Posted 7:03 AM by Blah blah

Wedding Porn? "The Bachelor"

What do you think of this popular TV show which ends tonight, "The Bachelor"? In this reality show, 25 women compete for the affection of one man who, on paper, looks like he was ordered out of a John F. Kennedy fall fashion catalog.

Heather Havrilesky wrote this Salon.com article that makes a lot of stinging points:
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ABC offers us TV's version of wedding porn, "The Bachelor," in which a dull but ultimately supernice fella navigates his own neuroticism to choose between 25 fluffy females in order to find his wife. It's "Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire" but without the harsh game-show format and the tacky participants. Alex went to Harvard, we're reminded 50 or 60 times per show. Alex is a sweet guy. Alex wants a woman to spend the rest of his life with. Alex has been pre-selected for his ability to live up to the fantasy of kind, pretty, hollowed-out provider.

The real question is, what's his motivation, or theirs? Why do the fluffy girls of "The Bachelor" and the bland heroes of wedding porn long for Egyptian cotton bath towels more than hot sex?...

Not surprisingly, despite the fact that the show focuses on a running competition among the women, Alex seems to struggle the most with whether or not the women actually like him. He can't tell, because they uniformly want him to pick them -- instant, public validation, the engagement fantasy of being "chosen" writ large. These women want to win -- not just the ring and the Harvard guy, but the promise of being publicly redeemed from every rejection they've ever experienced on the road to this moment. While Alex's interest in them comes across as quite sincere -- he's already The bachelor, after all; now he just wants a relationship that's good enough that he won't feel like a jerk for being on the show -- their interest in him is debatable at best, downright dehumanizing at worst....

Alex wants to know who really likes him, apparently so he can consistently choose the women who don't. This isn't incredibly surprising when you consider the overall goal of the show, and of the glossy ring-shopping culture reflected in wedding porn: If your goal is to trap the poor animal at all costs, why wouldn't the animal be more attracted to tourists than to trappers?...

[I like this paragraph the best.]
While in wedding porn the bossy, self-involved girl always finds true love, in reality -- or at least on reality shows -- the truth is a little harder to swallow. With the average age of the bride increasing from 20 in 1964 to 27 according to the latest estimates, women have many more years to escape into the fantasy of being chosen, all the while becoming more neurotic and inflexible in ways that seem to lessen the possibility of fostering the kind of openness that's necessary for falling in love -- falling in love not with a gallant poster boy, but with a real human being. Our uptight, scattered heroine can stomp her feet cutely until someone spineless enough to cater to her every whim wanders up, but in the real world, it takes an ability to drop any preconceptions of "the dream guy" and follow your feelings, not your thoughts, to a person who makes you happy. A lasting relationship isn't indicated merely by the fact that he opens doors and brings home the bacon and accepts an endless stream of demands without complaint. Real love grows from two people accepting each other beyond the confinement of outdated roles and societal notions of what constitutes a desirable mate.

Here's the Rice Bowl Journals discussion I started.

The article's author even writes a blog, rabbit blog!