Bachelor Nation

by Amy Kaufman

  “I was so damaged,” she said. “I couldn’t be near recording devices or talk on the phone for months.”

  So what did she witness that was so traumatizing? Mainly, she said, it was realizing that what was happening on the show was having a real-life impact on the contestants. She wondered whether the participants were aware of what they were signing up for, because “truly, they can’t know what they’re signing up for. You can’t really understand the power of editing, and there are a lot of really smart people making these shows. It’s a chess game you can’t win.”

  During her time on the show, she kept thinking back to her days in college, sitting in feminist seminars that would pose the question: “How much would it cost you to sell your soul?” She’d always thought the answer would be millions of dollars, but at The Bachelor, she realized it “was just a fucking paycheck. After eighteen years of your parents building your morality, the desperation of staying alive sinks in so quickly.”

  Michael Carroll, who became one of Shapiro’s closest friends at the show, said everyone knew how unhappy she was. She was a “smart New York chick” who was constantly complaining: “Why am I doing this? I’m a feminist, and I hate this shit.”

  So why didn’t Carroll have a problem with the job? “I’m from Jacksonville, Florida. I didn’t grow up in a feminist environment,” he said with a shrug. “But Sarah was a Jewish New York girl, who went to a great college and wanted to do things and wanted to make films. And she was a big schlub. Like one of those, like, East Village girls. Dirty T-shirt, hair in a fucking ponytail, hated everything. Jeans showing her fucking butt crack. Fucking dirty tennis shoes. She was always grumpy.”

  There were, of course, moments on The Bachelor that Shapiro enjoyed. She admitted that she wasn’t immune to the princess fantasy the show was selling and even got a thrill out of eyeing the pricey diamond rings that were used during the proposals.

  “Diamonds can hypnotize anyone,” she said. “Sometimes, I’d have to transport them to the show, and I politically don’t believe in diamonds. I think the whole thing is bullshit. I know it’s not right. And I still would get weird around diamonds, trying them on with my dirty, baggy jeans and down jacket. That idea that some girls are pretty, pretty princesses that deserve to be taken care of and rescued and saved and cared for? That sets us up for a lot of heartbreak.”

  To Shapiro’s mind, so much of the appeal of The Bachelor is related to its sentimentality—that the show creates a world where everyone knows what their role is. The guy is chivalrous and the girl is a princess. “To be a perfect contestant, you should be a lawyer that gives really awesome blow jobs and doesn’t really care about being a lawyer,” she said with a laugh. “Like, ‘I just passed the bar for fun!’ You’re really professionally successful, demure, and submissive— sexy, but not slutty.”

  And yet with UnREAL, Shapiro’s intention wasn’t to pass judgment on fans of the franchise. “Our aim was to have compassion for why we fall into these fantasies,” she explained. “I’m not above it. I love being wooed, and I totally want someone to get me a helicopter ride. Who doesn’t?”

  It wasn’t long before those in Bachelor Nation started responding to the show. While many former contestants were quick to say they related to UnREAL—and recognized numerous producing tactics portrayed on it—others were displeased with the depiction. Chris Harrison, for one, was decidedly not a fan, saying the main difference between the fictional show and the reality show was that “people watch The Bachelor.” Oooh! Sick ratings burn!

  “It’s complete fiction,” he went on to say in an interview with Variety. “As much as they would love to jump on our coattails—they were begging for us to talk about it and for people to write about it—at the end of the day, no one is watching. I mean, absolutely nobody is watching that show. Why? It is terrible. It is really terrible.”

  Lifetime will air the third season of UnREAL in 2018, so obviously someone is watching. In any event, it certainly rattled plenty of people affiliated with the show—even Scott Jeffress, who worked with Shapiro during the early days of The Bachelor.

