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Part Three

Dilemmas of VisibilityIdentity and Difference

11

The Bachelorette’s Postfeminist Therapy

Transforming Women for Love

Rachel E. Dubrofsky

An Industry

The first season of The Bachelor aired in the United States on ABC in 2002. At the time of this writing, the series has been running for a decade and is still going strong (two seasons a year, on average), with the 16th season concluding in March 2012. The Bachelorette, a spin-off of The Bachelor, debuted in 2003 and began its eighth season in May 2012. A second spin-off, Bachelor Pad, began in 2010, with a third season in the works for July 2012. Ratings for all the shows have been consist-ent and strong, with The Bachelor the heavy-hitter of the three.

In 2002, when I began researching The Bachelor, reality television had just exploded onto the prime-time television schedule. The Bachelor was the first of many reality romance shows (serials following the development of a romantic relationship over time). Viewers witnessed the rise and fall of such shows as Joe Millionaire (Fox, 2003), Average Joe (NBC, 2003), and For Love or Money (NBC, 2003), to name a few. However, all of The Bachelor’s contemporaneous reality romance shows have since fallen by the wayside, while The Bachelor is still going strong. This is remarkable in a genre characterized by short-lived shows (most not lasting beyond a second season).

At the 10-year mark of the airing of the first season of The Bachelor, The Bachelor and The Bachelorette offer a compelling opportunity for an analysis of how gender functions in popular media sites. The shows provide feminist critical cultural schol-ars with a rich site of inquiry as media texts that span a significant period of time (for a reality show), with two comparative series, one featuring men, the other women. The shows vividly articulate the ideas of postfeminism (a reactionary

A Companion to Reality Television, First Edition. Edited by Laurie Ouellette.© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

192 Dilemmas of Visibility

discourse suggesting there is no longer a need for continued feminist action), the tensions between career and family in particular: a woman worthy of love is pre-sented as a women prepared to give up her career for a man. However, in recent seasons of The Bachelorette there is a new twist: a linking of postfeminist tensions about career and love with a therapeutic imperative to work on – change – the self to improve one’s life (White, 1992, 2002; Peck, 1995; Shattuc, 1997; Cloud, 1998). In this chapter, I look at how postfeminist imperatives are aligned with therapeutic transformation in recent seasons of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette by conduct-ing a close analysis of the presentation of the “real-life” stars of three seasons (five, six, and seven) of The Bachelorette – respectively, Jillian Harris, Ali Fedotowsky, and Ashley Hebert – and of their first appearances as participants on The Bachelor. My focus is on how they are shown navigating the demands of career and love.

Conventionally, the therapeutic lesson participants learn on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette is the importance of risking being vulnerable and opening up to another person for the chance at love. On the shows, a woman’s embrace of the experience of being on the series becomes proof of her desire for love, of her willingness to take the necessary risk to find love, and, ultimately, of her worthiness of being loved. This embrace includes a readiness to be emotionally vulnerable under surveillance, a willingness to be one among many women the bachelor is interested in, an accept-ance of a high level of uncertainty about whether the bachelor will choose her, and an ability to display a certain amount of comfort with being in a context where non-monogamy is a privilege enjoyed by men. All of this is part of the test of a woman’s readiness for love, constructed as a therapeutic journey. A central part of story lines revolves around the failure of participants to do this, especially the failure of women (Dubrofsky, 2011).

The journey to love for the female stars of The Bachelorette is particularly long since they all begin as rejected romantic partners from prior seasons of The Bachelor (not the case for the male stars of The Bachelor). More so than women who appeared before them on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, Jillian, Ali, and Ashley must overcome an overvaluation of career to become viable candidates for love. Jillian, star of season five, is an interior designer who expressly states in the first episode of her season of The Bachelorette that she has learned that her career is not enough to make her happy, that she needs love. Ali, an advertising account manager at Facebook and star of season six of The Bachelorette, is of particular interest since her story lines poignantly engage postfeminist tensions: she leaves season 14 of The Bachelor when her employer tells her she will lose her job if she does not return to work. She immediately regrets her decision and tries to return to the show, but the starring bachelor refuses to let her come back. When Ali returns as the star of The Bachelorette, she affirms she has learned to make love a priority, always. Ashley, star of season seven of The Bachelorette, is completing her degree in dentistry. Brad, star of season 15 of The Bachelor, in which Ashley first appears to vie for Brad’s affection, worries Ashley will not have enough time for him because she is about to start a demanding career. He eliminates her. When Ashley returns as the star of The Bachelorette, she confesses that she has a tendency to withdraw emotionally, affirm-

The Bachelorette’s Postfeminist Therapy 193

ing she is now ready to open up so she can find love. Ashley’s focus on career and her emotional unavailability are linked: she is presented as using work to withdraw emotionally, which is offered as the reason she has trouble finding love.

