My experience with The Bachelor franchise is as follows:
I edit the recaps from Elyse, which she’s been faithfully recording since 2017. That’s it.
Now, I have watched two (2) episodes to fill in for Elyse, prompting the following questions:
- Why are they four hours long?
- Why are they on two subsequent nights sometimes?
- Why on sequential nights or on four hour nights are they stretching out TWENTY FIVE TOTAL MINUTES OF FOOTAGE into an interminable length of time?
- Will my acute secondhand embarrassment survive this? (Answer: Barely)
I’m familiar enough through cultural osmosis and editorial work that I can converse about the show, but what I really love is listening to other people who are fans talk about why they love it – and what makes them want to scream.
So when I received an email from Ilana Masad and Stevie K. Seibert Desjarlais introducing this anthology, I was EXTREMELY ON BOARD. Why?
As they put it:
In 2020, we realized that although the fandom of The Bachelor is the entire reason the show–with its historically retrograde politics and lack of diversity–continues to exist, relatively little had been written about or by the fandom. We set about correcting that and filling that gap and the result is an anthology with nearly 30 contributors–longtime fans, cultural critics, and fellow Bachelor Nation members–writing about the messy, emotional, funny, and sometimes frustrating reasons why viewers keep showing up season after season.
Like the romance genre, romance reality TV (like a lot of media consumed primarily by women) is stereotypically considered to be trashy and/or for airheads–technically, there’s nothing wrong with trash TV or airheads. However, the fact is that millions of people engage with reality TV in meaningful and diverse ways. The Bachelor franchise, as one of the longest-running dating shows, has amassed fans from all corners of life who hold a plethora of identities and have a multitude of reasons for watching the show….
The Bachelor franchise’s fandom is a rich space for discourse on culture, race, sexuality, gender, human behavior, and community.
FINE. JUST EMAIL ME WITH A PILE OF MY CATNIP WHY DON’T YOU.
My episode with Ilana and Stevie is up now, but I also wanted to review this anthology to make sure you (hi!) know about it.
Holy crap is it good.
The essays are like scalpels equipped with magnifying glasses, dissecting and examining at The Bachelor franchise from every possible angle. Each contributor brought a fascinating perspective and pretty much made my brain explode as if someone put Pop Rocks on hot popcorn and drank a Diet Coke spiked with Mentos. It was a mess – a very enjoyable mess. I took so many notes.
Amanda and I have discussed on the podcast the challenge of reviewing an anthology, and this is no exception. I want to mention every essay, and share what I learned from each contributor, but that would be overkill and honestly, what I want to talk about may be very different from what you discover in this collection. These are writers who discuss media literacy skill development, tensions about gender, race, and hierarchical expectations, and beauty standards.
And much like romance lately, The Bachelor franchise and discussions thereof have become very mainstream, especially with the cross-pollination of other reality tv programs and the disastrous casting of Taylor Frankie Paul. This collection does for The Bachelor what we try to do with romance: explore and explain its importance as a cultural entity, while also offering criticism and condemnation when warranted.
Jeanna Kadlec’s essay “White Picket Cage,” which I am still thinking about, examines the evangelical Christian coded messages within the show:
Watching that first night of limousine arrivals and catfighting over cocktails, I had a strange out-of-body sort of experience, like I was watching an alternative version of my former life. I was stunned at how Christian-coded the show was in its treatment of gender roles and relationship expectations, and how hypocritical; for example, the show is belligerently insistent on ignoring the fact that contestants are in an open relationship with the lead while professing traditional values. (emphasis mine)
Apparently I’m one of the last people to recognize the polyamorous construction of the show; Ilana Masad emailed me a link to her March 2018 article in Playboy Magazine titled, “How ‘The Bachelor’ Franchise Celebrates Polyamory.” (Web archive link)
Kadlec’s essay also locates the growing popularity of the show within the evolving political and historical contexts of the time, and writes,
“I’ve come to treat The Bachelor properties as a temperature check of where the white evangelical movement is, and I take heart that, while reactionary Trump policies are flourishing, this show and others like it are dying.”
This concept of a ‘temperature check’ is echoed in other essays; in our interview, Ilana Masad said that for her, the show is a measure of “where heterosexuality is at in this country.”
Other essays I am still thinking about include Alana Hope Levinson’s “Pick Me (Or Don’t)” in which she explores the idea of being ‘chosen’ (or, conversely, not chosen to leave the show), and what that means for some of the contestants in terms of fame, wealth, status, and relative security. One unspoken “reason” for many contestants’ participation is upward social and economic mobility, especially for the women. Some former contestants have married professional football players, billionaire pastors, or other wealthy individuals:
“…it pays to not get picked; these rejected pick-mes actually ended up winning in the long run. There’s a lesson in there somewhere—that being picked by a shitty guy is actually worse for you.”
I love how this echoes Elyse’s repeated assertion that none of the contestants actually want to win The Bachelor; they want to last long enough to go on a cool vacation paid for by the network, and establish enough of a following on IG that they can parlay their Bachelor experience into an influencer career.
Prior podcast guest Sophie Vershbow’s essay, “Falling Out of Love with The Bachelor” focuses on her own relationship with the show, and with on the online community of Bachelor Nation that would watch and tweet about the show while it aired, an example of a live monoculture community event, now increasingly rare.
She parallels her own evolving perspective about relationships against the stubbornly unchanging format of the show, chronicling the growth of her own perspective from “I wanted a man to choose me so my life could begin, even if that man was so obviously the wrong one” to realizing that The Bachelor is “…a franchise peddling the uninvestigated marriage fantasy, often among people too young to have fully-formed prefrontal cortexes.”
“These are people who want to get married, not who want to marry each other as an expression of their love, which is the only kind of marriage I now have any desire for.
I only got to see how full my adult life could be without a romantic partner because circumstance gave me the time and space needed to build a happy life on my own, and I’m often left thinking of all the women whose circumstances turned those bad relationships into worse marriages that stole far more than four years from them. The women who go on The Bachelor shows seem primed for the latter….”
There are so many compelling essays and perspectives in this anthology, and I am still pondering most of them. Like, all the time.
If you’ve ever thought about how The Bachelor continues to have a strange hold on American culture after over 25 years, you’ll find really smart people talking about many, if not all, of the fascinating reasons why.
