutterbug replied, “Well, they all look too alive.”

That wouldn’t be a problem by the show’s eighth season, when Top Model—taking their cues from the likes of Jimmy Choo and Marc Jacobs—did their best to convince viewers that there ain’t nothin’ hotter than a dead girl.

That was the takeaway message of what I like to call the “beautiful corpses” episode, which featured ten posers as the mutilated, mangled, and murdered epitome of beauty. Ordered to convey the most convincing corpses in a “crime scene victims” photo shoot challenge, the lithe lot of’em were arrayed in awkward, broken poses, splayed out in cold concrete corridors, their bloody, lifeless limbs positioned provocatively, just so, at the bottom of staircases, bathtubs, and back alleys, mimicking their demise via stabbing, shooting, electrocution, drowning, poisoning, strangulation, decapitation, and organ theft(!), while following stage direction such as “It looks like you’re taking a nap. We need it to look like you were brutally killed.”

For their attempts to look fatally attractive in skimpy undies and ripped cocktail dresses, the girls were rewarded by rave reviews from the judges: “Gorgeous!” “Amazing!” “Absolutely beautiful!” they gushed. My favorite accolade of the episode? “Death becomes you, young lady!”

Top Model’s pretty-as-a-picture crime-scene challenge epitomized the worst of an insidious advertising trend that, ahem, just won’t die. But this episode was especially ugly even for a series that traffics in bottom-feeder humiliation, objectification, and degradation of women in the name of fashion, fun, and beauty for the deep profit of integrated marketers such as CoverGirl cosmetics, Seventeen magazine, and Wal-Mart. At last, producer Tyra Banks’s disingenuous claim to care deeply about girls’ empowerment was exposed as crassly as the lacy lingerie adorning the dead sexpots. The necrophiliac shoot laid bare Top Model’s blatant nexus of ad industry misogyny and corporate media’s pursuit of the almighty dollar.

ANTM and its many copycats have created a reality subgenre that allows advertisers to advance their backward notions in 3-D, with dangerous ramifications for girls and women. I’m certainly not the first to contend that images like this help to desensitize viewers to violence against women. Media critics such as pioneering advertising theorist Jean Kilbourne (in books such as Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel and films such as the influential Killing Us Softly series) have long argued that ad imagery equating gruesome violence against women with beauty and glamour works to dehumanize women, making such acts in real life appear not only more palatable and less shocking, but even aspirational. In our media-saturated culture, thong underwear and “Slut!”emblazoned T-shirts are marketed to eleven-year-olds, and photos of women with puffy, black eyes for that “just-punched” look are used to sell everything from shoes to sports cars. Media and advertising combine to teach girls that they will be valued, desired, loved, and successful only if they enact a commercialized, often traumatized, version of beauty. And if that ideal du jour happens to be grossly violent? Well, then violence must not be so ugly after all.

But where entire academic departments and social science research teams are now devoted to deconstructing the glorification of violence against women in print ads and TV commercials, so far reality TV has mostly escaped this kind of intellectual rigor and sociological scrutiny.²² Scholars and analysts (not to mention parents, responsible journalists, ethical media-makers, and anyone who might appreciate living in a more humane society) should pay closer attention. Unlike traditional ads, whose commercial and ideological implications many of us now have the tools to consciously consider and resist, the glammed-up depictions of violence against women shilled within this TV genre are presented in the name of reality—as if actual women experience physical and psychological abuse as sexy, as a means toward power, and suffer no ill effects from the pain and violence represented by these images.

Substantive media literacy education can help us to counter or complicate these insidious messages as we develop our own self-perceptions. But without the tools needed to critically unpack these representations, any image labeled “beautiful”—regardless of the context or cost—can become positioned as something for girls and women to emulate (and, perhaps more frighteningly) for boys and men to desire.

During media literacy workshops I’ve facilitated about reality TV with high school and college students since The Bachelor first began passing out roses, I have observed the deep level of identification many younger viewers attach to shows like America’s Next Top Model. This personalization became evident when a critique of the “beautiful corpses” episode on WIMN’s Voices, the media-monitoring group blog of Women In Media & News²³ prompted scores of impassionate comments, many from girls like fifteen-year-old Katarina, who vehemently defended the show’s presentation of bloody, beaten, bruised, and broken babes. “I don’t quite understand why so many people are finding this photo shoot inappropriate or appalling,” Katarina wrote. The “crime scene victims” challenge

isn’t a big deal, and I will continue to watch ANTM, a show that empowers women and gives aspiring models a chance at their dream and young teenage girls the notion that they too can achieve their goals . . . I fully support the show, and, unfortunately I do find seeing all these pretty girls taking beautiful photographs very entertaining.

