In Which The Bachelor Is A Sight For Sore Eyes

Love Fool

by ALICE BOLIN

The contestants on this season of The Bachelor would like to emphasize that they’re not used to being around this many women. “I’ve always had more boy friends,” says one bachelorette in an interview. “I’m not a girl, if that makes any sense,” says another to the current Bachelor, Ben Flajnik. “I appreciate that,” he says.

We recognize this as the female misogynist’s standard line. They complain of “drama,” of women being cruel and catty, when of course they are the ones who have abandoned the communal duty of women to be kind to one another. Reality television is rife with these self-hating women — since the goal is often to portray them as petty and irrational, it helps to cast those who already see their fellow women that way.

This is part of what sometimes makes The Bachelor such a sorry display. This season the contestants target one woman, Blakeley Shea, 34, as being a slut — even though she has done nothing more than kiss Ben, who makes out with nearly all of them every episode. They make fun of her large breasts and her job as a cocktail waitress. “She’s the kind of girl your boyfriend cheats on you with,” says one contestant. When Blakeley, a former college softball player, excels in the latest episode’s baseball game, one of them says, “Who knew strippers could play baseball?” This is the first problem. These women have no respect for women.

But of course, the contestants tearing each other apart is only one attraction in the circus that is The Bachelor, in which women make lovesick idiots of themselves for our entertainment. The first episode features a parade of gimmicks, as the twenty-five contestants try to gain the attention of the singularly not-all-that Ben Flajnik, 28, who is like a goofier-looking Josh Groban with Paul Rudd’s voice.

One woman rides in on a horse. One comes wearing a massive hat, another a beauty queen’s sash. One contestant actually brings her grandmother, and Ben worries he’ll have to make out with her too. Emily O'Brien, 27, a PhD student in epidemiology, writes Ben an amazing rap — "Love is like disease, always spreading," she flows. "You can get it from a friend, you can get it at a wedding." One contestant whose name is Amber Bacon makes Ben lick her hand. "Did you know that was actually Canadian bacon?” she says.

Thus begins the season-long spectacle of indignities the women endure for the chance to date Ben, apparently the last man on earth. Ben takes upwards of twelve of them at a time on absurd "group dates," like downhill skiing in bikinis through the streets of San Francisco — because he’s looking for someone who’s up for anything, obviously. The contestants are made to perform a play written by children who may actually have promising futures in the entertainment biz. “Do a sexy dance!” they bark at the women during their "auditions." "Run in slow motion!"

It’s not only that the dates are ludicrous; it’s the glow of positivity all the traumatizing activities on the show are washed in. On a one-on-one date, Ben and a woman propel into a deep ravine. "Relationships are all about trust," says Ben; "I'm 'falling' for Ben," says the obviously terrified woman. Later she says it was the best day of her life. Most harrowing, though, is when Ben makes Emily the epidemiologist climb to the top of the Golden Gate Bridge. "I'd rather do anything than climb up a bridge," Emily says before the date. After having a panic attack while teetering on a cable several hundred feet above the ocean, she is reflective. "A bridge takes two things that are separate and brings them together," she says. "And here Ben and I are, two different people from two different places, different backgrounds, and we’re coming together. On this bridge.”

The contestants have to constantly chatter about how lucky they are, how perfect Ben is, and how magical the experience on The Bachelor is. It’s necessary for addressing the show’s major problem: its desperate need for filler. The episodes contain not even close to the action needed to accommodate their two-hour timeslot — instead they rely on several redundant "Coming up on…" preview segments, the rose ceremonies that drag on and on, and useless host Chris Harrison who appears at the beginning and ending of every episode to reiterate the format of the show. They also linger for endless uncomfortable minutes on the sobbing faces of the rejected contestants who hiccup and wipe snot from their noses, wondering aloud what they did wrong, as their cycle of humiliation is complete.

But the women’s effusions don’t just help to fill out the eighty-five-minute episodes; it goes deeper than that. "I think Ben and I have a really special connection," the contestants all gush, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they are filler. It is clear from the very beginning that a majority of them have zero chance of winning Ben’s heart — they must appear so invested in him in order to rescue the show from pointlessness. In fact, nine minutes into the first episode, when a woman appears and says, "Hi, I’m Courtney, and I’ve been modeling for the past ten years," it is clear the way the season will end.

"Courtney is like a statue made of marble,” Emily says. “It’s really beautiful, but it’s cold and hard on the inside." Courtney Robertson, 28, is this season’s frontrunner and its villain, which makes for a compelling combination. She is weird and easy to hate, scrunching her mouth, sipping her signature glass of read wine, and borrowing Charlie Sheen’s catchphrase "Winning!" to sinister effect. She is also the season’s most gifted shit talker. "I hope I’m a sight for sore eyes. Because after the date with Elyse his eyes are probably pretty sore,” she says in a creepy deadpan. The other frontrunner is Kacie Boguskie, 24, a sweet baton twirler from Tennessee. She and Courtney are predictably contrasting female archetypes — fawning and innocent versus beautiful and manipulative, Snow White versus the evil queen.

These two are bound to be the last women standing. Ben was dumped by Ashley Hebert on the last season of The Bachelorette after proposing to her, and there has been some pretty clear foreshadowing that he could walk away empty handed again. He will choose the evil Courtney over Kacie B. in the finale, and Courtney will refuse his proposal; Kacie B. has a lock on being the focus of the show's sister series The Bachelorette. Make no mistake: only the promise of this sad end, not some desire to take part in Ben’s “journey,” will keep us watching.

Of all The Bachelor’s offenses, I think the worst is its self-seriousness. The greatest sin in the world of she show is to be guarded — Ben talks constantly about being "open" and "available," always asks the women about their past romantic lives and rewards the ones who seem to reveal the most. What’s cruel about this is that it is a good idea to take your guard down when looking for love in the real world, but it is almost certainly a recipe for embarrassment and heartbreak on The Bachelor, where there is such a small chance of finding lasting romance, and such a large chance of looking really stupid.

At least Flavor of Love and the show’s other trashy cable cousins didn’t act as if they were helping their contestants to do anything other than be on TV; The Bachelor actually portrays itself as a beneficial, therapeutic, or even spiritual experience, which makes it the most cynical of them all. Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields once said that love songs were "very far away from anything to do with love," and that goes double for love TV shows. The Bachelor was never about love — it was created with the knowledge that heartbreak is hypnotic.

Alice Bolin is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Missoula. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about Agnes Varda.

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