You've got to work hard to find love. On The Bachelor, women intern for a husband
|
Version 0 of 1. It’s not difficult to guess at a feminist’s instinctive reaction to a show like The Bachelor: the program resembles a postcard from some sort of dystopia. In the show’s bizarro world, the norms of romance are retained, but it’s also standard to share your new partner with a dozen other women with whom you’re in furious competition. Less overtly, the show resembles a workplace, albeit an odd one. A series of The Bachelor is effectively an interminably long job interview for the rarely-advertised position of Beloved, or perhaps a portrait of a dysfunctional organisation with an unusually high rate of redundancy. Once you see the program through that lens, particular features stand out, such as its earnest quasi-management-speak (“I need to touch base with him.” “I really want to move forward.” The contestants talks about “taking the initiative” and being on a “journey”.) and the public performance reviews at which applicants who are acquitting themselves well receive a rose and the unsuccessful are “let go”. Participation in such shows is in some ways analogous to that ubiquitous feature of modern life: an internship. Contestants cannot undertake other paid work while living in the mansion, and none of them are getting rich from the experience (indeed, reality television is relatively cheap to produce, in part because there’s no need to pay actors). Instead, as in many bullshit jobs, the major currency is hope of future success. The contestants’ labours are intangible, of course: they’re not producing goods, providing a service or even showcasing any particular skills. Instead, they’re marketing themselves in the hope of recognition (individual dates, one-on-one attention) and a big promotion (wife). It’s a peculiar occupation, with the individual effectively becoming the product, but maybe not a million miles from the experience of countless workers anxiously trying to impress their bosses and climbing a seemingly endless ladder. In a recent post at The Baffler, MB Goodrich wrote that ours is the age of the permanent applicant: workers “can never stop selling themselves”. This quest, which requires constant competition, renders solidarity virtually impossible: instead there are forced smiles and insincere hugs at the successes of others. These elements of many modern workplaces – insecurity, uncertainty, individualism – are echoed in much reality television. Contestants on The Bachelor intone repeatedly that they are looking for love, a phrase which evokes a certain pathos as well as inviting incredulity (is a manipulative exercise in extracting ratings from social awkwardness really the place to go searching for a life partner?). There are dream jobs as well as dream husbands, and this statement of longing also echoes something else: the words many of us use to describe our quest for that one job that will pay our bills but also make us feel fulfilled. In an article on the almost vanished goal of the four-hour workday in the United States, Nathan Schneider observed: “Hardly anyone talks about expecting or even deserving shorter workdays anymore; the best we can hope for is the perfect job, one that also happens to be our passion”. Work and love are old bedfellows. In her book Unspeakable Things (which I’ve reviewed elsewhere), Laurie Penny made the venerable feminist argument that “love can also be work”, referring to childcare, housework and emotional labour, and also noted that in the realm of Work with a capital W, you don’t merely need to do a job, but “to smile while you’re doing it”. Penny argued, more contentiously, that: Romantic love has become just like work under capitalism: it is at once all-consuming and precarious. You are expected to pour the whole of your energy, all of your passion, time and enthusiasm into one endeavour, even though you know that it could end at any time if the magic disappears, or the economy tanks. Penny’s focus was on reality, and not on the television shows that bear its name, but her words could easily describe a weekly parade of eternally smiling women, pouring their efforts and energy into a game in which the numbers are decidedly not on their side and the power balance tilts away from them. None of this is to say that there is anything inherently wrong with watching the show – whatever gets you through the night. It’s odd, though, that the television we watch to unwind after work simply presents us with more of the same in a shinier wrapping. In the end, the strangest thing about The Bachelor is that it is so familiar. |