Is ‘The Bachelorette’ Bad For Women?

Recently, Jillian Michaels stated that The Real Housewives is bad for women, telling Life & Style, “I hate watching women tear each other apart. Anybody who watches it, shame on you.” Executive Producer Andy Cohen responded, explaining to The Hollywood Reporter, “It’s a show about friendship. It’s a show about being a wife. It’s a show about being a mother. It’s a show about being a sister. And sometimes the experience of being a friend and a mother and a wife and a sister isn’t pleasant and sometimes it’s wonderful.”

The same conversation has popped up time and time again about another popular show with predominantly female viewers, The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. It’s taken different forms, including claims of being mean, sexist, fake, and giving women unrealistic expectations of love. But now that Bachelorette season has officially begun, let’s establish that, no, The Bachelorette is not bad for women.

The Bachelorette is a show about dating and relationships and finding a suitable life partner. And guess what: sometimes the experience of that isn’t pleasant and sometimes it’s wonderful, too. In fact, that description pretty closely describes both the experience of appearing on these shows, as well as watching them from the comfort of your own couch.

I became a member of #BachelorNation just two years ago, at the start of JoJo’s season of The Bachelorette. What I have found to be overwhelming true over the past two years, of JoJo, Rachel, and now Becca’s season of The Bachelorette, and Nick and Arie’s seasons of The Bachelor (we’ll leave Paradise out of this for now), is that my female friendships have only grown stronger. Now, have they also grown cattier? Amy Kaufman, LA Times writer and author of Bachelor Nation: Inside the World of America’s Favorite Guilty Pleasure told The Salt Lake Tribune that could in fact be a side effect of Bachelorette viewing parties. “There’s some weird thing that happens when you’re in a group watching. You just feed off each other. … You just pile on and pile on, and that can be fun in a messed-up way.” I won’t flat-out disagree, but will say the most important part of her observation is not the pile on part, but the group watching.

While The Bachelor, a show where over two dozen women compete for one man’s love, is the much more competitive and bitchy installment of the show (again, leaving Paradise out of this), The Bachelorette, the program where the woman is in charge of her destiny, is still not without its negativity. One episode into this season I immediately became very angry at Becca for getting rid of Chicago Joe on the first night in the mansion. How dare she?! I began to question her judgement and her intelligence and how serious she was about wanting to find love. But that quickly morphed into a new feeling, one where I realized, hey, maybe she didn’t have that vibe with him. We’ve all known plenty of nice, cute men we just weren’t feeling it with either. And then I also realized, hey, he’s available now (Hi Joe!). The cattiness might exist, but it doesn’t always last.

Any woman who has ever swiped just once on Bumble knows the fairytale doesn’t exist anymore, in case it ever did. There’s both something exciting and dreadful about facing a room full of nearly 30 men competing for your love: on one hand, look at all these hunks here to meet me! On the other, well, you gotta do real life swiping and that’s a bit harder face to face. Of course what we see on The Bachelorette is in no way an actual expectation any sane woman has when it comes to finding a romantic partner. To say these shows are skewing what women should be expecting from romance and dating is like saying Jersey Shore is not an accurate depiction of a quiet weekend down at the shore. No duh.

What The Bachelorette does confirm to its viewers is, yes, there are a bunch of loser dudes out there (and sure, The Bachelor isn’t looking for the epitome of class in its female contestants – this is television), but it also highlights that what might look like the right parter for one woman, is not the same for another. That also, some men, no matter how few it may seem, really are decent. And for those women out there in the world searching for love (or looking for a reminder of how good they’ve got it with their current partner), that’s not a terrible lesson to walk away from these episodes with.

Dating sucks. That Becca gets to do it in a shortened amount of time is nice. But that we get something to talk about with our friends, on Twitter, at bridal and baby showers, and on girls trips throughout the summer is the real winner here. Tuning in with a few female friends every Monday night, either in-person or online, is almost like a group therapy session. Each can, and does, share past experiences with losers and nice guys alike, reveal traits they are searching for in future partners, and point out red flags set by contestants, and just how they would react in a similar situation. I’ve learned a lot about my friends’ dos, don’ts, and did its just by discussing this show.

I believe it’s due to this comradery that both The Bachelor and Bachelorette have me rooting for women every season. I mean, I like to believe that I’m rooting for other people to find love as it is. But there’s a sense of relatability and empathy that kicks in while watching these shows, maybe not as loudly as the momentary cattiness, but it’s there. We’re learning the warning signs to look for in our own lives, and feeling bad for the fellow lady’s heart that has been broken because we’ve been there, and continually working on grasping the concept that yes, sometimes a human can fall in love with two people at once!

This is by no means to say that The Bachelorette is a perfect television show. In fact, it was Kaufman’s frank discussion with Amy Schumer around her film I Feel Pretty which brought up the discussion of body image in relation to these shows, probably one of the most valid discussions to have around the people we’re seeing on TV each week.

“Also, The Bachelor gets to you,” she continued. “It gets to me. I’m so fired up watching that show. The girls on there — you can’t have three black people with the same body as the white people and say ‘we [are diverse].’ That show glorifies [a specific body type]. I love that show, and I’ll watch it to my death, but I think it’s really bad for women.”

While this aspect of the show ranges for viewers, from extremely impactful to hardly noticeable, or, in my case, just plain boring, it’s certainly an area with major room for improvement. I like to again remind myself that this is television — it’s not surprising, but it’s surely not realistic. What would it be like if a woman with Ashley Graham’s body and confidence walked into that joint? Now that’s a season I’d be excited about. But until that point, let’s make a pact to simply roll our eyes at the lack of variety in that department and appreciate the diverse body shapes of the women we are, we love, and yes, we gossip with in our own lives.

The comparison has been made time and time again, and excuse the gender generalization, but saying watching The Bachelorette is bad for women is like saying watching sports is bad for men: They’ll drink and gamble and get aggressive and hang out with their bros too often! But also, they’ll find an escape, a way to relax and relate to their friends for an evening. If you like The Bachelorette, watch The Bachelorette. But be warned that it’s not a totally danger-free show: if you choose to follow the contestants on Instagram, they WILL fill up your timeline with pictures of FabFitFun boxes no one needs. And that’s the price you pay for watching others find love on TV.

Where to watch The Bachelorette