In the seasons of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette in which Jillian, Ali, and Ashley appear, a woman’s willingness to give up her career is positioned as therapeutically transformative, and undergoing this process under surveillance in the space of the series attests to her strong desire to be reformed, verifying the transformation. Only when a successful and ambitious career woman comes to the realization that she must welcome putting her career second to love can she fully open up emotionally to find love. A focus on career is effectively pathologized: not only will this focus prevent a woman from being emotionally available to a man but also an overvaluation of career represents a fear of intimacy (the women are presented as hiding behind their work because they are afraid of finding love).

The Bachelorette on seasons five, six, and seven is structured as a redemptive thera-peutic space where the women can overcome mistakes made in the past (when they appeared on The Bachelor), in particular their pathological habit of running away from love and focusing on career. In this space, they can prove they are now ready for love. A woman’s ability to find love is presented as a willingness to risk career for the chance at love, a quality that ultimately verifies each woman as worthy of love: lovable. This chapter details how claims to emotional health and happiness are constructed within the space of the shows, how these claims animate key feminist concerns about postfeminist tensions between career and love, and the connections made between these tensions and ideas about therapeutic transformation.

Setting the Scene

My use of the term “reality television” refers to unscripted shows, even though most have a set structure and writers. There is a “call to the real” of sorts in the genre: the material used to create reality television shows comes from footage of real people (not actors) doing real things (though the settings and action are contrived). As Murray and Ouellette highlight, reality television merges “popular entertainment with a self-conscious claim to the discourse of the real” (2009, p. 3). As I have said elsewhere, “the action on reality TV shows is a fiction that produces fictional char-acters, like the action on scripted shows” (Dubrofsky, 2011, p. 11), since the narrative of the series is constructed by editors and producers out of all footage shot. Every season produces enough footage to create several different stories about participants, but one story is privileged over others. In this way, the process of producing the show (camera work, editing, mise-en-scène) creates characters and stories that are “con-structed fictions” (Dubrofsky, 2011, p. 11). When analyzing media that makes claims to the “real,” it is imperative for critical scholars to be mindful of how the “real” is constructed and of the implications. My work is attentive to the process of mediation within the reality genre. By “mediation” I mean the ways in which the formal aspects (for instance, characterization, setting, camera shots, and lighting; and, in the case of


reality television, the aspect of surveillance) of a particular media and genre can have an impact on how ideas are presented. This chapter is aware of the ways in which reality shows are mediated constructions, and asks: why choose this story about women, from among all that might have been told?

I use the term “reality romance” to distinguish the type of show I am analyzing from dating shows (such as Blind Date, The 5th Wheel, or Meet My Folks), which focus on a single date or a few dates in a given episode rather than on the develop-ment of a romantic relationship over time in a serial format, as do The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. The convention on reality romance shows (others in this genre in addition to the two shows I examine include Flavor of Love and Rock of Love) is to have a group of men or women (usually women) compete for the affections of one man or woman over several weeks, generally with an elimination ceremony at the end of every episode. The competition revolves around attracting and maintaining the affections of the star. Some shows in this genre test existing relationships (for example, Temptation Island and The Ultimate Love Test), with couples put in a context where their relationship is tried (for instance, by providing opportunities for participants to date other people).

