Tag Archives: The Bachelorette

Shocking News from The Bachelorette: One Solitary Woman Was Harassed on the Internet!!!

Image via Caroline Gormley

Image via Caroline Gormley

OMG you guys—so, I’m getting caught up on The Bachelorette for tonight’s FINALE!!! and just needed to report back on some important findings from the “Men Tell All” episode that aired last Monday! So like, color me shocked-as-fuck—my jaw is literally hanging open; YOU ARE NOT GOING TO BELIEVE THIS: I learned on “The Men Tell All” that Kaitlyn had the extremely rare and shocking experience of being a female public figure who was slut-shamed and harassed on the internet! She even received death threats! Continue reading

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The Bachelorette Is Changing the Rules to Accommodate Kaitlyn’s Sluttiness and I Love It

I realized something this past week: The Bachelorette is my favorite show. I can’t say why, and I don’t know that I’ll always feel this way, but like drunkenly pulling smarmy, ugly leather jacket-clad Nick into your Ireland hotel room in a feverish passion, the heart wants what the heart wants. And this week, I’ve just wanted The Bachelorette.

As a show, The Bachelor is a really straightforward narrative of patriarchy: there’s a single boring white dude, and 30 women with blonde highlights and unthreatening careers fighting over him. The Bachelorette, however, is more of a mind-fuck. It more or less always brings us the same tired cliches about hetero romance and gender, the same negative stereotypes and narrow views of womanhood as its brother program, but it’s all wrapped up in a kind of faux female empowerment—a crowd of HOT TOPLESS GUYS with SIX-PACKS, OMG, fawning over one lucky single gal in a glorious triumph for feminism and equal opportunity. This is our turn, ladiesssss!

Sluttiness montage via Inquisitr.com

For a brief moment on this past week’s episode though, it felt like it kind of was. There was indeed a tiny glimmer of feminism, in which the show decided to cater to Kaitlyn’s sluttiness. To be perfectly clear, by saying sluttiness I of course am joking about the double standards that the show and our horrid patriarchal culture perpetuate around female sexuality; by Kaitlyn’s sluttiness I do of course mean her Totally Healthy Female Sexuality. The show saw that Kaitlyn was being unapologetically sexual, and they did some helpful rearranging to cater to it. Continue reading

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“I’m Not Part of This Thing”: On Kupah’s Exit & Racism on This Week’s Bachelorette

#WifeMaterial

I had a lot of feelings about this season of The Bachelorette before it even started, and I considered not watching it in protest of the franchise’s BS decision to have TWO BACHELORETTES—but ultimately I decided that if I was boycotting TV shows because of my politics, I would have stopped watching this horrid show a long time ago. It’s not news that the Bachelor franchise as a whole plays on deeply problematic ideas about gender—the fact that this season the men got to choose which woman they thought made better “wife material” (Kaitlyn, obviously—I’ll put a ring on her finger right now.) is not a line in the sand; it is in fact neither here nor there in relation to the show’s decidedly sexist foundation. Yes I have watched this show for the past thirteen (oh my god how can that number be real) miserable seasons. I have wasted so many hours of my life. And yes I shall continue to waste my life this season. If I believed that being a “bad feminist” was a thing, I might feel like this makes me a bad feminist, but I don’t. I think I’m a decent feminist and also a necessarily flawed human that is vast and containing of multitudes. I sometimes make decisions that don’t always exemplify my political beliefs—I shop at chain stores that no doubt use unethical labor practices, I slather my face with night creams in hope of stopping my inevitable female aging, and I watch The Bachelor. And The Bachelorette.

This past week’s episode was really on point in terms of the show’s heinous politics. The Bachelor franchise has a terrible track record in terms of racial diversity (see host Chris Harrison’s gross comments dismissing allegations that the show is racist here). The past few seasons we’ve seen the show make a minimal, face-value effort to address critiques around this by inviting a handful of people of color into the dating pool. Whether these guys and gals get any substantial air time, or make it past the first several episodes, is another story. But we’ve been seeing some more contestants of color on the show, and with this comes more overt, and not so overt, racism. The all-white or mainly white contestant pools of the past allowed for total erasure of race politics as an issue within the whitewashed alternate reality of the show. With more people of color being cast, white contestants’ privilege to never have to think about race is sometimes challenged, and we get to see how the show frames/addresses race (hint—it is not good).
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The Feminist Bachelor Recap: Season Finale + After the Final Rose

This fuckin’ guy.

Oh Bachelor Nation, I do not even know what to say to you. For this week, we may have witnessed the biggest blow to feminism In. Bachelor. History. Like you, I am speechless. I don’t know where to begin, so let’s start at the beginning. We’re back in Arlington, Iowa, with Farmer Chris and his Final Two, Fertility Nurse Whitney (whose name henceforth is synonymous with Patriarchy), and Virgin Who Can’t Drive Becca (who will heretofore represent Feminism). Farmer Chris brings both stellar babes to meet his family this week, and then he must make the Most Difficult Decision of His Life. Continue reading

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