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Sources Used For This Blog

Ballhaus, Louisa. “The Age Diversity on ‘The Golden Bachelor’ Is Great. the Size Inclusion Is Nonexistent.” Cosmopolitan , 2 Nov. 2023, www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/tv/a45666445/the-golden-bachelor-size-diversity/.

Cloud, Dana. “The irony bribe and reality television: Investment and detachment in the bachelor.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol. 27, no. 5, Dec. 2010, pp. 413–437, https://doi.org/10.1080/15295030903583572.

Dubrofsky, Rachel E. “the bachelor: Whiteness in the Harem.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol. 23, no. 1, Mar. 2006, pp. 39–56, https://doi.org/10.1080/07393180600570733.

Lindenfeld, Laura A. “The surveillance of women on reality television: Watching ‘The bachelor’ and ‘The bachelorette.’” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 99, no. 3, Aug. 2013, pp. 386–389, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2013.812319.

McKinney, Kelsey. “The Bachelor Franchise Is Sexist and Needs to Go.” Vox, Vox, 5 Aug. 2014, www.vox.com/2014/8/5/5814026/-the-bachelor-sexist-ban-it.

Siwak, Miranda. “Bachelor’s Victoria Larson Slams Producers over ‘Worst Experience.’” Us Weekly, 6 Apr. 2022, www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/bachelors-victoria-larson-slams-producers-over-worst-experience/. 

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There is Nothing "Real" in Reality TV: The Bachelor Edition

Reality TV is known for its dramatic events and viewer entertainment. However, it has its flaws. Looking into The Bachelor specifically, the series over-sexualized women and uses them as pawns for entertainment. They are stereotyped, judged, and insulted due to this. This blog will take a deep dive into these topics. Enjoy the read!

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This one photo practically encapsulates the entire meaning of the show: to get married

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The Bachelorette, yet the man is the one proposing?

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Zero racial representation!

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Is The Bachelor Sexist? Racist?

The Bachelor Industry is a place where women compete to fall in love with women and men can also compete to fall in love with women (the bachelorette premise) right? Not entirely. The bachelor actually provides some pretty sexist viewpoints, which should not be accepted in today’s society, yet somehow still is. For starters, having twenty something women compete against each other for one singular ordinary man is just a recipe for disaster. It just leads to girl on girl hate, which unfortunately, viewers heavily enjoy. The production crew is aware of this, and makes this the goal for almost every season. In fact, “viewers are wedded to the promise of a happy ending (and the advertisers wedded to the viewers’ pocketbooks) the illusion of romance must carry on … viewers enjoy the program in spite of its ultimately misogynistic content.” (Cloud, 2010). There is also the Bachelorette, where men compete for one woman, yet somehow the woman still ends up being objectified and robbed of any power she has. The series really tries to implement the fact that women are meant to sit there and look pretty and do dramatic “girly things”, while the men deal with it and fight through to pick their one “true love”. Even on the Bachelorette, things are still unfair. It is said that “On every season of Bachelorette: It is presumed that the woman will move wherever the man lives, It's the man who proposes at the end. She can say no, but he asks, and women are shamed for kissing a lot of contestants, unlike the men on the Bachelor” (Mckinney, 2014). This double-standard is just insane. The Bachelor himself can kiss twenty something girls and not be criticized, yet when the girl does it, she is considered gross or a slut. This is not fair at all and the standards are clearly not equal. Also, if the woman does not meet every single standard the production company has, they are portrayed as “women who fail to align themselves with these expectations fail both at love and at being a woman” (Lindenfield, 2023). The fact that they are pushing the idea that women cannot love without meeting high standards is just blatantly sexist and disgusting. 

This principle applies to the girls race, too. There are women of color occasionally on the show, but “they do not thrive. In the first season, all four women of color in the initial pool were eliminated by the third week” (Dubrofsky, 2006). While in recent years this has changed some, and more people of color are being represented, it is still not enough. The first Black Bachelor only appeared a few short years ago in 2021. The lack of racial representation is unacceptable, and unfair to women who are already facing the minority.

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We See What the Producers Want us to See

Everyone knows that reality television is somewhat scripted and obviously not completely accurate. However, it goes to such an extreme extent for shows like this. The producers film every hour of every single day for the six to nine weeks that contestants are there. Meanwhile, only one hour episodes are released each week. This leaves tons and tons of footage for the producers to sort through. They obviously do not pick scenes where the girls are being normal/boring, or getting along. This constant surveillance makes you think that something real would be shown, right? Wrong! In fact, “reality television situates surveillance as an explicit technology of confession and elides the editing and production process to affirm agency over presentations of the self (participants often claim the edited and produced version of themselves as a product of their own making)’’ (Lindefield, 2013). They agree to the show and are essentially signing up to be willfully objectified for more views. At the end of the day, being a reality television star is all about the company itself and the money. The Bachelor Industry needs to make sure that people will continue watching the show, so they portray “cat fights” and fights and tears to make sure people are interested. They do not show them getting along or really being kind to each other, because what about that is dramatic? 