  “It’s a little frustrating for me. They’re kind of lifting the skirt and showing behind the scenes,” Jeffress said. “I don’t have any animosity about it, but it’s a shame for our industry that this has to happen—that we have to tell those tales. . . . It bothers me a little bit that it kind of softens what the viewer is seeing. It was inevitable it was gonna happen. And God bless [Shapiro] that she’s the one that did it. She’ll make the money for it. But it kind of blows the cover on the whole Bachelor thing.”

  Yes, UnREAL did raise questions about the way in which reality producers manipulate contestants—and just how ethical it may or may not be to do so. But I think it also started to force fans to examine the way we consume the show. Right around the time the program began airing, I started noticing a glut of similarly themed essays popping up on female-centric publications:

  Elle: “9 Reasons Strong, Intelligent, Feminist Women Watch The Bachelor(ette)”

  HuffPost: “The Bachelor: Why Smart Women Watch (and Love) It”

  The Washington Post: “10 Times The Bachelor Shows Made Feminists Proud”

  The Guardian: “Does Bingeing on The Bachelor Make Me a Bad Feminist?”

  Vogue: “Why Feminists Are Unabashedly Obsessed with The Bachelor”

  This was obviously a topic female viewers were struggling with. Something about loving The Bachelor made many women feel ashamed—like they were, in some way, betraying their gender. So I returned to feminist scholar Andi Zeisler to get her thoughts on the flood of think pieces exploring the connection between the show and feminism.

  “It almost seems to be less about The Bachelor and more about this idea in the past few years that if you identify as a feminist, you have to somehow justify everything that you consume,” Zeisler theorized. “Every piece of pop culture or media, you have to kind of justify watching it as a feminist act, which I find a little bit ass-backward. But people really feel like their consumption patterns have to be explained as part of a larger identity.”

  After reading some of the essays just mentioned, Zeisler told me she felt like women were “twisting themselves into pretzels” to explain why watching the show was actually a feminist act. To her mind, none of the arguments were convincing—and that’s OK.

  “Establishing feminism as a purity test is just a losing proposition, because we do things all the time in our daily lives that contradict a feminist world view,” she said. “It could be as simple as being married or shopping at Target. There’s kind of no way to win once you start thinking about it like that. If you’re actively working toward feminism, watching The Bachelor or shopping at Target or wearing leather shoes or whatever—that’s not going to cancel out that part of your life.”

  When she starts seeing men “writing tortured essays about how watching Sunday Night Football is really shaking their faith in themselves as left-leaning progressives”—that’s when, she joked, she’ll give these feminist arguments more credence.

  But Susan Douglas, the UMichigan communications professor who authored Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message That Feminism’s Work Is Done, told me she understood why so many women were troubled by their fandom. Young women in the twenty-first century who are college educated and have managerial positions—in other words, the main Bachelor demographic—have been told for years they can do anything they want. And yet these same women still face pressure to be thin, beautiful, and stylish.

  “They are pinioned between wanting the fruits of feminism without sacrificing the femininity that’s going to help them advance, not just in relationships, but at work,” Douglas said. “So on the one hand, you’re like, ‘Oh my God, this is the dumbest show ever. The dates are stupid. It is reinforcing the most retrograde standards around female beauty and performance.’ In the other ear, it is a tale of courtship and roman
ce in this age of ‘How do you even meet men?’”

  The show, she argued, also appeals to women on a more basic level. Let’s say you’re watching the nightly news. Will Donald Trump’s economic policy really produce deficits? Who knows? Here, on The Bachelor, you can be a completely authoritative judge about which kinds of women are performing a kind of womanhood you, as a woman, admire—and that you think men might admire.

  “Sometimes, The Bachelor does show that a man and woman with their own careers can fall in love, and she doesn’t have to give up the world for him, and what’s so bad about that?” Douglas said. “On the other hand, it’s historically been very white. It’s very heteronormative. It’s very, very middle class. And all of the women have to be a size zero, look great in a bikini, and be very conventionally pretty. So there are very narrow corporate standards of thinness and beauty—stereotypes of female behavior—that the show incessantly reinforces.”