The Bachelor and The Bachelorette bring together people who have never met, and the express focus is to have the star find someone with whom he or she wants to spend the rest of his or her life. Both shows unfold over 8 to 10 weeks, with a single man or woman as the star and between 25 and 30 single women or men at the star’s disposal to choose from as his or her mate. Each week, the star goes on a series of dates with participants. The activities are often the stuff of generic romance stories, such as romantic dinners; extravagant shopping sprees; trips to exotic locales; picnics in scenic settings; boat, helicopter, or hot-air-balloon rides; private concerts performed by famous musicians; and so on. At the end of each episode, the star eliminates several participants until he or she arrives at the final two. The male stars on The Bachelor are encouraged to propose to the woman they select (the series provides the star with a diamond engagement ring for this purpose). On The Bachelorette, the final two men chosen by the bachelorette are given the oppor-tunity to pick engagement rings furnished by the show to propose to the star.

In terms of appearance, the women selected as participants on The Bachelor and as stars of The Bachelorette are all conventionally attractive, with the raw material to look like starlets when they have donned the appropriate clothing and with the necessary primping. None of the women have physical disabilities. While not all of the women are the height of models, few appear to be shorter than five feet two inches or taller than five feet ten inches. In terms of weight, most appear to be around a US size two or four, none above a size six. The women exhibit comfort with showing their bodies for the camera: the camera revels in putting their bodies on display, with countless opportunities for the women to wear bikinis (many of the settings involve pools, hot tubs, outdoor locations near water, or being on sail-boats or yachts).

The majority of the women on the shows are white, and the starring women on The Bachelorette have all been white. While racialization is not an explicit focus of


this analysis, the story I detail about the women is about whiteness: it is white women who are the heroes of the shows.1 The space of The Bachelor and The Bach-elorette is “raced” white (Dubrofsky and Hardy, 2008, p. 379); that is, it is a space where whiteness is privileged, which occurs partly through the trope of authenticity. As Hardy and I outline, “White-centered [reality television] shows seek participants who appear not to be performing, but rather comfortably revealing an authentic identity, an often difficult position for Black subjects to occupy in this space” (2008, p. 377). White participants somehow perform not-performing2 more easily. For instance, black participants on reality shows are generally presented as actively claiming an authentic identity (Dubrofsky and Hardy, 2008), claiming to be “real”; this is in contrast to authentic white participants, who are presented as simply revealing their authentic self. As well, in the space of The Bachelor and The Bach-elorette, people of color are not presented as behaving in ways that make them viable candidates for the central action of the shows: finding love (Dubrofsky, 2011). Instead, people of color play secondary roles, often facilitating the coming together of two white people. Finally, while earlier seasons of The Bachelor and, to a lesser extent, The Bachelorette made attempts at featuring some diversity in selecting par-ticipants (though not in the selection of the stars), in recent seasons, diversity has no longer been an aspect of either series. This, as I have suggested elsewhere (2011), might reflect a postracial ethos in which race is not seen as mattering (so efforts at diversity are no longer important) since racial equality has been achieved.

The women on the shows are generically middle class. By this I mean that they are college educated or in the process of obtaining a degree and either already have a career or are on their way to having a comfortable middle-class career. None-theless, on a few rare occasions, female participants have been waitresses, nannies, or homemakers – women who do not have a postsecondary education or the promise of a career. The starring women on The Bachelorette all have a career or the promise of a good career, but few appear to be fully established in their careers. As for the men, they are generically middle-class as well: college educated, or in the process of obtaining a degree, and with a career or on their way to obtaining one. Most are conventionally handsome, but there is a bit more leeway than with the women: a very few are slightly heavier than the conventional male ideal, for instance. Rarely are there men of color on The Bachelorette, but sometimes one or two appear on a given season. The starring men have all been white. However, perhaps attesting to the fact that we are not, in fact, living in postracial times (race does still matter), two black men, Nathaniel Claybrooks and Christopher Johnson, recently brought a lawsuit against ABC, accusing the network of racial bias in their casting procedure, claiming they were rejected during auditions because of their race (Ghianni, 2012). The starring men on The Bachelor are presented as well established in their careers, financially stable, and able to provide for a wife and family. They have a range of careers and financial means. For instance, Byron Velvick is a professional bass fisher-man; Lorenzo Borghese is from an Italian royal family and is heir to the Borghese cosmetics fortune; Andrew Firestone is heir to the Firestone tire fortune; Charlie O’Connell is a reasonably successful actor; Travis Lane Stork is a doctor; Jesse


Palmer is a professional football player; and Andrew Baldwin is a US Navy officer, to name a few.

