Chapter Eight
“I Would Be a Servant to Him”
New Millenium, Same Old Backlash
But surely, it’s only television, isn’t it? Most people realize that the real world is different, don’t they? Well, yes and no . . . the line between the TV world and the world beyond the screen has, for most people, become exceedingly hazy. . . . We know that [TV characters] are not real, yet we continually think about them as if they were. We are seduced by television’s fictions to believe partly that this is how the world is but mostly to believe that this is how it could be. We learn to live in the dreams sold by network executives.
—SUT JHALLY AND JUSTIN M. LEWIS,
Enlightened Racism1
Step right up, folks, it’s time for everyone’s favorite guessing game, Regress-o-Rama. Can you trace this quote to its source?
I will make the best wife for Bob because I will be a servant to him. And if he comes home from a long day at the office, I’ll just rub his feet, and have dinner ready for him, and just [giggle] love on him!
Was it:
A. Nicole Kidman as a subservient cyborg in the 2004 remake of The Stepford Wives; B. a devout attendee at the Southern Baptists’ 1998 Convention, heeding her clergy’s call for wives to “cheerfully submit” to their husbands;
C. Christine, a bubbly twenty-four-year-old administrative assistant on The Bachelor, explaining why she should win a marriage proposal from some guy she’d never met.
If you guessed C, congratulations—you win! Christine’s quote came during The Bachelor’s season 4 premiere—before she’d ever met the man.
On second thought, we all lose.
In
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, journalist Susan Faludi documented how attacks on women’s rights periodically flare up in journalism, pop culture, and advertising as a reaction to “the perception—accurate or not—that women are making great strides” to improve their collective status. Threatened by signs that women might be on the verge of achieving great progress, media respond by condemning not only their ability to succeed in education, sports, business, and politics, but also the notion that they should want to do so at all. “In other words,” Faludi argued:
antifeminist backlash has been set off not by women’s achievement of full equality but by the increased possibility that they might win it. It is a preemptive strike that stops women long before they reach the finish line . . . these codes and cajolings, these whispers and threats and myths, move over whelmingly in one direction: they try to push women back into their “acceptable” roles—whether as Daddy’s girl or fluttery romantic, active nester or passive love object.2
I began actively monitoring unscripted programming when The Bachelor debuted, sensing a new resurgence of this time-tested media tactic. Since that time, reality television has emerged as America’s most vivid example of pop cultural backlash against women’s rights and social progress.
A cursory look at a timeline of this supposedly reality-based genre is telling:
2000: Condoleezza Rice is named the first African American national security advisor. Fox airs Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? based on the notion that women can only achieve success by proxy, as arm candy to rich husbands.
2002: The New York Times finally updates their wedding announcements policy to include same-sex nuptials. ABC debuts The Bachelor to remind us that romance and marriage are the sole domain of wealthy white men and pretty white women.
2003: Athletes including Michelle Kwan, Mia Hamm, Serena Williams, Martina Navratilova, Regina Jacobs, and Stacy Dragila score record-breaking wins in figure skating, soccer, tennis, swimming, and pole vaulting, respectively, while nearly three thousand girls play high school football as kickers, wide receivers, and linebackers.
3 UPN unveils
America’s Next Top Model, teaching young women that their bodies are valuable only as decorative props for advertisers—the skinnier and weaker the better.
2004: Cindy Sheehan, mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, meets with President George W. Bush along with other military families. She soon becomes one of America’s most vocal antiwar activists, organizing peace actions in the name of her son. ABC introduces Wife Swap and Supernanny, which generally portray women as bad wives and mothers if they pursue professional or political interests outside the home.
2006: Representative Nancy Pelosi is elected the first female speaker of the house. CBS’s Katie Couric becomes the first solo female anchor of a network nightly newscast. VHI rolls out
Flavor of Love, depicting women—especially women of color—as nothing more than ignorant, violent, gold-digging sluts.
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2007: Drew Gilpin Faust becomes Harvard’s first female president, and Dr. Peggy Whitson is the first woman to command the International Space Station. TLC premieres Say Yes to the Dress, where women find complete fulfillment in thousands of dollars’ worth of beading and tulle, and the CW embarks on The Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search for the Next Doll, where pole-dancing prowess is the key to success.
2008: Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is the Democratic front runner for president, eventually losing the nomination to Senator Barack Obama. Sarah Palin becomes the Republican nominee for vice president. Bravo’s new series The Millionaire Matchmaker, The Real Housewives of New York City, and The Real Housewives of Atlanta showcase women who aspire mostly to lives of leisure.
2009: The median age of first marriage for women rises to an all-time high of 25.9;
Singled Out author Bella DePaulo notes this as a sign that women are increasingly embracing and enjoying single life.
4 VHI offers
Tough Love via matchmaker Steve Ward, who opens every episode saying, “Nobody knows single women like I do. They’re lonely. They’re clueless. They’re needy.” Stylized illustrations of dapper dudes rejecting lovelorn ladies accompany this intro, rendering The Single American Female a symbol of misery.
As the above illustrates, American women have made great strides over the last decade in every professional field. Yet in the world of reality TV, women are not concerned with politics, law, athletics, activism, or even careers in general (unless they’re competing for the supermodel/starlet/rock star jobs that populate ten-year-olds’ daydreams). Instead, reality TV producers, casting directors, and story editors have collaborated to paint American women as romantically desperate, matrimonially obsessed, and hypertraditionalist in their views about the proper role for wives and mothers, husbands and fathers.
When dating show hotties say, “I would give it all up for [bachelor-I-barely-know]!” the first “it” they mean is their jobs, which are painted as inconsequential in comparison to the promise of “fairytale love.” While contestants usually do work, casting directors seem to prefer women with jobs that were acceptable in prefeminist days: models, flight attendants, secretaries, pro sports cheerleaders. The few women with lives outside of 1950s conventions find their careers held against them or turned into cautionary tales: A rocket scientist was called “intimidating” and promptly sent packing on More to Love, while a medical grad student was depicted as cold and stuck-up, even though her season’s Bachelor was a doctor himself.
Having fallen “completely in love” with Jake,
Bachelor number fourteen, bubbly twenty-five-year-old Ali learned that she’d be fired from her position as an advertising manager at Facebook if she didn’t immediately return to work. Jake couldn’t promise that he wouldn’t dump her for three other women, so after endless on-screen sobbing, she made the only rational choice: She left the show to keep her “dream job,” instead of joining nearly 15 million people unemployed in early 2010.
5 This act of independence was unprecedented: For the first time in the franchise’s nine-year run, a woman decided that her real life was more valuable than the show’s faux-fairytale fakery. Naturally, producers couldn’t leave it at that. One week later, they sent a camera crew to her house to film her bemoaning her “mistake” and begging Jake to let her come back to play her 25 percent shot at being with him. Her career meant nothing without “someone to share it with,” she pleaded, falling apart when he wasn’t interested. “I’m completely heartbroken . . . I made the wrong choice,” she sobbed. “I will forever regret this decision.” On the “Women Tell All” episode, Ali confessed that although it would have meant losing her apartment and her livelihood, she “would choose love over work” if she could do it again. “Don’t get me wrong, I am the biggest advocate of women going out there and having careers. One thing I know, though, is that when I’m on my deathbed I don’t want to look back and say I didn’t love enough,” she said, promising to “put love first” from then on. Now cured of her pesky self-reliance, the newly retro-tastic Ali quit her job to become the sixth
Bachelorette.