  That, of course, is what is troubling to feminists about watching The Bachelor. But like Zeisler, Douglas agrees that just because you watch the show, it doesn’t mean, for example, that you wouldn’t support equal pay for women, go to bat for Planned Parenthood, or condemn sexual harassment.

  The fact that these discussions are happening within Bachelor Nation is a relatively new phenomenon, fueled largely by fan engagement on social media. According to Twitter, The Bachelor was one of the top five most-tweeted-about reality shows on TV in the United States between 2015 and July 2017. On average, the tech company said, The Bachelor gets roughly 260,000 tweets per episode; The Bachelorette generates about 180,000.

  There are also about a dozen prominent podcasts about the franchise, where fans not only recap weekly episodes but dive into the social dynamics at play on the program. The Ringer’s Juliet Litman hosts Bachelorette Party, Bustle has Will You Accept This Podcast?, and HuffPost is behind Here to Make Friends. In the past year, even Bach alums have gotten in on the podcast game, with Kaitlyn Bristowe, Ben Higgins, Ashley Iaconetti, Becca Tilley, Dean Unglert, and Olivia Caridi all offering up their insights on the franchise.

  “I think pop culture has really started to engage with the show because it has a universally appealing premise,” said Emma Gray, who co-hosts Here to Make Friends with her HuffPost colleague Claire Fallon. “It taps into these really basic notions of love and weirdness around sex and dating and fulfillment. And then Twitter popped up at the right time, making it so everyone wanted to watch live and go on Twitter and make fun of it so they could be in on the conversation in real time. They’ve created this loop where people feel like they need to be a part of this community online in order to watch it.”

  Young women are the primary demographic for Gray’s show, which goes up once a week while The Bachelor is on the air. Roughly 50,000 listeners tune in to each podcast, she said.

  Even Reality Steve has a Bachelor podcast now. Reality Steve—whose real name, sadly, is not Reality Steve—is Steve Carbone, a forty-two-year-old blogger who lives in Dallas, Texas. And to ABC’s dismay, his moniker has become synonymous with the Bachelor franchise.

  For the better part of a decade, Carbone has made a living reporting spoilers about The Bachelor. Which wasn’t his intention when he started recapping television shows in 2003, sharing his thoughts on Joe Millionaire with a list of email subscribers. When that show came to a close, his followers asked if he had plans to recap any other shows—and the next dating program on the television schedule was The Bachelorette. At the time, writing was just Carbone’s hobby. He did it for fun and was hopeful that someday, a professional TV site might hire him to do some freelance work.

  But in 2009, everything changed. A tipster contacted him with this note: “Hey. I know you write about the show and you’ve got a following. Well, I’ve found something out about the ending of this season of The Bachelor.” The season currently on the air was Jason Mesnick’s—and the ending of that season went down in the Bach history books when Mesnick, infamously, spurned fiancée Melissa Rycroft on the “After the Final Rose” special and told her he was still in love with his runner-up, Molly Malaney.

  Carbone’s source had the dirt before the special aired, and “based on who it was and what they knew, I was like, ‘OK, this is legit,’” the blogger recalled. So he ran with it, publishing the information on his site roughly two weeks before the finale aired.

  There were doubters, of course, but when the prediction turned out to be true, Carbone instantly became the Bachelor authority. Suddenly, anonymous sources started turning up left and right, willing to give him dirt on the show.

  Carbone said his sources vary every season, and when one begins anew, he has no idea where his information will be coming from. By now, though, he said he’s confident good scoops will come his way—“it’s just a matter of how detailed, and when.”

  “It’s become easier now, because of the popularity of the site,” Carbone explained. “I don’t need to solicit anything anymore.”

  So how does he tell good tips from the bad ones? “The best example I can give,” he said, “is if I get an email that’s one sentence long, misspelled, and has no punctuation, saying, ‘I no who wins.’ It’s like, ‘OK, but how do you know?’ When they tell me how they know, that’s when I know if it’s legit or not.”