The stated purpose of the shows is to help two people find heterosexual monoga-mous love, but in practice the couples rarely stay together beyond a few months. To date, only one couple from The Bachelor have married: Jason Mesnick and Molly Malaney from season 13 (Molly was actually the runner up to the woman Jason chose in the finale). Likewise, only one couple from The Bachelorette, Trista Rhen and Ryan Sutter from season one, have married. Season seven’s Ashley and J.P. Rosenbaum from The Bachelorette are engaged, and the most recent couple from season 16 of The Bachelor, Ben Flajnik and Courtney Robertson, are still together (at the time of this writing their season just ended, so perhaps it is too soon to tell). However, as I have argued elsewhere (2011), most of the action on The Bachelor focuses on the ways in which female participants fail at finding love; the series puts on display excessively emotional and hysterical women who are presented as unsuit-able matches for the bachelor and, ultimately, as unsuitable for love. The series is more interested in how women fail at love than in showing women who find love; in any given season, more than half the episodes focus on women who behave badly, and the ideal women (those who are fit for love) take center stage only in the last three episodes.

Postfeminism and Therapeutic Transformation

Early seasons of The Bachelorette emphasized the careers of the starring women but made clear that the women were more interested in marriage than in having a career. A pattern I noted (2011) in analyzing the women in The Bachelor and The Bachelo-rette was that they did not appear to have to make any of the difficult choices between career and love current in popular postfeminist media. Scholars have out-lined the recurrent conundrum of the woman who desires it all (career, husband, and family) and the resulting tensions between work/career and love/family (Walters, 1995; Dow, 1996; Probyn, 1997; Projansky, 2001), a trope present in the construction of women in much contemporary popular culture. I argued (2011) that these ten-sions disappeared in The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, creating a space I labeled a “postfeminist nirvana,” where women are able to achieve their postfeminist goals (husband and family) alongside the possibility of a career. Having a career, or the possibility of one, was in fact an important prerequisite for a shot at love on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette in previous seasons. For instance, Trista, star of the first season of The Bachelorette, was presented to viewers as a Miami Heat dancer and a pediatric physical therapist as well as being ready for love. Viewers were made aware that Meredith Phillips, star of season two of The Bachelorette, had a bachelor’s degree in fine arts, was a makeup artist and model, was thinking of attending culi-nary school, and wanted to get married. Jennifer Schefft, star of the third season of The Bachelorette, viewers were told, had a bachelor’s degree in business, was starting a career as an events coordinator, and was ready to commit to a man. The obstacles


the women were presented as overcoming as stars on The Bachelorette centered on learning to open up to the experience of love and to take the necessary risk to find love, with little discussion of any tension between this desire and their careers. It was made clear that their careers would take second place to a relationship with a man (the women were willing to move to where the men were and there was little focus on their careers throughout the season). In essence, the women did not seem to reconcile conflicting desires (family and career) or feel the need to make difficult postfeminist choices, as is the case in many popular media texts, but rather strove to successfully complete a series of tasks (getting a degree; laying the ground for a career, even if they later gave it up for a man; and finding a man) that promised to lead to their ultimate postfeminist goal: marriage and children.

The easy handling of postfeminist tensions between career and family changed around season four of The Bachelorette. This season is notable in that there is nary a mention of star DeAnna Pappas’s career, with only a brief reference several epi-sodes in to a career as a real estate agent. Unlike in the cases of most women on the shows, for whom the ability to have a career (and seeming willingness to put this on the back burner) is an integral part of their appeal as a romantic partner, DeAnna’s career is irrelevant: it does not factor into the story line. This is the first time this occurs. Significantly, the opposite is true for the subsequent three stars of The Bachelorette. The women are shown struggling to make finding love a priority in their lives, in particular to prioritize love over career. By the time the women reappear as stars on The Bachelorette, they realize that part of their mistake on The Bachelor (why they didn’t win the guy) was their inability to prioritize finding love (over career). They are now ready to do so as stars of The Bachelorette. Their thera-peutic transformation is a theme during their season: in addition to learning that being open and vulnerable is a risk necessary to finding love, they learn that a rela-tionship with a man is only possible if it takes precedence over having a career, and this is framed as part of the necessary therapeutic transformation the women must undergo.

