Page 137 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

11 | Dat ng Shows

camera’s “eyes” are gendered as heterosexual male, with the woman perform-
ing for the camera; the concern is that such shows normalize the act of turning
women into sexual objects perpetually on show, and that such normalization
will also encourage women to look at themselves as might a (horny) man, and
hence both to welcome and solicit the male sexual gaze at all moments. The
shows invite audiences to criticize the harem of female suitors as unworthy, de-
termining who will be unlikely to garner the man’s favor, and so forth, hence
reducing a woman’s value to her “usefulness” to men.
Some feminist critics also detect a worrying misogynistic vein to some dating
shows, given that they often encourage viewers to enjoy the site of women de-
feated. Average Joe, for instance, promised a bachelorette a house full of eligible
suitors and then delivered a bus full of “geeks,” and overweight or otherwise con-
ventionally unattractive men. The camera then relished in her horror as one by
one the men stepped off the bus, and much of the show continually berated her
for being so superficial—even as it never problematized its own choice of a con-
ventionally attractive woman as the ideal date. Joe Millionaire deceptively told
its female suitors that the bachelor was a millionaire, and yet audience members
knew the truth all along, and hence were invited to enjoy the spectacle of “gold-
diggers” being belittled and punished for their greed—even when women are
positively encouraged to seek men for such reasons in many other dating shows
and products of mass culture.

the raCial PolitiCs oF dating shows

Dating shows also offer messages about interracial dating, and about race and beauty. The
Bachelor, for instance, is particularly fond of the stereotypical beauty pageant blonde, rarely
adding more than one or two obligatory minority woman, and to date no minority bach-
elors. The number of nonwhite suitors on dating shows only tends to go up when the bach-
elor/ette is nonwhite. Thus, when the supposed paragons of beauty and attractiveness tend
overwhelmingly to be white, or else a special exception to the bachelor/ette’s racial back-
ground (as though competition now occurs in a minor league), the racial politics of beauty
are pronounced on dating shows.
Enter Tiffany Pollard, also known as “New York,” star of VH1’s Flavor of Love and I Love
New York, who became a veritable “unruly woman,” much loved by fans for her decidedly
“unfeminine” behavior: speaking her mind at volume, loving to eat, mocking or belittling
men, and refusing to be any man’s trained puppy. While a glorious rejection of and play
with expectations of gender on one level, as an African American woman, Pollard’s racial
characterization was less clear, galvanizing audience reaction into those who found her yet
another offensive replication of the stereotypical sassy African American woman, and those
who found her performance so over-the-top and excessive as to gleefully poke fun at and
disable the racial caricature, much as did the entire genre of blaxploitation films in the
1970s.