Reality television classic The Bachelor was supposed to have reached its woke redemption with its first black leading man, Matt James. Instead, by the end of his season, the show is in utter shambles. James publicly dumped the woman he claimed to have fallen for, Rachael Kirkconnell, because she attended an antebellum-themed party in college, and host Chris Harrison has been dumped by the show after nearly 20 years of loyal service for claiming that Kirkconnell deserved some “grace” for her past mistakes.
But deeming The Bachelor problematic for insufficient wokeness feels like lambasting an oil company for not having enough women in its C-suite or Harvard for not having enough black billionaires on its board. If we’re being honest, the show is degrading, sexist, and every other -ist Hollywood has pretended to care about for years — and that’s by design.
Of the 25 men to have turned their personal lives into national television as the leads of The Bachelor, just one, Sean Lowe, has married the winner of his reality television season. Lowe was the rare, publicly Christian Bachelor star to profess that he would wait until marriage to take his winner to the “Fantasy Suite,” as the show euphemistically calls it.
At the time of Lowe’s season, candidates of color were rare, and the biracial Catherine feared that he wouldn’t be a fan. Well, the two found love, and Catherine found Christ. The two, married for nearly a decade now, have three children and the sort of picturesque, drama-free lives girls tuning into The Bachelor could only dream of.
The rest of the stars get rich hawking products on Instagram and become C-list guests on ABC’s other glitzy reality shows.
In a former lifetime, the will-they-or-won’t-they drama and the catfights among models and would-be-models were simply good, lighthearted fun. But in our era of stupid seriousness, it cannot escape the fact that its charade of racial hand-wringing is simply covering for its inherently depraved structure.
Consider: Twenty-five women barely above college age are supposed to fawn all over a man they’ve never met. Even more absurd, they’re supposed to fall in love while being surveilled by a reality television crew.
It’s a show about sex that pretends to be a show about love. And suddenly, we’re learning this might not be wholesome fun?