In many ways, the shows tell a fairly a standard postfeminist story about the dangers of career ambition for white heterosexual middle-class women. However, the tale is updated by turning desire for career into a pathology for which there is a fairly simple cure – and being on the show is a big part of the cure. Pathologizing women who value career over husband and family is nothing new. Recall the iconic character “Alex” played by Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction (1987), for instance, who is driven to murderous insanity, seemingly as a result of loneliness due to her focus on career rather than love, and who realizes only too late that she wanted children and a husband (Walters, 1995). On The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, the risks are significantly less than for poor Alex, though perhaps, if not attended to quickly, the results could prove almost as hazardous.

In my prior work detailing the behavior of participants on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, I outlined a pattern I termed the “therapeutics of the self,” which is the paradoxical idea that affirming a consistent and unchanged self across disparate social spaces accesses the rewards of therapeutic transformation (2011, p. 93). This,


I noted, occurs alongside more conventional notions of the therapeutic (see, among others, White, 1992, 2002; Peck, 1995; Shattuc, 1997; Cloud, 1998). Participants on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette can claim a positive experience from the series, even if they do not find love (and all but the final two people – though usually fleetingly – find love), by stating that they have been true to their authentic self by not changing while on the series. They show they are suitable for love by behaving consistently on the series, and claim this experience of proving consistency across disparate social spaces as therapeutically transformative.

Integral to the therapeutic transformative experience of the women on the shows is the aspect of surveillance. The context of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette links therapeutic conventions such as learning, improving, overcoming, and working on the self with surveillance. Andrejevic notes that reality television connects “surveil-lance with self-fulfillment: that being watched all the time serves to intensify one’s experiences, and thereby to facilitate self-growth and self-knowledge” (2004, p. 145). A willingness to be under surveillance is a way to show self-awareness and knowl-edge, the experience working to transform the self therapeutically by confirming that one is comfortable with oneself (Andrejevic, 2004). For the female stars of The Bachelorette, who all appeared first as participants on a season of The Bachelor, there is recorded evidence of their past mistakes (footage from their appearances on The Bachelor) and now there will be recorded proof of their ability to overcome these mistakes (with recorded footage of their appearance on The Bachelorette). This process not only verifies the therapeutic transformation (it has been caught on film; there is visual evidence) but also confirms the participant’s commitment to the therapeutic process, since she is willing to go down this emotional route all over again – part of the difficulty of which is the surveillance aspect (showing emotion while being watched). And, of course, this willingness and commitment is con-firmed by recorded visual evidence of the participant’s appearance on the shows.

Appearing a second time on The Bachelor or The Bachelorette is conventionally a sign that a participant has realized his or her failings the first time around and is now ready to show that he or she has learned his or her lesson: the second appear-ance works as proof of the therapeutic benefits of the experience of being on one of the shows. In fact, each woman who stars on The Bachelorette is presented as transformed from the previous experience of heartbreak on The Bachelor (all the starring women made it as one of the final two or three women on The Bachelor and are presented as having developed deep feelings for the bachelors). This past experience is framed as enabling the women to now open up to love, to take the necessary risk to find love, something they were unable to do during their time on The Bachelor and have since realized is an obstacle they must overcome. Significantly, in recent seasons the women must overcome an added obstacle: over-valuation of their career. This obstacle is linked to a woman’s ability to be open to finding love.

Fewer men than women are given an opportunity to appear a second time on the shows, suggesting men are less in need of therapeutic redemption under surveillance. Only four of the starring 16 men on The Bachelor appeared first as participants on The Bachelorette (Bob Guiney, Jason Mesnick, Jake Pavelka, and Ben Flajnik), and


Brad Womack is the only man to star on two seasons of The Bachelor. During his first appearance, on season 11, Brad rejects both final women (to date, this is the only time a bachelor has done this, but Jennifer, star of season three of The Bach-elorette rejects her two final suitors). When Brad returns on season 15, the focus is on how much he has changed since his first appearance – he has learned to be open to love (rather than reject it, as he is presented as having done the first time around). On the first episode of season 15, Brad tells viewers he was given the chance of a lifetime on season 11 and squandered it; he vows never to make that mistake again. A running theme this season is how scared Brad was to commit to a relationship the first time around and the emotional ordeal (panic attacks and depression) he has gone through since. The first episode spends considerable time on the trans-formative process Brad has undergone, with scenes of Brad discussing his three years of intensive therapy. The main message of the episode is that he has learned that the only way to find love is to be willing to be truly vulnerable. Brad explains that, while he previously had his walls up, he is now a changed man. He has dealt with his commitment issues and is ready for love. Brad tells Chris Harrison, host of the show, that he is the luckiest guy to have been given a second shot at love. His thera-pist also appears on the episode to confirm Brad is ready for love.

