In Kaitlyn Bristowe’s season of The Bachelorette, the Bachelor franchise had seemingly all but revamped its image, giving way to a more raw and unfiltered Bacholorette. As the season progressed, however, Bristowe’s raw energy led her to making decisions in her personal life that seemed to rub the general public the wrong way.
Her choice to spend the night with one of the men on her season sparked a national conversation that centered around whether or not Bristowe was “ladylike” enough to fulfill the role of the bachelorette. As I watched the season, I never once considered Bristowe “unladylike,” because I never once considered that choosing to spend a night with a man that you share strong feelings for “unladylike.”
Naturally, the number of negative responses set me off. How dare these people judge her for her personal choices even if she had some sort of celebrity status? What was even more infuriating about the responses was that I’d never once seen this level of scrutiny being thrown at the Bachelors of the previous seasons.
As this season approached and season eight fan-favorite Arie Luyendyk Jr. was named the newest bachelor, my hopes weren’t exactly high considering the franchises’ reputation of painting the men as good-doers and the women as power hungry, sex-craved bimbos. We are a few weeks in now, and with every passing episode in which Luyendyk is referred to as the “kissing bandit,” I can’t help but roll my eyes at the number of outrageous double standards that the franchise so irritatingly employs.
It seems a bit ironic that a show watched primarily by women is so wildly sexist. What’s even more ironic about the show's demographic being made up primarily of women is that these are the same people who take to the Internet to scrutinize the bachelorettes and praise the bachelors. I’d like to believe that girl power and sisterhood is stronger than the fantasy of dating some guy in his 30’s who would really be considered average if he weren’t wearing a free Armani suit so generously gifted to him by producers paid to make him look like a ten, but apparently our society seems to enjoy letting me down time and time again.
Though the Bachelor franchise is not an entirely direct reflection of society as a whole, it is in fact a reflection of how women are supposed to remain the purest of virgins who do not kiss boys, let alone sleep with them, while boys are allowed to just “be boys” without fear of being shamed for their choices. Every vanilla bachelor who has so graciously appeared on the nation’s primetime television screens is given free reign to “test the waters” with every woman that waltzes into the mansion rose ceremony after ceremony, but when a single woman assumes the role of the bachelorette and even remotely acts in a promiscuous manner, she is instantly labeled.
Why is this? Why do we view the two genders differently? We label a woman as a slut and a man as a “kissing bandit.” Why not level the playing field and consider the two equal? If we are all going to crowd around the television every Monday night and pick apart every little thing that the Bachelorette chooses to do, from a kiss too many or a sleepover too early, shouldn’t we be doing the same to the men? Shouldn’t we be holding the men accountable as we do the women?
Why is the Bachelor franchise so telling of our societal faults? In my opinion that is nothing to be proud of. A television show about finding your soulmate with an, uh, less than perfect track record, is reflecting some of the ugliest parts of our society, one of the most prominent being the sexist double standards.
How do we mend this? Well, we could stop watching the show all together and stop giving the franchise power, but if we’re being honest, that will never happen. Perhaps we stop expecting these women to be our definition of “perfect” and start viewing them as every day people who are capable of making their own decisions in their romantic life. We should stop expecting so little of men and so much of women and start trying to reform the way we view promiscuity and sexism.