This selective surveillance also has detrimental effects on women. People see women being nasty to each other on the show, and take it immediately to social media. For example, in season twenty five of the bachelor, a contestant named Victoria Larson was heavily made into a villain. I personally watched this season myself, and noticed that every single time she was on the screen, she was always saying something nasty to another girl. She also got a lot of hate from the other girls competing, as they called her dramatic and mean. The viewers immediately picked up on this. They did not like her whatsoever, and complained about her through several different social media platforms. People started insulting her left and right, and even went as far to insult her appearance. They think they have the full picture from a few clips on their favorite television show, and run with it. In actual reality, they have no idea who this girl really is behind the cameras and have no right to be insulting her and trashing her for the whole world to see. There was a theory going on that the producers kept her on the show longer than she should have been because she brought so much attention and caused so much drama, that it was incredibly entertaining for fans. I fully believe in this theory. Victoria Larson herself even spoke on this, and mentioned that she hated being on the bachelor and was not in control of her own actions. She reported that people were purposefully rude to her when they saw her in person, as well as that she received harassment online constantly (Siwak, 2022). She also claimed that some of the rude actions she committed on the show were not even her ideas, but the producers (Siwak, 2022). This interview with Larson really proves to us that the producers are in control of everything. They choose how they want each of the women to be represented. My mind goes to younger and/or teenage girls watching the show. Their representation of women finding love must be shattered. They think that they have to be mean to other girls and be the prettiest and skinniest in order to get a man, which is not at all true. This show essentially ruins all the good representation women have, whether it is staged or not. By not portraying all of the truth (or any of it, really) people get these false ideas in their head. If anything, this show just emphasizes the sexualization and moodiness of women, which is not the case off camera.

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Plus Size Women Gone Missing

The Bachelor is a reality tv show where there is one man looking for love, with about 25-30 women all looking to find love as well with this one man. For starters, girls have to apply to be on the show. There are a bunch of different requirements for their submission. They have to agree to being recorded and filmed twenty four hours a day when they are on the show, and also must agree to lots of their personal information being publicized according to Bachelor Nation. This makes the women become extremely vulnerable. Not to mention the unspoken rule that they have to be pretty enough for television. One thing that I have always noticed is all the girls that actually get selected tend to look the same. White, skinny, blonde, etc. While in recent seasons they have bumped up their diversity - it still lacks. Body inclusion is completely missing from the show. In fact, “in the 20+ year history of the Bachelor franchise, there have only ever been two self-identified plus-size people cast on these shows out of over 1,100 contestants” (Ballhaus, 2023). Essentially, the bachelor casting crew only picks girls who they think are “sexy” or “beautiful” based on basic female stereotypes. Also, the two plus-sized girls mentioned deemed themselves that, which means they might not actually be plus sized. How is this supposed to make women feel? This gives the false representation that in order to be on a show like this and find true love, you have to be hot and skinny, otherwise you are just unacceptable and not good enough. How can you make a show about how anyone can find love, but by “anyone” they mean one specific type of stereotypical girl who will do well on television? 

Now, we know that obviously reality television is not exactly how life goes. Scenes are cut, edited, and moved around to make the series more dramatic. How does this alter the way we view the representation in the show? Stuart Hall provides us with a good explanation. He brings up three different approaches to representation. If we apply the reflective approach, we essentially “reflect” the meaning of the show based on information we have (Hall). In this case, we might know that the bachelor is a reality show and therefore not take everything so seriously and know its staged. Or we might view it as just a drama show for entertainment - nothing more. Hall also mentions the intentional approach, where something has an “intended meaning”. When applying this to The Bachelor, one could say the show is intended to show girls and guys trying to find love and trying to build connections to find their future wife. The third approach Hall brings up is the constructionist approach, which states that we cannot fix language and must not confuse material with symbolism (Hall). For example, one may watch the show and think it is a cute show about finding love, but also understand that there can be several meanings behind it. I think a lot of people interpret the show how they see fit. Something I also believe is that most people love the drama and the villainization and sexualisation of women, that they do not really care about what goes on behind the scenes. I am sure plenty of people think this, but they deserve to be enlightened on how the women suffer.