Dating show women must also be willing to leave their friends, families, and hometowns behind to be with men they’ve only just met. Whomever the network-approved stud chooses, it is understood that she will relocate for him, and that their life will unfold on his terms. “You can lead,” doe-eyed divorcée Tenley whispered as she danced with fourteenth-season Bachelor Jake. “You can lead me in life. And that’s what I want.”
If there’s no potential boyfriend to kowtow to, producers often have women submit to the nearest male authority figure. Tina, a project manager nicknamed “Miss Career Obsessed ” by
Tough Love’s relationship drill sergeant Steve Ward
, lamented, “I put work first. At the end of the day you’re still sad and alone at home. . . . What’s wrong with me? This is one of my last options because I feel like I’m on the path to not find someone.
I’m ready for Steve to control my fate.” VHI’s promotional materials tell viewers that Kanisha, “Miss Gold-Digger,” joined the show because “I have a bad habit of being picky with the men I date,” but “I believe that Steve Ward can put me in my place.”
ek That’s certainly how Ward sees his role. Through insults, paternalism, and universal statements about “the male mind,” he commands women to follow his “boot camp” rules or be alone forever. It’s all or nothing, he barks, because if he can’t “train” this cast of “slutty,” “dumb,” “soul-sucking” “losers,” they’ll never be able to land “Mr. Right.”
Female submissiveness is still imposed as a major theme even when the roles are supposedly reversed on shows like
The Bachelorette, where many men pursue one woman
. “For the first time in TV history,” the host declared during the spinoff ’s first season, “a woman has
all the
power!” The majority of
The Bachelor’s stars have been plucked from obscurity to sit on the proverbial throne and choose among twenty-five women. In contrast, each star of
The Bachelorette was previously humiliated and dumped by one of
The Bachelor boys. This assures that their pathetic bona fides—and their bikinied bods—are known commodities to any man who auditioned to date them, not to mention viewers.
el Instead of flipping the script,
The Bachelorette reinforces the same old gender stereotypes as its counterpart. Trista, a former Miami Heat dancer, became the first and most famous
Bachelorette in 2003. She spoke in grating baby talk, cried whenever she rejected suitors, and moved to Colorado, where Ryan, the man she selected, worked as a fireman. Producers pursued the same framing all the way through 2009, when interior designer Jillian, the fifth
Bachelorette, said she was tired of making important decisions and preferred to sit back and let her man determine where and how they would live.
Dating show dudes, meanwhile, are assumed to have careers, homes, and social ties too important to alter just for some woman. While
The Bachelor draws its female competitors as overly emotional backstabbers who’ll do anything for an engagement ring, guys vying for smooches from
The Bachelorette are usually shown palling around with one another, chugging beer and male-bonding over
The Bachelorette ’s hot bod.
em Producers stress this sort of camaraderie among brothers because, at heart, they don’t want to give the impression that men are deeply invested in the romantic outcome of the show, other than as exceptions that prove a macho rule. The audience is meant to understand that these aspiring actors and models are in it for career advancement, and the larger TV landscape underscores that point: Rather than badgering
Bachelorette runner-up Charlie Maher with hurtful questions about how devastated he must feel after being dumped at the faux altar, as they do with booted
Bachelor babes, the infotainment show
Extra hired him as a correspondent. And while
The Bachelor bumps to commercial asking, “Who will get sent home brokenhearted?” over footage of weeping women,
The Bachelorette’s narrator teases, “Who will make the cut?” and “Who will have his ego shattered?” (both questions that connote the woman as commodity and the show as a game) or simply, “Who will get sent home?” No need for any adjective or qualifier, since we assumed they hardly cared in the first place.
Sexual double standards are also pervasive. With a wink-wink and a nudge-nudge,
The Bachelor has encouraged its fourteen male stars to get as far as they can—with as many women as possible—in hot tubs, mud baths, and “fantasy suites.” But while
The Bachelorette’s leering cameras offer a series-long ogle-fest, zooming in on their stars’ breasts, asses, and legs whenever possible, their female stars are harshly judged for behaving half as wantonly as any of the randy
Bachelors. Host Chris Harrison actually sat Trista down and asked her to explain to uncomfortable viewers why she kissed more than one prospective fiancé during her season. She jumped at the chance to tell the audience that she’s a good girl and not a tramp, but she had to kiss several men to make sure she had chemistry with her future life partner. Likewise, Harrison made Jillian justify a steamy hot tub makeout session with former
Bachelor Jason Mesnick before he dumped her. (To Jillian’s credit, she was the first
Bachelorette to refuse to apologize for her sexuality. She was a normal, healthy adult, she said firmly, and if she wanted to pursue sexual attraction with a consenting partner, she saw nothing wrong with that.) This sort of slut-shaming has traveled from the prime-time series to the media spectacle that surrounds it, with bloggers calling the women whores and even CNN’s Anderson Cooper casting aspersions about their supposed promiscuity. Guest-hosting Live with Regis & Kelly, Cooper demanded Jillian tell him, “How many [guys] did you actually hook up with? How many did you actually sleep with?” Flustered, she answered, “I kissed ten guys, but only four with tongue.”
6
“Equal Society? I’m Sick of It!”
Power imbalances in heterosexual relationships are codified and glorified in relationship shows. How-to-land-a-man series like Tough Love give women ideological makeovers, with advice ripped from 1950s finishing school manuals: Laugh at men’s jokes even if they’re not funny. “Act interested even though you’re not.” “When it comes to sexual partners, for women it should be like a golf score. The lower the better.” Don’t be opinionated, do be “uncomplicated.”
The Millionaire Matchmaker’s Patti Stanger spells out gendered proscriptions point-blank: “It is so important for women to be women and men to be men, and to keep those roles intact. It’s worked for millions of years.” But what does it mean for “women to be women” and “men to be men?” Simple, Stanger instructs: On a date, “women should listen. You’re not the leader in this situation. You let the man lead. . . . You gotta, like, be the actress in the movie, not the director.” The condemnation of female leadership and celebration of the dominant “hunter-gatherer male” have been through-lines over three seasons of
The Millionaire Matchmaker. Women who make more money than men or who make the first move sexually or socially are “aggressive” and “masculine,” therefore emasculating and undesirable. Women must keep themselves thin, gorgeous, and agreeable at all times, but accept dates with schlubby chauvinists ten to twenty years their senior.
en Men “want Madonna in the bedroom, Martha Stewart in the kitchen, and Mary Poppins in the nursery,” Stanger explains, so if a woman wants love, she’d do better to hide her ambition and reveal her cleavage.
But what of men who want partners, not servants?