Brad exemplifies one of the main lessons participants are meant to learn on the shows: the importance of opening up to love and of doing this despite difficulties and fears. In fact, the more difficulties a participant is able and willing to overcome, the more he or she is presented as ready for love. However, unlike with Jillian, Ali, and Ashley, there is no suggestion that what Brad needs to overcome to be truly ready for – and open to finding – love is an overvaluation of his career. This aspect of the work needed to be ready for love is gendered.

A Strategy for Love: Career on the Back Burner

On season 14 of The Bachelor, Ali suffers tremendously for what are presented as her bad choices, but she learns her lesson and is able to redeem herself as the star of season six of The Bachelorette. On episode six of The Bachelor, Ali’s employer tells her she has to choose between staying on The Bachelor and keeping her job. When she speaks to the bachelor, Jake, about her situation, he tells her that, although she’s very lucky to have a job, he selfishly wants her to stay, adding that he can’t offer her any guarantees he’ll put a ring on her finger if she does. Viewers are then privy to several scenes of Ali inconsolable (in a few shots she is crumpled to the floor, sobbing), unable to decide what to do, lamenting the heart-wrenching task of choosing between what she calls the two “loves” of her life: Jake and her job.

Ali tearfully leaves the show. During this scene, she is so overwrought that her words are inaudible through her crying. She has difficulty standing – Jake appears to be holding her up. She tells Jake she loves him, and viewers see lots of hugging and kissing. Ali is indecisive up until the last moment, professing her deep feelings for Jake. Eventually, Ali, bawling, gets into the limousine and leaves the show. Viewers see Jake, distraught (he tears up), watch her leave. Once she is gone, he


comments that, if he gives up now, he doesn’t deserve to find true love – emphasiz-ing that the road to love is difficult and that one’s commitment to finding love is shown through a willingness to forge ahead despite trying times. One of the final shots of the episode is of Ali in the limousine regretting her decision, a theme that continues into the next episode and resurfaces two weeks later in the “Women Tell All” special (the second to last episode in a season, in talk show format, with the rejected women talking about their experiences).

It is worth noting the importance of surveillance in this setup. The emotionality of this scene works to demonstrate to viewers that the feelings between these two people are very strong, with the realness emphasized and verified by surveillance. Ali and Jake are so overcome with emotion (they cry, Ali is unable to stand up on her own, she is physically overcome by her emotions) that even the fact of surveil-lance cannot stop the emotions from being expressed: the feelings are so powerful that the presence of the cameras has no impact.

In the “Women Tell All” episode, Ali is brought onstage to talk with Chris Har-rison. Immediately, the conflict between love and career becomes a focal point. Ali expresses a sentiment that is counterintuitive in the space of the series: love and career can go hand in hand. She tells Chris that she felt that if it was really love between her and Jake, it wouldn’t matter if she left the show (to keep her job), that Jake would come find her. Chris quickly interjects, insisting that the bottom line is that she chose her job over Jake. Chris makes clear the parameters for understanding the interplay between love and career in the context of the series, refusing Ali’s framing of the situation in any way other than as a choice between work and love (for instance, as one where Jake might need to make some effort to make the rela-tionship work). Additionally, Ali’s attempt to see things in any other way is presented as a refusal to face reality, to own up to her mistakes, effectively pathologizing pri-oritizing career over love (with the suggestion that she is in denial about how her actions sabotaged her chance at love). Predictably, the next scenes are of Ali talking about the difficulty of opening up emotionally, admitting that in her personal life she doesn’t deal with her emotions, instead burying herself in her work, blocking everything else out. Here the implication is that Chris has made her realize she has a problem. Chris insists she come to terms with the fact that she has made herself unhappy by hiding behind her work. Ali then tells Chris she turns to her work when she is scared. Chris labels this her “defense mechanism.” Ali claims that, although she felt she was in love with Jake, she had bills to pay and couldn’t afford to lose her job, couldn’t take that risk. As opposed to framing her decision as stem-ming from an unfair predicament she was placed in by the series, or a situation in which financial survival had to take precedence, she instead articulates her decision to leave as an incredibly unfortunate one. In this way, her economic reality is irrel-evant, especially in light of the importance of love. Finally, Ali comments that people’s lives are measured by the risks they take, admitting that, if she could go back, she would probably make a different decision.