Unfortunately, indeed. After decades of feminist activism, girls and women are still being told that their primary access point to power is through their bodies, and that the amount of power they can wield will be directly proportional to how much they weigh, how much of themselves they’re willing to wax, how Western they look, how provocatively they can preen and pose. So deeply do some girls buy into Top Model ’s false promise of fame, fortune, and mass adulation—so profoundly do they fantasize that they are the girls being feted as fiercely, fabulously, powerfully beautiful—that Katarina and several of her peers interpret criticism of the show’s content and thematic messages as a direct, personal attack on themselves and on young women everywhere. “This ‘dead model’ photo shoot is not spreading any negative images . . . [and] the show does not affect my decisions or opinions about . . . topics such as self-confidence” Katarina insisted, because “teenage girls also aren’t impressionable/stupid enough” to be impacted by these sorts of representations of women on television. Other teens who commented on the blog agreed. Mandoline, a seventeen-year-old who said she watched ANTM after coming home from fencing practice, assured us that “a TV show has very little effect on my identity as a strong confident person/ girl/woman/whatever,” while sixteen-year-old Veronica accused our blog of “fully underestimating young girls. We’re not as ignorant as you seem to think we are” because we ascribed political and cultural relevance to Top Model ’s beautiful corpses spread. “It’s entertainment, people. It does not affect me.”

And isn’t that, to some degree, what we all think? As an intelligent and competent person, you probably feel similarly unaffected by advertising and television, don’t you?

That’s how advertisers want you to feel. Advertising banks on the idea that we (all of us, not just youth) believe we are not affected by the images we see in ads—and now, so does the product-placement-generated reality TV genre that has resulted in hour-long commercials masquerading as entertainment programming. The smarter we are and the less we think marketing affects us, the less likely we are to bring an active critical lens to the images they’re spending more than $200 billion annually to create—and the easier it becomes for advertisers to break down our defenses and weave their messages into our psyches. Plainly put, advertising doesn’t work despite our belief that we are above it—it works precisely because of that belief. As Jean Kilbourne writes in Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel:

In spite of the fact that we are surrounded by more advertising than ever before, most of us still ridicule the idea that we might be personally influenced by it. The ridicule is often simplistic. The argument essentially is: “I’m no robot marching down to the store to do advertising’s bidding and therefore advertising doesn’t affect me at all.” . . . Of course, most of us feel far superior to the kind of person who would be affected by advertising. We are not influenced, after all.²⁴

Playing on this belief allows advertisers to then “co-opt our cynicism and our irony just as they have co-opted our rock music, our revolutions and movements for liberation, and our concern for the environment,” Kilbourne argues.²⁵ So, as it turns out, the very girls going to the mat defending Top Model’s sexy dead spread in online chat rooms and sorority houses because they believe the show has zero impact on them are, by nature, among the viewers most vulnerable to internalizing the dangerous ideology the show is selling alongside their many plugs for CoverGirl Long Lash Mascara or the latest $200 pair of La Perla panties.

The persuasive art of marketing works on a subconscious level—and not just on youth. As the editor-in-chief of Advertising Age once said, “Only eight percent of an ad’s message is received by the conscious mind; the rest is worked and reworked deep within the recesses of the brain, where a product’s positioning and repositioning takes shape.”²⁶ In reality TV, advertisers don’t only sponsor programming but work in tandem with producers to position and reposition our core perceptions about ourselves, our place in society, and our culture in general right alongside the Steve Madden stilettos and Heatherette dresses showcased by Top Model ’s living mannequins.^eh

This is the context through which we need to understand the implications of allowing advertisers—especially fashion and beauty industry advertisers—to create an entire genre of entertainment infused with their historically misogynist and bigoted philosophies. The “crime scene victims” challenge—like the many episodes of ANTM centered around female pain, terror, and torture—serves as a sharp reminder that what millions of reality TV viewers believe is harmless fluff . . . is anything but. Top Model is less a “guilty pleasure,” as TV Guide and infotainment shows have called it, than it is a cynical cash cow guilty of making product placers, and producers like Tyra Banks, rich at the expense of not only the self-esteem of the few hungry (in every sense) young models appearing in the competition but of the millions of girls and women, boys and men, who learn from the show that unhealthily underweight, Brazilian-waxed waifs can only achieve the ultimate in beauty when they appear to be erotically pained, provocatively maimed, self-abusive^ei corpses. These butchered-for-beauty gore fests are the ultimate silencers of women—dead girls don’t talk back, after all.

The mainstreaming of violence against women and girls as a normal part of “real” life is the seamy underbelly of the “romantic fairytale” reality show producers are selling. From the implicit acceptance of physical and verbal abuse on dating shows with leading men of questionable legal repute to the over-the-top worship of images of female fear, pain, torture, and death on modeling shows more grotesque than gorgeous, reality television is spoon-feeding a generation of viewers decidedly unhealthy ideas about gender and power, love and sex, beauty and body—ideas that threaten the physical and emotional safety of girls and women and harm the psyches, reputations, and relationships of boys and men. This is the subtextual thorn on The Bachelor’s rose. And just like The Bachelor . . . the flower’s pretty packaging might just be masking a dangerous prick.