The Millionaire Matchmaker sets out to show them the error of their ways. When charismatic ex-NFL star (and rare African American participant) Matt “Hatch” Hatchett said that “chivalry is dead” and he wanted a relationship with an “ambitious” “career woman,” Stanger flipped out. Hatch “needs to shut his mouth and open his mind,” she told the cameras. “He’s got a chip on his shoulder. He’s pissed off that women get their dinners and their drinks paid for. Women get their car doors opened. He wants it to be equal society here . . . I’m really getting sick of this!” To correct Hatch’s enlightened sensibilities she sent him to “chivalry boot camp,” where Naomi, an “expert” his grandmother’s age, insisted that when he takes a woman out to dinner he shouldn’t allow her to speak to the waiter, ordering for her instead. When he pointed out that women of his generation like to make their own decisions, this simple idea flew over the heads of Stanger and her “expert,” so Hatch suggested they role-play the scenario:
STANGER (playing “the guy”): “What would you like to drink?”
HATCH (playing “the girl”): “I’ll order it when [the waiter] comes.”
STANGER:“Well, why don’t you let me order it ’cause I’m gonna order for the table.”
HATCH: “Because I’m an adult, and I’m grown, and I make my own money, so I’m gonna order my own drink.”
STANGER: “Then that’s not a girl you should be dating!”
Annoyed, Hatch asked, “If that’s my girlfriend for six months and she likes ordering my food for me, what’s wrong with letting her do that?” Naomi’s reply: “If you don’t mind being with a shrew who’s going to take over your life!”
Now, consider: Hatch didn’t suggest that his girlfriend asked him to do 50 percent of their housework, or fend for himself while she worked late, or march with her at an antirape rally. All he said was that he doesn’t want to control women’s choices at dinner (or, by implication, in life). But just that glimmer of male respect for female independence and equal partnership, so rare on reality relationship shows, was enough to elicit condemnations against “shrews” and dire warnings: “He’s gonna be alone for the rest of this life,” Stanger told viewers.
Far more typical was Jason, an overweight, seemingly stoned heir to the 20th Century Fox fortune, who wanted The Millionaire Matchmaker to locate his dream woman: “I want hot blond, big tits. Definitely funny. Kind of like a Stepford Wife.” Potential Stepford wives are Stanger’s specialty, so she set him up with a trophy bride hopeful who looked like a pinup, giggled at his lame jokes, and didn’t object when he demanded that she fetch his dinner because, “You’re the woman, you’re supposed to serve.”
Women who would recoil at their presumed subservience either are not cast, or are edited to appear ditzier than they are, or find their objections left on the cutting room floor. As a result, the “self-loathing single gal” joins chapter 3’s bitches, incompetents, and gold diggers as a dominant dating, mating, and marriage show archetype. “I’m a loser . . . what is so wrong with me that someone cannot love me for who I am?” wept Heather, offering the ubiquitous, tear-stained money shot that follows every Bachelor elimination ceremony. On Tough Love, sexy simpleton Liz chirped that she has trouble concentrating because “I’m usually thinking about kittens or sunshine or something.” Ward described her as “so desperate to get married she’s ready to settle for anything with a pulse.” The pretty young thing confirmed: “I would love to be a housewife. . . . The fact that I’m not married right now at twenty-four years old makes me feel like a failure! Walking down the aisle would finally make my life complete.”
With few exceptions,
eo relationship and lifestyle shows have framed women as unaware that there is anything more to life than tossing back martinis, lounging in hot tubs, and as bachelorette Christine suggested, meeting their husbands at the door with dinner and a foot rub at the ready.
Between 2000 and 2010, American couples redefined relationships in countless ways. Women postponed marriage longer than ever before. More stay-at-home dads took primary responsibility for childcare. More long-term heterosexual partners with kids began living together without legally formalizing their unions, while lesbian and gay couples continued to fight for—and increasingly won—the right to legally marry. Reality producers wanted none of that, showcasing mostly a narrow, nostalgic interpretation of marriage in which all single women are pathetic, all couples are straight, parenting and housecleaning are exclusively women’s work, and families can get by on just the income of a male provider. Off-screen, low-income women were working multiple jobs to keep food on their tables and roofs over their kids’ heads, feminists were advocating family leave and childcare policies to allow women and men to more sustainably balance work and family obligations, and middle- and upper-middle-class women continued to break barriers in top-tier businesses and elected office. The babes of reality TV? They dreamed only of suburban domesticity and cheerful dependence.
“Most definitely I see Aaron as my husband,” declared Heather, a thirty-one-year-old flight attendant on season 2 of The Bachelor, “I can see everything. I see the house. I see the white picket fence. I see the wife. I see the mother. I see the children. I see him coaching the soccer team.” In this hazy vision, all the problems of the world magically melt away when Daddy walks through the door. Fourth-season Bachelor contestant Kristi, a twenty-four-year-old loan processor, mused, “I see myself in the future as the mommy. You know, I’m trying to get everything together. And the phone’s ringing and the stuff’s boiling over and the kids are screaming, and I’m like, ‘Ahhh!’ All of a sudden . . . the door opens, there’s Bob. ‘Honey I’m, home!’ And he comes up behind me, puts his arms around me, and gives me a kiss, and at that moment everything’s okay. You know? Just perfect.”
If the message isn’t clear: “Every little girl grows up dreaming, you know, about the big wedding and children and the white picket fence with 2.5 kids and a dog,” twenty-five-year-old schoolteacher Lee-Ann insisted. Producers marshal such quotes in editing to reinforce the stereotype that these unbridled bridal fixations are universal . . . and, by implication, if anyone in the audience can’t relate, she must be a freak.
And why is this message so important and consistent? As we learned in chapters 1 and 4, the product placement trappings are what matter, not the bloke who pops the question with the name-brand diamond. Attempting to convince women that starring as the princess of a huge, ostentatious wedding is the most important thing they will ever accomplish, dating shows as well as programs like
Say Yes to the Dress and
Platinum Weddings are the mouthpiece of what Chrys Ingraham, author of
White Weddings: Romancing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture, calls “the wedding-industrial complex.” By 2006, the wedding industry was generating a whopping $80 billion annually for companies hawking rings, bridal apparel, invitations, flowers, receptions, catering, destination weddings, honeymoon travel, gifts such as household furnishings, appliances, consumer electronics, and even wedding insurance.
7 That astronomical figure doesn’t even include the profits of media companies and advertisers via these programs.
“I’m Going to Die Alone.”
Some apologists claim that reality TV is not sexist because no one forces women to sign on. That’s beside the point. The genre’s real impact isn’t on the handful of women who willingly appear on these programs, but in the narrative messages sent to millions of viewers tuned in to the vicious spectacles of The Swan and Joe Millionaire, or the millions of young girls for whom America’s Next Top Model is aspirational. We may talk back to our screens, we may think we’re above it, but the more we watch, the more we learn that only the most gorgeous, least independent women with the lowest-carb diets and the highest thresholds for humiliation will be rewarded with love, financial security, and the ultimate prize: being selected by some guy—any guy—because nothing is as important as male validation.