Chris asks Ali to summarize what she has learned. Echoing Jillian’s sentiments discussed below about the interplay between a woman’s desire to be independent


and her fear of ending up alone, Ali tells viewers that, while she is a big advocate of women having careers, she also doesn’t want to be on her death bed regretting that she didn’t love enough. Predictably, Ali vows that from now on she is going to put love first, affirming that, if she invests as much into her relationships as she does into her job, she will have much better relationships. One of her departing com-ments is that, if she could go back and do it all over, she would choose love, stay on the show, and then fight to get her job back when the show ended, effectively letting Chris, the audience, and viewers know that she has learned to reorder her priorities. The live audience claps in approval.

The conflict between career and love is not as emotional an issue for Jillian, star of season five of The Bachelorette, as it is for Ali, but it is presented as a tension she needs to resolve in order to find love. Jillian’s successful interior-design career is referenced repeatedly throughout her season. On the first episode, Jillian comments that up until then she has mistakenly focused on her career and independence, believing that, if she showed how strong she was, she would eventually attract a man. Foreshadowing what Ali says in the following season (discussed above), Jillian explains in this same episode that she has come to the realization that when she is older, on her death bed, her job won’t be there telling her what a wonderful life it had with her. As expected, viewers hear her recount what she learned: when she was on The Bachelor she came to the realization that she needed to let her guard down and show Jason (the star) how much she cared about him. She confesses that opening up to love is a scary experience, something she hadn’t done before, but affirms she is ready to do it now. Throughout her season, viewers repeatedly hear her mention her desire to let her career take a back seat and to make love a priority: for instance, she expresses wanting to move to where her chosen man lives, so her career and her ambitions are less of a focus.

Jillian is presented as implicitly making a link between putting her career on the back burner and finding love: she can focus on her career or on love, but not both, with the latter focus attesting to her openness to finding love. In episode three of her season of The Bachelorette, Jillian further makes this correlation when she says to Ed Swiderski (the man she finally chooses) that she is still single because she has always put her career first. In fact, she berates Ed for making the mistake of not prioritizing love on episode five when he briefly leaves the show for fear of losing his job (discussed below). At that point, she tells him she hopes that when he finds the person he is crazy about he won’t let work get in the way. She notes that she gave up everything to be on the show for the chance to find love, adding that, although this scares her, she has no regrets because she knows what is important. This is the same correlation Chris insists Ali makes in the “Women Tell All” special (discussed above), that a focus on career is a sign that a woman has her guard up, is not open to love, and will be unable to find love.3 Concomitantly, the implica-tion is that, if a woman is ready to take the risk to find love, she also has to be willing to risk unemployment.

The need to prioritize love over career is not a concern referenced explicitly by Ashley, a participant on season 15 of The Bachelor and star of the seventh season


of The Bachelorette. It is, nonetheless, a concern that bachelor Brad has about her and a tension that underlies her time on The Bachelor. When she appears on that season, Ashley is finishing her degree in dentistry. A good portion of the storyline about her centers on Brad’s fear that Ashley is not ready to settle down. Specifically, Brad tells the camera he worries because Ashley is about to start a career and may not be able to focus on marriage (and, presumably, children). This apprehension is central during Brad’s visit to meet Ashley’s family in episode seven, when viewers listen to him wonder whether a proposal of marriage will hold Ashley back in her career. He discusses this with Ashley’s sister, who assures him Ashley is ready for marriage despite her budding career. This focus remains in episode eight, when Brad talks to Ashley about where she sees herself in her life. Ashley tells him she doesn’t see any conflict with beginning a career and getting married. She admits that she is very career minded, but says she wants to do it all, to be, in her words, “super-woman.” Brad seems unconvinced. He tells her he doesn’t expect anyone to be superwoman, adding that he is worried because he thinks they are at different stages in their lives, that she is where he was 10 years ago when he was in his twenties and spent all his time working. He notes that Ashley is at the start of a very successful career that will require a lot of work, and confesses that when he was at that point in his life he wasn’t able to find a balance, which is why he is still single (his focus on career, as a potential obstacle to love, is not something he deals with on the series since this is in his past). Brad’s concern is that Ashley will need to spend all her time on her career – what he did 10 years earlier – and will not be able to focus on creat-ing a life with him.4 During their final conversation in this episode, Brad tells Ashley he can’t tell whether he fits into her life, suggesting he is not sure there is room because her career takes up so much space. Brad eliminates Ashley at the end of the episode.

