Apparently, the 18th installment of The Bachelorette is set to start tomorrow night on ABC, according to Politico’s Joanna Weiss. She argues that despite their “shocking and subversive” reputations, The Bachelorette and its dating show kin “might be the most conservative shows on television.”
“If reality TV reflects actual desires, then these shows are a telling statement about the culture wars — a suggestion that the dream of traditional marriage, the kind that leads to starter homes, little league games, joint IRA accounts and the attendant political priorities, is still very much alive, no matter your political persuasion,” Weiss writes. “In reality TV land, singlehood isn’t a newly desirable state, but rather a purgatory that people will exit as soon as their finances allow, or they meet the right partner, or an army of TV producers steps in to intervene.”
Weiss points to a 2014 Pew poll finding that although a record-high percentage of adults under 30 are unmarried, 66% of those that are unmarried say they want to get married someday. If anything, Weiss claims, even shows as crassly named as FBOY Island manufacture storylines to reinforce these “strikingly conservative” existing social norms: “that monogamous love is far preferable to the unsatisfying treadmill of endless hookups and rotating partners.”
I’ve never watched a single second of any of these shows, so I’ll have to take Weiss’s word on the underlying message of the programming. But I was surprised she never mentioned the glaring gender gap of the genre’s audience — somewhere north of 75% female — or the divergent reasons the two genders give when they explain why they are still single.
For example, that same Pew poll Weiss links to also shows that almost 8 in 10 never-married women (78%) say it’s very important that a prospective spouse have a steady job. Not even half (46%) of never-married men list this as a priority in a spouse.
More recently, a 2019 Pew poll found that although 67% of single men and 61% of single women age 18-39 were looking for a romantic partner, the two groups identified very different reasons they hadn’t found said partner.
The vast majority of women said the leading reason they were still single was that it is “hard to find someone who meets their expectations” — like having a steady job, for example. For men, the most common reason identified for still being single was that it is “hard for them to approach people.” Single men were also twice as likely as single women to say that they felt “no one would be interested in dating them.”
With 2 out of every 3 college degrees going to women, more and more college-educated women are not going to find men “who meet their expectations.” This gender imbalance will, unfortunately, lead to more caddish (even FBOY-like) behavior on the part of those relatively few men who do have college degrees.
Since we have already established that the primarily female audience of these dating shows ultimately do not like such behavior, perhaps they should take a greater interest in making sure young men are raised in the environment they need to become desirable marriage partners.
