Living and working in Penrith gives me one advantage over my fiancé, who travels into the city to work each day.
You see, most nights I get home before her – which means I also get to turn the TV on first.
Striking the first blow is crucial in the nightly battle for the remote control.
Last Thursday night, I arrived home late to find that she’d won said battle, and I found myself watching ‘The Bachelor’.
Reality television and I aren’t the best of friends, as I think most shows in the over-done genre are the furthest thing you could find from how things play out in the real world.
I would rather slide naked down a hill of razor blades before putting myself through ‘Geordie Shore’, ‘Dance Moms’ or whatever the latest cooking show is.
What is duck parfait anyway?
To each their own, however.
After all, Stacey doesn’t quite accept that watching ‘NRL 360’, ‘Sterlo’, ‘Monday Night with Matty Johns’, ‘The Footy Show’ and ‘The Back Page’ are weekly requirements.
The thing that strikes me about ‘The Bachelor’, however, is how it remains so successful with women when it is clearly the most offensive, sexist and anti-feminist show on television.
We live in a society that is so desperate to be offended at everything and anything, and yet ‘The Bachelor’ seems to survive unscathed.
Here is a show that parades women around as if they’re pieces of meat, all waiting for one bloke to pick them to be his for all-time.
A show that seems to define a woman’s success by her relationship status, and failure by the inability to convince one bloke that she’s the best of the bunch.
A show that portrays romance and love as an orchestrated parade, where the man holds the power.
A show that just presumes that all of the women who have entered want to spend the rest of their lives with this individual; as if all of their tastes are perfectly the same.
I was finally willing to join the world of faux outrage, but despite an extensive search, I couldn’t seem to find any!
First I tried Collective Shout, a “grassroots campaigning movement against the objectification of women and sexualisation of girls in media, advertising and popular culture”.
These are the folks that recently succeeded in having Zoo Weekly taken off the shelves of Coles because they think it normalises the abuse, sexualisation, and objectification of women.
Nothing on their website about ‘The Bachelor’, even though one could argue it does a similar thing when it comes to objectifying women.
And I can assure you ‘The Bachelor’ has a much bigger audience than Zoo Weekly.
Anyway, never fear, I headed over to that bastion of faux outrage, the website Mamamia. Surely I’d find some support there.
No luck there either. In fact, quite the opposite.
Mamamia seems to be quite big fans of ‘The Bachelor’, running a regular recap about the program that, while taking the p***, certainly doesn’t seem all that concerned about what’s being portrayed on the show.
I am outraged about the lack of outrage.
If you haven’t been able to tell already, I’m being somewhat facetious. I don’t really care if people watch ‘The Bachelor’ and Channel 10 would be thrilled that almost a million people are tuning in each night.
My point, though, is how easily those who are so often offended by the most ridiculous of things are quite happy to sit and indulge in a show that objectifies women.
Maybe, just maybe, we can all agree that it’s about personal choice. Watch what you want, read what you want. Just be smart enough to figure out what’s real and what isn’t.
Originally published in The Western Weekender