Once upon a time, on a Monday night circa last year, my friend and former colleague Anna Breslaw, author of the young adult novel Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here and an ardent feminist, gathered with her “Bachelor watching group” at a friend’s New York apartment. Breslaw is a brilliant writer who has quoted Simone de Beauvoir in The New Inquiry and tweets passionately about street harassment and the Stanford sexual assault case. On this particular evening, however, her cultural consumption consisted of Bachelor du jour Chris Soules, a farmer from Iowa who was vapid even by the show’s dim standards: He repeatedly emphasized his preference of a woman who was open to leaving her job and relocating to his corn farm for the purpose of stay-at-home motherhood. (In other words, total catch.)
When Breslaw’s friend’s roommate—an Ivy League–educated social worker—came home early to find the Bachelor viewing party in her apartment, tipsy and “yelling at the TV,” as Breslaw recalls, “we were immediately self-conscious and made embarrassed jokes about it.” But the roommate didn’t raise an eyebrow. “Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “My group meets on Thursdays.”
The Bachelor/Bachelorette franchise is a consistent ratings winner, and, according to The New York Times, a particular draw for women in households that bring in more than $100,000. It is also reductive, objectifying, and sorely lacking in diversity, not to mention cheesy, staged, and rarely successful at achieving its purported goal of finding everlasting love for its contestants. It is predicated on the ritual of women lining up, county fair cattle–style, to be chosen by a man, largely based on their Barbie faces and bodies. (The Bachelorette, airing now with real-estate developer JoJo Fletcher, flips the script, but still leans heavily on the trope that women are mere husks of themselves until they are engaged.) As far as TV shows go, it’s a feminist nightmare.
And yet, many Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie–reading, #ImWithHer feminists are completely obsessed with it, breaking from successful careers by day for spirited viewing parties and vigorous live tweeting by night. Jennifer Weiner, the New York Times best-selling novelist who has been vocal about the disproportionate praise heaped on male authors compared to their women counterparts, is the high priestess of Bachelor live-tweeters and a devotee since episode one, season one. Journalist Jennifer Mendelsohn, whose USA Today column on last year’s Baltimore riots was held up by Hillary Clinton at a rally, is another superfan. Avowed feminists Amy Schumer, Emma Roberts, and Anna Kendrick are followers. And Shameless star Emmy Rossum—a YouthAIDS ambassador and breast cancer awareness advocate—recently revealed she’s in a Bachelorette fantasy league.
Full disclosure: This feminist has watched most, but not all, seasons, beginning with the 2002 saga of Bachelor Aaron Buerge, a favorite at my sorority house at the University of Virginia, where I was surrounded by some of the smartest feminists I know. They’ve gone on to be lawyers and entrepreneurs and PhDs, and many still watch The Bachelor. One Bachelor fantasy league I know of in Washington, D.C., is cohelmed by an astrophysicist.
Why do feminist Bachelor/Bachelorette devotees love it? For all of the reasons we shouldn’t. Beneath the avalanche of rose petals, many see a bizarro societal case study. “The Bachelor is something that we can sink our teeth into as engaged feminists,” says Emma Gray, the executive women’s editor of the Huffington Post and cohost of the Bachelor/Bachelorette podcast “Here to Make Friends.” “It taps into all of these really base and often regressive ideas our society has about how love and sex and courtship should look. That makes it really ripe territory to analyze from a sociological perspective.”
Every Monday night at 8:00 p.m., Feminist Bachelor/Bachelorette Twitter, a mighty force, tries the show by fire, contributing to the flood of tweets that regularly make it a top trending topic. “Like during Andi Dorfman’s season, when Andi literally TAKES HER LAW SCHOOL DIPLOMA OFF OF HER WALL AND PUTS IT IN A BOX SO SHE CAN START HER ‘JOURNEY’ TO FIND LOVE,” Weiner recalls with characteristic zeal in an email. “I tweeted about sending my daughters out of the room.” Or, when ABC set up what Weiner calls a “two bachelorettes enter, one bachelorette leaves” premiere stunt between Kaitlyn Bristowe and Britt Nilsson, “I could tell my daughters, ‘This is what objectification looks like, where men are allowed to vote on which woman they want, like they’re deciding between McDonald’s and Burger King.’”
Later that season, when the “victor,” Bristowe, was slut-shamed (both on the show and online) for sleeping with her final two suitors, says Weiner, “People on Twitter were breaking down the double standards, and tweeting about how Nick wasn’t being punished for sleeping with her, so why was Kaitlyn being punished for sleeping with him?” (In a hypocritical twist, the Bachelor/Bachelorette tricks out hedonistic “fantasy suites” and encourages sex between contestants, but acts all Pollyanna when they actually do it.) Weiner adds: “It was a way to talk specifically about the way women are treated, and about the persistence of double standards and how the culture needs to change.”
On their podcast, Gray and cohost Claire Fallon have dissected the series’ pitiful lack of diversity: In the two shows’ combined 14 years and 32 seasons, there have been only a handful of non-white contestants, and there has never been a bachelor or bachelorette of color, a disturbing trend currently being sent up on the new season of Lifetime’s UnReal, which features its first-ever African-American bachelor. (The cocreator of that show, Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, is a former Bachelor producer who describes herself as a “dyed-in-the-wool feminist.”) “[The lack of inclusion] is incredibly upsetting,” says Gray. “It’s a thing that we’ve asked the director, Ken [Fuchs], about. It’s something that we’ve asked [host] Chris Harrison about.” She adds, “It really is indicative of just how ingrained racism is in this society. It is everywhere. It is in our frothy, bullshit, TV-watching habits.”
Some of the Bachelor/Bachelorette’s feminist faithful concede that they aren’t always watching through a critical lens, nor do they consider themselves entirely above the tearful trials of the show. “I think a lot of cerebral, New Yorker–reading women are into the Bachelor franchise because it’s a funhouse version of our own dating lives at one time,” Breslaw observes. “We’ve all dated the fratty douche who got too drunk on the first date, the emotionally removed asshole you shouldn’t fall for but you do, the totally-nice-and-cute-so-why-don’t-I-feel-it guy.”
Feminists may claim to hate-watch the franchise, or watch it only ironically, but, Gray says, “inevitably, if you are investing that much time and energy into looking at any sort of cultural product, you’re buying into it to an extent.” She adds, “The Bachelor hits us in that really vulnerable part of ourselves where we all want love and fulfillment.”
By the time a season of The Bachelor or The Bachelorette nears its end, despite the show’s many indefensible failures, even the most feminist of women can find themselves swept up in the impossible romance of it all, heavy-handed as it may be, rooting for the proposal, the ring, the rare happy ending. “I am supposed to be above such flights of fancy, but I am not. I am enamored of fairy tales,” wrote Bad Feminist author Roxane Gay in a powerful New York Times essay about her own Bachelor habit. “The real shame of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette,” Gay said, “is that they know where we are most tender, and they aim right for that place.”