Despite how frivolous reality TV may seem or how much producers say it’s all in good fun, the psychological browbeating these shows engage in has political ramifications. These programs reinforce insecurities bred into women by years of factually inaccurate news media reports of supposed “man shortages” and broken-down biological clocks. They play on the same fears as the infamously inaccurate but wildly influential 1986
Newsweek cover story that claimed single women had a better chance of being
killed by a terrorist than finding a husband after forty. The statistic
Newsweek quoted—only 2.6 percent will wed and the rest will die alone—was debunked at the time by journalists like Susan Faludi, and by
Newsweek itself in a 2006 anniversary mea culpa (as it turns out, 23 to 40 percent of women aged forty and up will marry). But never mind the facts; the notion that women “past their prime” are doomed to a life of loneliness spread like a bad rash through newspapers, magazines, TV, and film, so pervasively that the “killed by a terrorist” meme has became one of those pop culture “facts” that reporters, fictional characters, and people on grocery store lines quote as pseudo-scientific “proof ” that women looking for love really shouldn’t be too picky.
8
It’s the same message reinforced in a recent tidal wave of cautionary-tale news reports, op-eds, and conservative-think-tank-produced books that (as Caryl Rivers documents in Selling Anxiety: How the News Media Scare Women) Caryl Rivers documents in Selling Anxiety: How the News Media Scare Women) predict that women who don’t “opt out” of the workplace, who instead prefer to wait until they’re emotionally and financially ready to marry and have children, are bound to wake up barren and full of regret in their thirties and older. But where news media usually rely on misrepresentative statistics and flawed studies to manufacture their misleading case against women’s independence, reality TV producers cherry-pick through thousands of hours of videotape to highlight the fears and yearnings of specific women like Heather, the lovelorn woman who called herself “a loser” when The Bachelor sent her packing. On The Bachelor: Where Are They Now, the host told viewers that “Heather is now back in Dallas, continuing her quest for an engagement ring,” over B-roll of the solitary gal sadly searching the city for her other half. Filmed in her kitchen (the spinster!), she explained that her “goal right now is to get married. You always hear those horror stories. You know, ‘forty and single!’ . . . I’m always nervous that Mr. Right is not going to come along.”
“A backlash against women’s rights succeeds to the degree that it appears not to be political, that it appears not to be a struggle at all,” Susan Faludi explains. “It is most powerful when it goes private, when it lodges inside a woman’s mind and turns her vision inward, until she imagines the pressure is all in her head, until she begins to enforce the backlash, too—on herself.”
9 As we’ve seen, much of the representational power of unscripted programming comes from the overwhelming presence of women who have internalized backlash ideology (or who are willing to pretend as much in trade for airtime), coupled with the invisibility and demonization of women with more progressive values.
Of course a successful executive is described on VHI’s website as being loveless and crushed by regret because she mistakenly prioritized a career. “After over a decade of working her way to the top of her business [she] quit her job” to appear on
Tough Love, because she realized “at the age of thirty-seven” that “she doesn’t want to live a life of loneliness.” That’s not incidental to the series—it’s arguably the program’s primary point.
Ultimately, though we usually understand that reality shows are not fully real, female contestants’ desperation, sadness, and questionable self-esteem all seem so authentic that this “fact” of female desperation (even among gorgeous twenty-four-year-olds) becomes to viewers in 2010 what that Newsweek killed-by-a-terrorist story was in the ’80s and ’90s. When a dejected forty-year-old businesswoman says “I’m going to die alone!” on The Millionaire Matchmaker, we believe her . . . and we file it away in the back of our minds, more “proof ” that liberation leads only to heartache.
Working hand in hand with print media hit-pieces on women’s achievement and highly hyped books like Lori Gottlieb’s Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough (sample chapter title: “How Feminism Fucked Up My Love Life”), reality TV dating and mating shows prey on women’s insecurities to convince us that we’re doomed to unhappiness unless we rid ourselves of all traces of individuality, ambition, or—heaven forbid—feminist thought. The scare-tactic message sent to self-sufficient, independent women is that we need to do whatever we can to make ourselves as thin, attractive, and nonthreatening as possible before it’s . . . daa daah dummm . . . too late! Once we’ve gotten our Extreme Makeovers and figured out What Not to Wear, we need to lower our standards and settle for any Bachelor who’ll have us—ASAP! If we demand respect, intelligence, kindness, honesty, or actual love, these shows insist, we’ll wake up to find that Mr. Right has been snatched up by one of twenty-four other cuter and more compliant chicks waiting in the wings. And then we’ll be left alone, unloved, childless (or an overburdened single parent), and miserable.
The result is deeply political. What these shows are ultimately trying to drag us back to is a time when women were told that no other emotional, professional, political, or academic accomplishment could compare with the goal of becoming “Mrs. Something.” That’s the exact phrase used by Christy Fichtner, chosen as Miss USA 1986 over runner-up Halle Berry (!) when she was asked why she wanted to compete for a stranger’s heart on Who Wants to Marry My Dad? “I want to be ‘Mrs. Something,’” she told NBC’s bald, suburban Adonis, “I don’t want to be ‘Miss’ forever.” Even Miss USA is worthless if she doesn’t transform into a Mrs. Somebody, and soon.
Life’s a Bitch and Then You Marry One
Depressingly, the depth of reality TV contempt for women runs so deep that even those who buy into the genre’s retrograde June Cleaver worship are met with the equivalent of a televised bitch-slap. Those who actually pursue the consumerist version of the diamond-encrusted, name-brand-approved, sugar-daddy wedding portrayed as the ideal are eventually vilified for wanting their “special day” to be as “perfect” as the ones on My Fair Wedding. “Eight of America’s most demanding brides-to-be have let us into their lives for a peek behind the veil. Meet the Bridezillas, and let the madness begin!” an alarmist announcer told viewers of Bridezillas, a Fox special that was spun into a WE network series. “There’s three kinds of Bridezillas stalking the streets of America. The Princess Bride, the Neurotic Bride, and most frighteningly of all, the Obsessive Bride,” the narrator classified. Graphics of shattered glass were thrown up on-screen in between each segment with captions such as, “LIFE’S A BITCH AND THEN YOU MARRY ONE.”
On the WE series, “out of control” stress cases of all ages have screaming hissy fits over place settings and dress fittings, verbally abuse loved ones and “hired help,” and behave like entitled, irrational bitches. The show layers racial prejudice into their backlash toolkit when the bride isn’t white. Perhaps no Bridezilla was portrayed as more despicable than “Queen Melissa,” a full-figured African American mom depicted as a violent thief. She wielded a handgun and threatened to shoot anyone who’d dare spoil her trip to the altar. She stole her fiancé’s ATM card and withdrew hundreds of dollars, plunging his account into a negative balance, then lied about it. Worse, she called her ex-husband, a soldier stationed in Iraq who didn’t know she was remarrying, and told him to wire $600 by the afternoon, to fix some fabricated emergency for their children. Amused, she told the cameras that in between his military duties he had sent more than $4,000 “on top of the child support he has been sending. . . . I’ve been saying it’s going towards the kids, bills—he doesn’t know it’d been going towards my wedding.” Just as grave a sin, we learn from the narrator, she “refused to take her husband’s last name.”