  If someone says they’re a friend or a cousin of the contestant in question, Carbone’s ears perk up—people on the show often spill to those around them, even though they’re not supposed to. Once he has a tip, he’ll follow up by doing some good old-fashioned social-media stalking—tracking down biographical details, double checking locations, and digging up photos to piece everything together.

  The show has also gotten more lax about filming in public. Early dates often take place in very visible settings, and oftentimes, fans are invited to witness the dates. They’re not supposed to say what they see during filming, but they do—and within hours, Carbone’s inbox is flooded with pictures, tweets, and Instagram postings. Sometimes, all he has to do is a quick search of the word “bachelor” or “bachelorette” on Instagram, and information he wasn’t expecting will pop up. Even if it’s stuff from early on in the season, it helps Carbone to narrow down the field.

  And what, exactly, are these anonymous sources getting out of sharing information with Carbone? Zip. Nada. Zilch. “I think people just like feeling they’re part of it,” Carbone surmised.

  He certainly can’t pay his sources—he tried that once and almost got into some serious legal trouble. During Ben Flajnik’s time as the Bachelor, Carbone attempted to contact three women who had competed on the 2012 season, searching for information about Flajnik’s final pick. Two of the women responded but told Carbone they couldn’t help him for fear they’d get in trouble if they did. That’s when he offered to pay the ladies in exchange for information, but they both declined.

  Just a few weeks later, Carbone received an email from a lawyer at Warner Bros., alerting him to the fact that the company was aware of his exchanges with the female contestants. It wasn’t long before he was served with a lawsuit on his doorstep.

  “ABC had their smoking gun of ‘Oh shit, this guy is now offering our contestants money and sooner or later, someone’s going to take it because we don’t pay them,’” Carbone said. “If they can make money on the side by doing this, they’re going to take it. So that’s probably why they didn’t want me doing that anymore, is my guess.”

  Eventually, Carbone reached a settlement with the show, the gist of which reads, “Stay away from our contestants,” he said. Essentially, he’s chilled out on soliciting information, but no one can stop him from publishing information that comes to him.

  While he had to pay his own legal fees, he was not required to pay anything to anyone involved with the show, Carbone said. To this day, he has never had any interaction with Mike Fleiss or any of the producers—only the legal team at Warner Bros.

  “It was a littl
e bit empowering to know that they were really bothered by me,” he said, a hint of pride in his voice. “But I’ve never done the spoilers so people won’t watch. I’ve done them so they’ll watch the show differently. You can see storylines; you can see editing.”

  Indeed, Carbone’s spoilers don’t seem to have had any major impact on the show’s ratings. Since the couple at the end almost always breaks up anyway, knowing who “ends up together” isn’t that big of a deal.

  In the meantime, Carbone is able to make a living off his site. He started putting advertisements up in 2010, and he was able to make the blog his full-time job by August 2011. Roughly 65 percent of his traffic comes from mobile devices, which isn’t great, since desktop ads are more lucrative than mobile ones. Still, his traffic is strong. When any one of the Bachelor shows is on, he said he gets between 6 to 8 million page views a month. Off-season, that number drops precipitously to around 2 million per month.

  It might seem like easy work, he said, but it’s all-consuming. “I’m almost like a doctor in that I’m constantly on-call,” he said. “At any point during the day, I can get an email, a text, a direct message, an Instagram message, a Snapchat message—something that says, ‘Hey, here’s what I’ve heard, you might want to look into this.’ My phone is my job.”

  With outsiders trying to capitalize on the lucrative Bachelor market, it only makes sense that Warner Bros.—which produces the show—would do the same. In 2016, the company announced its consumer products line would start releasing the Bachelor Wines: “a collection of wines inspired by the award-winning television series,” according to a press release. The line offers three varietals. There’s the Fantasy Suite, a Cabernet Sauvignon; the One on One, a Chardonnay; and the Final Rosé, a Zinfandel and Petite Sirah blend. The wines are manufactured by winemakers in California’s Central Coast and Central Valley and retail for $16.96 a bottle.