That is, I was until about two hours ago, when, after listening to a critique of the program on ABC Radio National Life Matters the other day titled Can a Real feminist enjoy The Bachelor, I decided I better have a look at this show if I wanted to get a bead on where popular culture is currently at in the matter of romance, rose petals, and true lurve.
It was approximately one hour and twenty minutes of my life I will never get back.
I would also like to take up with Life Matters what exactly they mean by a “real” feminist, but one thing at a time.
After watching the final episode of Bachelor (I wasn’t going to submit myself to the torment of the previous fifteen) I was left with the kind of feeling I get when I’ve eaten an entire packet of jelly snakes, which, coincidentally, I also did this week. Sickened, guilty, ashamed, and wondering if I put my finger down my throat and barf will I be restored to my un-polluted self?
The Bachelor, whose name I believe is Sam Wood, scared the bejesus out of me at first glance owing to his uncanny physical resemblance to the actor Jamie Dornan, who, as you will all know, played the character Christian Grey in the movie Fifty Shades of Grey.
An aside: When I first heard the title Fifty Shades of Grey I thought it referred to a new L’Oreal hair colour chart. Then I thought it must be about very old ghosts. Then a friend gave me the book and I chucked it in the recycling. Anyhow. Be that as it may.
Jamie Dornan also played a seriously alarming psychopath in The Fall, alarming because of his ability to both conduct an apparently straightforward and loving family life, while transmogrifying into a serial killer at night. This surely must be the heterosexual woman’s worst nightmare, that the man with whom you’ve chosen to spend your life and allowed to give you babies has a side you never see until it’s too late.
In a Freudian chain of association these thoughts provoked by The Bachelor are not entirely non sequiturs, given that two people, brought together in entirely unrealistic circumstances, must decide on the basis of absolutely no knowledge of one another to join lives because, as the bachelor puts it :”I have to follow my heart and know that will lead me where I’m meant to go.”
Cue ten jelly snakes cos references to destiny. Biology is destiny. Damn you, Freud.
It took me a good ten minutes to silence the clamour of cultural references, and take Sam at face value. He seems like an OK guy and has very good teeth. He was also kind to the ladies. He lost credibility for mine when he appeared at the end in a royal blue suit.
Also, I have never seen a woman get so dressed up for a dumping. It was heartbreaking the trouble Lana had gone to, only to be told, you are an incredible woman but not my incredible woman, or some such blather, after which she took herself off and stood under a tree asking not to be filmed, but they filmed her anyway.
Look, this is ghastly. It should be bombed.
The Bachelor’s premise is scarcity: a harem of women competing for one man.
Its message to women is warped. You have no agency, rather a man will choose you or he will reject you. You must make every effort to suss out what it is this man wants from a woman and then you must give it to him, even if it isn’t in your nature. This man’s approval is everything. He has absolute power in the circumstances. You have none.
Helicopter rides are incredible. Flower-strewn rowboats mysteriously anchored in the middle of water-lilies are incredible. Classic cars are incredible. The champagne is incredible. Every woman looks incredible to Sam. This word incredible features more than any other adjective in the script and that is, unwittingly, entirely fitting because the entire stupid moronic concept is totally incredible, and so sickeningly hetero-normative it makes me want to barf up all my jelly snakes.
And I still don’t know what a real feminist is, but people seem to have been arguing about it for years.
No Place For Sheep 
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