Women rarely come off any better after they’re married with children. ABC’s
Wife Swap and Fox’s
Trading Spouses stoke animosity between women with opposing value systems, encouraging each to disparage the way the other runs her home, raises her kids, treats her husband, and lives her life. Stay-at-home moms berate women with careers as “selfish” mothers and “bad” wives for not “obeying” their husbands, while women who value—gasp!—egalitarian division of household chores and childrearing condemn traditional homemakers as ignorant doormats. “The woman who doesn’t listen enough to her husband is chastised. The woman with an unclean home is berated. The woman who doesn’t get sole satisfaction from her family is told she should,” Shira Tarrant writes.
10 Whether they conform to or reject traditional models of marriage and motherhood, all women are presented as domestic failures on these shows, which, along with
Supernanny and
Nanny 911, function as reality TV’s answer to the news media’s trumped-up “Mommy Wars.”
11 Meanwhile, men who rule their homes with an iron fist and control every aspect of their wives’ behavior, appearance, and daily routine are a staple on these shows. Though they’re often called jerks,
ep they’re rarely rebuked for displaying a level of dominance often exhibited by batterers. (One
Supernanny episode offered a rare exception, making a verbally abusive husband and father get counseling.) On the other hand, when the occasional progressive-minded man or nurturing, stay-at-home dad shows up on shows like
Wife Swap, he’s branded a “sissy” and a “loser,” told he’s being a bad role model to his kids, and encouraged to assume his rightful place as his family’s breadwinner, “ruler,” or “master.”
This is conservative gender war ideology disguising a counterattack on women’s rights with soft-focus lighting, string quartets, and Cinderella ball gowns. All this compulsory domesticity, this negating of individuality and will, rests on the underlying notion that women should think like June Cleaver, fuck like Jenna Jameson, and look like Miss USA. It’s Donna Reed meets Pamela Anderson, and it ain’t pretty.
These narratives also deeply underestimate men’s intelligence, their ability to love, and their basic decency. Where women are considered perfect 10s simply for being pretty, pathetic, and passive, reality TV tells us that all men need to be Mr. Right is wealth—their own, or an illusion borrowed from producers. Kind, sweet, funny, smart, dignified, and loving men who respect women really do exist in the world—but they’re all but invisible in the world of reality TV, where Mr. Right is less likely to be a decent human being than he is to be a lying (Joe Millionaire), cheating (Tool Academy), insincere (Age of Love), frat boy (Meet My Folks) who crushes beer cans on his forehead (The Bachelorette), tricks women into bed (The Pickup Artist), objectifies them (Flavor of Love), verbally abuses them (Average Joe), and even kicks them in the ass (For Love or Money). Women deserve better from their lovers—and boys and men deserve better pictures of themselves than these limited interpretations of masculinity.
Sex: It’s Only Okay if She Doesn’t Really Want It
The morning of the America’s Regal Gems pageant had arrived, and Morghan was pumped and ready.
She’d spent hours getting her game face on. Rosy blush over flaw-concealing foundation lent her skin a dewy glow. She batted fake eyelashes under carefully plucked eyebrows. Piercing blue eyes with dramatic black mascara completed that perfect smoky eye look. Her voluminous blond hair was pin-curled in a sophisticated updo. While her full-body spray tan didn’t exactly seem natural (how could it, after four consecutive applications?), it certainly looked expensive. She pursed her glossy pink lips, practiced her best come-hither look, and rehearsed the coy, over-the-shoulder shimmy/smile combo she hoped would wow the judges during both the swimsuit competition and her dance talent portion.
Oh, one more thing: Morghan, a contestant on Toddlers & Tiaras, is seven years old. She started her dance in a trench coat with her back to the judges. All of a sudden—bam!—she stripped it off to reveal short-shorts, boots, and a fringed, midriff-baring halter top, turned around, and began pumping her hips to club music. Her performance resembled a cross between burlesque and a Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders routine.
Toddlers & Tiaras and
Little Miss Perfect get my vote for most exploitative reality shows of the decade.
eq Girls as young as five and six years old are hypersexualized before they can possibly understand or consent to the implications. It’s a pedophile’s dream come true: Why risk renting illegal kiddie porn when you can watch little kids mimicking the sultry stares, flirty winks, and booty-shaking moves of exotic dancers on TLC and WeTV? There’s a reason the term “prosti-i-tots” was coined for the early introduction to raunch culture media give girls not yet old enough to cross the street by themselves.
12
These baby beauty pageant shows play like Intro to Misogyny for the preschool set. Girls are taught that their bodies are to be always on display, that it’s normal to be graded on how pretty your eyes, smile, and hair are, and that it’s
really, really important to be more beautiful than other girls. In short, they learn how to perform femininity. “It looks like a twenty-year-old face on a five-year-old, seven-year-old’s body,” one pageant dad told
Toddlers’ cameras, a bit uncomfortably. “It’s just different to see kids that way.”
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Toddlers functions as a training ground for female sexual performance, preparing little girls to cultivate and relish objectification. (I can fast-forward past a discussion of “the male gaze,” right?) They’re told to “never stop smiling,” even if they’re unhappy. They’re instructed to use their nascent “feminine wiles” to impress judges (especially “boy judges”). And they’re trained to strive for physical perfection in constant competition with female peers.
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In this sense, four-year-olds on Toddlers & Tiaras aren’t much different from twenty-four-year-olds on E!’s The Girls Next Door, where Playboy playmates prance around in thong panties and flash their surgically enhanced double-Ds to tease pervy octogenarian Hugh Hefner. They’re cast on the show and live in Hef’s mansion solely as eye candy. But unlike on The Bachelor and similarly contrived “love stories,” producers are straightforward about the fact that women’s bodies are commodities, women’s sexuality performative. Problematic? Sure. Yet this lack of artifice—or, more accurately, the transparency of this transaction—makes E!’s portrayal of Hef’s multiple centerfold “girlfriends” less insidious than the ways women are treated on Flavor of Love or The Bachelorette. We’re encouraged to watch The Girls Next Door with a winking understanding that these nubile young things are acting a role; it’s doubtful anyone believes for a minute that they’re sleeping with the eighty-four-year-old soft-porn scion. What’s more, we’re meant to understand that they like sex and, unusual in the reality landscape, we’re not supposed to scorn them for it.
For a genre overflowing with casual sex, reality TV is surprisingly opposed to women’s desire. Looking the part of femme fatale is expected;
acting the part will earn them a scarlet letter. We learn that women should be continually sexually available . . . so long as it is for a man’s pleasure, not their own. Ever since season 1’s
Bachelor chose the voluptuous and unabashedly sexual Amanda and was lambasted for that choice, dating shows have sent the message that women who actively seek sex for pure physical enjoyment are contemptible whores. Women can be “good girls” if they are seduced after copious amounts of booze, coerced into making out because they fear rejection if they don’t go along with it, or if they use sex as a bargaining chip to trap a man or as an act of desperation to prove their love. But if they give in too quickly or (heaven forbid!) make the first move just because they’re turned on, we’re supposed to consider them promiscuous, immoral, and downright filthy.
et And Lord help the girl who doesn’t need a man to satisfy her desires: When a bored dater quipped that she wished her
Bachelor castmates would leave so she could have some time alone to take care of her needs, her little masturbation joke ended up getting her labeled disgusting and inappropriate.
