By: Valerie Tonn
The Bachelor has been a franchise that started in 2002 and continued on for 27 season, with its upcoming 28th season taking place in Jan. 2024 (Brockington,2023). The show has even resulted in popular spinoffs like The Bachelorette, Bachelor in Paradise, and more recently, The Golden Bachelor (Brockington,2023). The premise of The Bachelor, is that a group of single women compete to gain a ring from a desirable eligible bachelor (Lind, 2023). Is the Bachelor, problematic to reaffirming ideologies towards women (Lind, 2023)?
The Cinderella myth is a prominent feature in The Bachelor series, where it is emphasized that women must be beautiful and compete with evil other women in order to secure a man (Lind, 2023). The Bachelor invites 25 to 30 women onto the show that all compete for the attention of one single man, while engaging in arguments and drinking alcohol frequently (Lind, 2023). Women are pitted against eachother within the series, with “Tell All” reunions often highlighting the tense behavior between the women on the show (Lind, 2023).
The show also highlights the fairytale aspects by women describing the experience like a fairytale, where they joined the show to meet the prince of their dreams (Lind, 2023). The women are seen making grand entrances, upon their arrival to the show, with one even dressing up as cinderella, alluding to scenery and dialogue within the story upon talking to the bachelor and even arriving in a horse and carriage (Ivie, 2019).
The Bachelor succeeds as a franchise because it builds off feelings rather than content that is cognitive (Lind, 2023). Regardless its promotion of women needing a man and beauty to be complete regardless of any personal emotional, professional and political triumphs is harmful (Lind, 2023). This forces women to not see their own sucess as completing to their journey and dims their light on their success (Lind, 2023). Additionally, when pairing the expectation that women should be sisters unless its regarding a man, where they should be catty, competitive and sometimes cunning in order to achieve femininity is harmful (Lind, 2023).
References:
Brockington, A. (2023, August 22). Which couples from “the bachelor” and “the
bachelorette” are still together?20. TODAY.com.
https://www.today.com/popculture/tv/bachelor-bachelorette-couples-still-together-now-
rcna40091
Ivie, D. (2019, January 9). The 10 most ludicrous arrivals in bachelor history. Vulture.
https://www.vulture.com/2019/01/the-bachelor-weirdest-arrivals-stunts.html
Lind, R. A. (2023). In Race/gender/class/media: Considering diversity across audiences,
content, and producers (5th ed., pp. 1–2). essay, Routledge. Retrieved 2023,.
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