Page 139 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

11 | D g tal D v de

lasting beyond a few months, and UPN’s The Player was particularly insistent on
celebrating “players” and those who reject notions of ideal love, marriage, and
long-term relationships. MTV’s shows have even offered gay or lesbian episodes,
and Bravo’s Boy Meets Boy staged an all-male dating show. Viewers, meanwhile,
are becoming increasingly aware that contestants on most reality television
shows are often there for the fame and exposure, willing to play whatever role
necessary, yet rarely likely to stay with their television-arranged partnership
longer than the date of broadcast. Hence, many dating shows are framed as
games first and foremost, not as decisively real, and thereby in turn might sug-
gest the degree to which real-life dating and gender role-play are themselves
highly peculiar games.

ConCLusion
Ultimately, in the dating show, we have an odd genre, one that is occasionally
progressive, offering the tools and images to reject scripts of patriarchal, hetero-
normative romance, that sometimes equates to little more than a postmodern
play with little embedded meaning, and yet that at other times perpetuates a
model of romance and gendered behavior that hearkens back several centuries.
Rather than alternate between these options at different times, though, dating
shows are often all of the above at the same time, making it particularly difficult
to evaluate or even to parse out their gender politics, instead requiring a purpo-
sive viewer to read around and through its various gender blockades.
see also Audience Power to Resist; Body Image; Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Trans-
gendered, and Queer Representations on TV; Reality Television; Representa-
tions of Masculinity; Representations of Race; Representations of Women.
Further reading: DeRose, Justin, Elfriede Fürsich, and Ekaterina V. Haskins. “Pop (Up)
Goes the Blind Date: Supertextual Constraints on ‘Reality’ Television.” Journal of Com-
munication Inquiry 27, no. 2 (2004): 171–89; Fiske, John. Reading Popular Culture. Lon-
don: Unwin Hyman, 1989; Galician, Mary-Lou. Sex, Love, and Romance in the Mass
Media: Analysis and Criticism of Unrealistic Portrayals and Their Influence. Mahwah, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003; Graham-Bertolini, Alison. “Joe Millionaire as Fairy Tale:
A Feminist Critique.” Feminist Media Studies 4 (2004): 341–43; Gray, Jonathan. “Cin-
derella Burps: Gender, Performativity, and the Dating Show.” In Reality Television:
Remaking Television Culture, 2nd ed., ed. Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette. New York:
NYU Press, 2008; Mendible, Myra. “Humiliation, Subjectivity, and Reality TV. ” Feminist
Media Studies 4 (2004): 335–38; Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1989; Rowe, Kathleen. The Unruly Woman: Gender and
the Genres of Laughter. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995.
Jonathan Gray

digital diVide

Many have argued that inequalities of access to the Internet in an information-
driven society pose a serious social problem and that public investment is needed
to solve it. Others contend that the digital divide is a minor concern that will