Producers paint women of color—especially African Americans and Latinas—as particularly hypersexual on shows like
Flavor of Love and
Real Chance of Love. Built into these shows’ structure is the requirement that they pole dance, lap dance, wear fetish costumes, and perform sexual favors to “win” dates or avoid elimination, for which they’re then demonized. This is a typical argument from
Flavor of Love: WOMAN A: “Are you proud to be stripping on a pole, bitch?”
WOMAN B: “You’re a whore!”
WOMAN C: “And to me, you’re still a slut!”
More irate rants were followed by moralizing condemnation from Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School host Mo’Nique, who told viewers that the cast arrived “look[ing] like hookers. Some of the skirts was up their ass. Some of the heels looked like they’d come off a pole.”
If reality TV makes women out to be whores (sometimes right in the title, as in Lady or a Tramp?, a series Donald Trump once planned), then the networks themselves are the pimps. They provide an endless array of needy sexpots to buff dudes with six-pack abs and hope like hell they’ll paw each other on film to rake in ratings and ad dollars, à la Temptation Island, where sexy singles (including porn stars) were hired by Fox to attempt to break up committed relationships. All this gyrating, tempting, and teasing does double duty when cobbled together in cable specials such as E!’s True Hollywood Story: The Bad Girls of Reality TV and the pay-per-view offering Reality TV’s Sexiest Vixens.
And then there’s HBO’s Cathouse series, filmed at the infamous Bunny Ranch brothel in Las Vegas, where sex workers nonchalantly rattle off price points for various erotic services and johns haggle over the cost of blow jobs and threesomes. If you missed an episode, never fear—HBO’s official website for the show is there to help: “Can’t tell the johns from the dicks? Need to ID a ho? Consult our episode guide!” (emphasis mine).
Prime-time prostitution? Really?
Don’t be surprised.
Cathouse is not only the logical progression of the genre—it’s also one of the more honest reality shows of the decade. The terms are clear at the Bunny Ranch: When the women sell their bodies they set their own prices, clearly articulate their limits, and don’t pretend to be in love with guys they’ve just met, weeping about how worthless their lives will be if they don’t find a man whose coattails they can ride. They just take their money, feign attraction, and help their clients get off. This isn’t the ideal form of sexual agency,
eu but it may be preferable to the majority of dating shows where ladies in waiting have no sexual agency at all. For all the reasons some feminists might object to prostitution (selling sex is a valid economic choice for many people, but it’s hardly liberatory), at least
Cathouse doesn’t glory in breaking women’s hearts and crushing their spirits.
Certainly,
Cathouse was more honest than
Joe Millionaire, whose most notorious scene strongly implied that one of the contestants, “bad girl” Sarah Kozer, hooked up with Liar McFakebucks in the woods just to get her hands on his great big . . . billfold. When they snuck off into the woods away from the cameras, producers transformed what could have been an exceptionally boring extended still shot of a grove of trees into a soft-porn spectacle, through the propagandistic power of editing and sound effects. They pumped in some “chicka-chicka-pow-wow” mood music, spliced in out-of-context dialogue from a different day to make the couple’s conversation seem incriminatingly randy, and threw the words “Shhh . . . ” “Ummm . . . ” “Slurp . . . ” and “Gulp . . . ” in captions on-screen, all of which appeared to be damning evidence that she performed oral sex. She didn’t—but reality hardly mattered.
ev Excerpts from that “slurp, gulp” scene spread like news of a Lindsay Lohan car crash through the infotainment cycle. Shows like
Access Hollywood and
Entertainment Tonight depicted Kozer as a mercenary skank. She was trashed in newspapers, magazines, and blogs, and by viewers on fan sites. As one commenter put it on FoxReality .com, “There’s no question that SARAH is a BIG gold digging, money hungry ho who’s willing to take any Dude into the woods at night to get some $$$ Hehe!”
The Gender Binary: Reality TV’s Definition of “Normal”
As we’ve established, reality TV has defined “Woman” nearly universally as heterosexual, domestically inclined, obsessed with thinness and beauty, and desperate to be married. The genre’s “almost relentless heteronormative impulse,” culture scholar Shira Tarrant writes, “reproduce(s) powerful and repressive ideological messages about the politics of identity.”
14 This plays out in the tropes we’ve explored about women as stupid, bitchy, gold-digging girlie-girls, and in the underrepresentation—and hypersexualization—of lesbians and bisexuals.
We’ve seen the Predatory Dyke out to seduce and “turn” straight women: An early example was
America’s Next Top Model ’s Kim Stoltz—a lesbian often criticized by judges as looking “too masculine”—who joked about a straight blond competitor’s crush on her after they kissed in a limo and made out in bed.
A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila and
A Double Shot at Love with the Ikki Twins treated us to bi-for-boys’-viewing-pleasure fantasies
, where lingerie-clad femmes with long fingernails felt each other up as male onlookers hoped to join in. Producers milked Sapphic lust for ratings, but undercut notions of authentic lesbian desire by ensuring that men always “won” the dubiously bisexual dating series—affirming the second-class nature of same-sex relationships. Tila Tequila wrote on Twitter that “MTV made me pick Bobby,” despite her “crying and begging” producers to let her choose a woman named Dani at the end of the first season. In interviews, she said she nixed a third season because they wouldn’t “let me choose who I want” and only did season 2 because of contractual obligation.
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On the plus side, some nonhetero reality TV participants have managed to escape such typecasting.
Top Model has included a significant number of lesbian and bi contestants over fourteen seasons, confirming that beauty isn’t only the domain of straight girls. Bravo has allowed a couple of open lesbians to headline shows based on their professions: Hairdresser Tabatha Coffey rules
Tabatha’s Salon Takeover, while fitness trainer Jackie Warner is ass-kicker-in-charge on
Work Out. The tenth season of CBS’s
The Amazing Race featured their first lesbian contestant, twenty-seven-year-old speech pathologist Lauren Marcoccio, and Duke, her formerly homophobic father.
15 Not only did viewers see Lauren as an able competitor, they observed familial love conquering prejudice. Duke had rejected his daughter when she first came out, but later realized the error of his ways. He encouraged parents of LGBT kids to “deal with it, cope with it, accept it, and move on. Life is too short. . . . ”
The rare presence of women like Coffey, Warner, Marcoccio, and Stoltz—and their girlfriends, wives, and families—on lifestyle, competition, and modeling shows has allowed Americans a positive opportunity to see televised images of queer women working, dating, and generally living and thinking just like anyone else. Regrettably, this has been more the exception than the rule.
More typically, women who flout conventional ideas about “proper” sexual behavior are marginalized. Reality TV hews to what scholars and culture analysts refer to as the “gender binary,” in which socially constructed gender roles are considered “natural” and only two recognized genders are considered valid—male or female. Within this system of thought, to be considered “normal” people must look and behave in traditionally “masculine” or “feminine” ways based on the genitals and secondary sex characteristics they had at birth.
ex In contemporary society, this deeply ingrained idea that there are only two “normal” genders has led to misunderstandings, mockery, and violence against people who are transgender (those who feel uncomfortable with or disconnected from their birth gender) and intersex (individuals whose biological sex cannot be classified as simply male or female).
Within the reality TV universe, the gender binary punishes even straight, “cisgender” women
exey who don’t conform to the strictest social constructions of femininity. If they wear flat shoes, boxy pants, and little to no makeup, makeover shows like TLC’s
What Not to Wear brand them “butch” and “manly.” Male adjectives are hurled as high insults, intended as “tough love” encouragement to coerce them to embrace stilettos, cosmetics, and curve-hugging dresses. Fox’s
The Swan went further, surgically altering women to “correct” their “ugly,” “masculine” features, employing silicone implants, liposuction, and collagen lip injections to make them “look feminine.” These artificial, high-femme transformations were portrayed as the only possible route “mannish” women had toward being beautiful—and, therefore, being loved.
Reality TV’s adherence to the gender binary has resulted in near-total invisibility for transgender women. I can remember only four transgender women on a decade of broadcast and major cable reality shows. The most talked-about of these, African American model Isis King, was recruited in 2008 for cycle 11 of America’s Next Top Model, after she and other homeless women were used as background props in a cycle 10 photo shoot. Predictably, ANTM played up some competitors’ antagonistic insistence that there’s no place for a “he-she” in a “real” woman’s modeling contest (“Reality is, she’s a man!”). But the show balanced attacks and jokes with sensitive scenes in which Isis’s beauty—and gender identity—were accepted and her bravery admired. The judges applauded when she said, “This is not something I chose. This is who I’ve always been.” Lounging in a pool in a bikini top, she explained without apology that she was taking female hormones because she was “born in the wrong body,” and that transitioning felt like going through puberty all over again. When Isis mentioned that she was “developing,” a fellow model replied, “Like a butterfly.” Others called her “brave” and even gave her moral support during her hormone injections. Sometimes she was referred to as a “sexy,” “gorgeous,” “beautiful girl,” other times as an imposter with “manly” hands, feet, waist, and another conspicuous part.
These mixed messages were trumped when Isis earned a stamp of “Fierce!” approval from über-model Tyra Banks, whose opinion holds powerful influence among many young women. Still, acceptance had its limits. In Isis’s audition, Tyra asked what her presence on the show would do for the LGBT community. The self-confident twenty-two-year-old answered that she was proud to represent, but her “eyes are on the prize” and she only cared about winning. “I like that Isis does not have an agenda, she really just wants to be a model,” a judge replied. A trans body may have been appreciated on the show, but activist intentions? Wanting to be a visible agent of social change, rather than just posing in sponsors’ ads? Now that would be unacceptable.
Also in 2008, transgender activist and performer Laverne Cox was cast on VH1’s
I Want to Work for Diddy, an
Apprentice-style knockoff replacing real estate tycoon Donald Trump with hip-hop mogul Sean Combs
. While some of Laverne’s competitors respected her as a worthy adversary, others called her a “joke” and a “spectacle.” At one point, her teammates even instructed her to “tranny it up” in a challenge involving on-camera interviews with Diddy’s former assistants. (“She’s gonna use her trannyness! And you can just laugh at that, period,” a male teammate giggled. Though reluctant, Laverne gave in, vamping and giving a beefy dude a lap dance.) Still, the show generally emphasized her poise, competence, and dignity, helping to buck stereotypes within the hip-hop community and earning an award from GLAAD (the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation).
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The next year brought two additional transgender women to MTV: Katelynn Cusanelli, a computer geek who enjoyed walking around in her underwear on The Real World, and Leiomy Maldonado, a member of Vogue Evolution, one of the groups competing in America’s Best Dance Crew. Like Isis and Laverne, Katelynn’s and Leiomy’s character arcs were edited to create narratives that fluctuated between reinforcing transphobia and rejecting it. Though imperfect, this duality could still be considered a positive antidote to media coverage that typically treats trans people as laughable freaks, deceptive sex workers, or pathetic crime victims. Overall these four shows emphasized the humanity of their transgender cast members more than their difference. In doing so, these few exceptions illustrated that reality television has the potential to tell compelling stories in ways that enlighten audiences, subvert conventions, and defy expectations—much like The Real World used to do in the early 1990s.
If only producers and networks challenged themselves more frequently to fulfill that potential, and not just with regard to storylines involving LGBT people.
Twenty-First Century Backlash: Your Handy-Dandy Annotated Guide
After “giving gold diggers their comeuppance” on
Joe Millionaire, breaking would-be brides’ hearts on
Married by America, and ogling bikinis on
Temptation Island, Rocket Science Laboratories wondered if women with “axes to grind” can “effectively rule society.” Enter
When Women Rule the World, a Fox reality series planned in 2007, described as follows by the network’s “evil genius” of unscripted programming, Mike Darnell:
You take 12 attractive women who feel like it’s still a man’s world and who think they’ve hit a glass ceiling, and you give them their own society to run,” complete with “12 macho, chauvinistic guys [who become] literally manservants. . . . They’ll have to obey every command from the women.”18
According to Fox Entertainment’s Peter Liguori, “What it’s doing, in a very Fox-like fashion, is testing social mores. . . . We decided, why not create this Petri dish of a society and see what happens.” Darnell was sure
When Women Rule the World would be a smash hit, because “The biggest reality shows we’ve done, other than ‘Idol,’ have been social ideas.”
19fa
Where most reality series hide their antifeminist backlash under a saccharine, fairytale gloss, Fox’s promotional release—excerpted and translated below for your enjoyment—offered an unvarnished glimpse at how reality producers and network executives perceive gender politics in America. It is extremely telling that Darnell and his Rocket Science buddies Chris Cowan, Jean-Michel Michenaud, and Charles Duncombe consider women’s protests about sexism as simply “personal axes to grind.” It would be laughable if it weren’t so pathetic.
Darnell & co. interpret women’s demands for respect in the personal sphere and an end to discrimination in public life as a power grab by rampaging fembots who want to control the world and turn men into their slaves. So accustomed have male media leaders become to the wealth and decision-making power they command (see sidebar) they just can’t parse the notion of equality between the sexes. They have never understood the world feminists actually envision, in which women and men share equal educational, economic, and professional opportunities, live free of abuse, can be fully sexual without judgment or coercion, and where girls and boys alike can embrace their authentic selves because no one will be told that strength, tenderness, confidence, empathy, or aggression is “inappropriate” for their gender—a society in which power and dignity are not rationed based on gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or physical ability.
WOMEN BEHIND THE SCENES
• Women are only 25 percent of all creators, executive producers, directors, writers, editors, and photography directors on reality shows, sitcoms, and dramas on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and the CW.
20 • This marginalization is even more stark in the leadership of Fortune 1000 media and telecommunications companies, where women are just 12 percent of corporate board members and 15 percent of executives.
21 • Female executives hold a paltry 3 percent of the “clout titles” that wield real decision-making power in these media and telecom companies, from executive vice president to chair and CEO.
22 • Women owned 28 percent (and minorities 18 percent) of all nonfarm businesses in 2002, but by 2006 owned less than 5 percent and 3 percent of commercial broadcast TV stations, respectively.
23 Human rights shouldn’t be such a confusing concept. Yet when women talk about correcting injustice, media powerbrokers tend to think of a “gender war” in which the winning side dominates and the other submits—and they deploy programming accordingly.
If the men who occupy media boardrooms and key executive suites are hostile to feminism, hardly any women exist in their power-peer group with the ability to sway them—or, for that matter, to veto their choices and set different corporate priorities for what we get to watch. The fact that women are only 3 percent of top-level decision-making media and telecom executives has broader impact than average employment discrimination. “The people who tell the stories in our culture ultimately control that culture and have a lot of power over how we see groups of people [and] events,” notes Dr. Martha M. Lauzen, executive director of the Center for Study of Women in TV and Film. “That remains a mostly male activity.”
24
With so little equality at the top, perhaps the gender bias in ten years of reality programming can hardly be seen as a surprise.
Reading Between the Lines
Now that we’ve unraveled reality TV’s twisted fairytales and examined how advertiser ideology influences depictions of women, people of color, and class and consumerism, my hope is that you’ll be better armed against the subtle indoctrination these shows engage in. This requires active, critical viewership—the opposite of irony, our usual shield when we watch kitschy, over-the-top shows like
Flavor of Love, Tool Academy, or
When Women Rule the World. As Susan Douglas writes in
Enlightened Sexism, “irony means that you can look as if you are absolutely not seduced by the mass media, while then being seduced by the media, wearing a knowing smirk.”
2526
The more you hone your media criticism instincts, the less affected you will be by sexist, racist, hyperconsumerist representations—and the more easily you can predict whether new reality shows are likely to offer harmless entertainment or antagonistic attacks.
As a sample of the fun you can have with media literacy, try predicting what future reality shows will be like by annotating press releases from production houses bragging about new programs. For example, the following phrases come from Fox’s “Fall Preview 07” release for
When Women Rule the World,fb decoded via my handy-dandy “Reality TV Speak to Plain English” translation guide:
“ . . . a group of strong, educated, independent women . . .
each with a personal axe to grind . . . ”
= Women will be portrayed as castrating bitchqueens; however, the female cast members won’t actually be feminists.
“ . . . unsuspecting men used to calling the shots . . . ”
= Men will be cast specifically because they are prone toward domineering, controlling, possibly abusive behavior, and are likely to say regressive, patronizing things about women.
“ . . . a world where women are in charge and men are subservient . . . ”
= Feminism (the idea of eliminating barriers to women’s equality) automatically involves denigration and submission of men.
“ . . . each gender’s ability to adapt to a new social order will be put to the test . . . ”
= Traditional gender roles are innate; by messing with biological destiny, this “social experiment” will result in total chaos, proving that feminism is futile.
“ . . . a remote, primitive location . . . ”
= Flashback to Bill Maher being boiled in a cauldron by hot, cruel babes in Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death. Women will wear revealing island outfits provided by producers.
“ . . . build a newly formed society—one where there is no glass ceiling and no dressing to impress . . . ”
= Fashion and the glass ceiling are the only two forms of oppression women face. Rape, poverty, state attempts to control reproduction, racist targeting of women of color, marginalization of female leadership in politics, sports, business, and media . . . simply don’t exist.
“For the men, their worlds of power and prestige are turned inside-out and upside-down”
= Up is down, night is day, cats and dogs living together—
total anarchy! It’s unnatural, I tell you—unnatural!
“for these women, turnabout is fair play! . . . women command and men obey.”
= Let the ballbusting begin!
“How will the women treat the men?”
= Like dogs . . . which is why women shouldn’t be given leadership roles in the real world.
“Will this new society be a Utopia or a hell on earth?”
= That’s an easy one. . . .
“Who will be man enough to succeed in the new social order”
In the end, When Women Rule the World wasn’t a Petri dish, it was a cesspool. Hardly “testing social mores” in a hands-off “experiment,” as Luguori claimed, Rocket Science and Fox manufactured a manipulative premise based on a bastardization of “women’s rights,” all to burn straw feminists in an island campfire.
These are the sorts of “social ideas” around which Mike Darnell has built a decade of unscripted programming: Women’s leadership is laughable, men’s rightful place is in charge, and women really belong—as The Millionaire Matchmaker put it explicitly—in the bedroom, the kitchen, and the nursery. As we’ve seen throughout this book, as much as Darnell claims that he and other reality programmers are just “giving people what they want, pushing the envelope to match tastes,” the opposite is true. In fact, they’re doing their best to alter our tastes, in an attempt to convince us that at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Americans do not see women and men—or our society in general—much differently than we did before the women’s rights, civil rights, and gay rights movements. Though full-fledged equality still awaits, the advancement of women and people of color in nearly every aspect of public life stands counter to producers’ attempts to redact several generations of social progress. Yet reality TV producers, advertisers, and media owners have done what the most ardent fundamentalists have never been able to achieve: They’ve created a universe in which women not only have no real choices, but don’t even want any.
I encourage you to take to heart this antidote for such backlash fare, offered by author Susan Douglas:
producers insist that mass media are simply mirrors, reflecting reality, whatever that is, back to the public. . . . Whenever you hear this mirror metaphor, I urge you to smash it. Because if the media are mirrors, they are funhouse mirrors . . . [that] “set the agenda for what we are to think about, what kinds of people deserve our admiration, respect and envy, and what kinds don’t.”26
No matter how often reality TV’s funhouse mirrors replay nearly identical images, it’s important to note that there’s no conspiracy of rich, chauvinist WASPS locked away in a media boardroom, asking each other between cigar puffs, “Okay, boys, how do we keep the chicks and uppity minorities down?” Anachronistic, yes—orchestrated, no.
Still . . . who needs a conspiracy when the impact of corporate media consolidation has led to the same results? Today, as a result of fifteen years of media deregulation, almost three-quarters of all broadcast and cable channels are owned by six conglomerates, soon to be five if an impending Comcast/NBC merger goes through (more on this in the next chapter). Reality programmers are landscape-shaping agents in the backlash, consciously or not, but they play just one part in a much larger institutional problem.
Market-based priorities have dumbed down network entertainment, corrupted mainstream journalism, and allowed media companies to lag way behind most other major industries in the percentage of women and people of color in leadership. In the following chapter, I dig into one aspect of media economics—how product placement led to the rise of reality TV, and what this means for media content in the future. I hope that by the time you get to the media activism conclusion, you’ll be ready to start working to change the system responsible for backlash programming.