Unlike Jillian and Ali, Ashley does not frame the issue explicitly as an overvalu-ation of her career (focusing on work, protecting herself by retreating into work). Rather, Ashley is presented as realizing she is unable to open up emotionally and aware of the problem. On episode six of The Bachelor, Ashley tearfully says to the camera that, when things get tough and emotional, she wants to withdraw, and this has a negative impact on her relationship with Brad. On the “Women Tell All” episode, Ashley emotionally (tears in her eyes) tells Chris she has mistakenly tried to protect herself while on The Bachelor. She explains how she felt vulnerable after her first date with Brad, and that she was never sure of Brad’s feelings, so she was scared of getting hurt. Chris tells her he is sad she is just now realizing all this. Ashley confesses she fears she missed out on something good and has regrets, wondering what would have happened if she had done things differently. Chris asks whether she feels she ruined the relationship, and Ashley responds that she does. The empha-sis on Ashley talking about how she withdraws emotionally when it comes to relationships, coupled with Brad’s focus on how much time Ashley will need to devote to her career, suggests these are linked: both are part of the reason Ashley was unable to make it work with Brad, and ultimately why she will not find love unless she resolves this tension. Ashley gets a second chance to prove she has learned


her lesson when she is selected to star on The Bachelorette. On the first episode of The Bachelorette, Ashley talks about what a hard time she had on The Bachelor, vowing this time to be honest with herself, to allow herself to feel what she needs to feel when it comes to love. Her career is barely mentioned this season, suggesting Ashley has overcome this obstacle to finding love – she is now willing and able to take the risk for love, without any interference from her career or any need to use her career as an excuse to hide from love.

A Risk for Love: Jobless but at a Man’s Disposal

Ali is a prime example of what happens when a woman is unable to come to terms with her overvaluation of career. As Ali is trying to decide whether she should stay on The Bachelor or leave to save her job, she points out to Jake that there are three other women remaining, all vying for his affection. Jake tells her that, if she’s falling in love with him, she needs to factor that into her decision, insisting it must carry some weight. Viewers see Jake lament to the camera that the love of his life might walk out the door, but he admits that he is falling in love with more than one woman and doesn’t know how this will end (who he will choose). When Chris and Jake discuss the situation, Chris points out that, if Ali stays, she is effectively quitting her job for Jake. Chris asks Jake how he feels being under that kind of pressure. Jake, looking distressed, agrees that it’s a tremendous amount of pressure. Chris asks him what would happen if Ali stayed and down the road Jake ended up saying to her “thanks for quitting your job, but you aren’t the one.” Jake looks even more dis-tressed and does not seem to have an answer. Ali is presented as all too aware of the precariousness of the setup for her. She notes that she came to The Bachelor with everything she ever wanted except for Jake, but she is now in a position in which she could leave with nothing (she could lose her job and Jake might not choose her in the end).

Despite making clear what is at stake for Ali, The Bachelor constructs her choice to leave (and keep her job) as the wrong one. Immediately after leaving, as men-tioned above, Ali regrets her decision, and her angst over making the wrong decision is a theme in the next two episodes. The following week, on episode seven, viewers see Ali back in San Francisco agonizing over the choice she made, professing heart-break. She admits she chose her career because she was scared, explaining that work has always been her safe place. Echoing Jillian’s words about not wanting to have only a career and no love, Ali admits that now that she is back at work she feels empty, has nobody to share her life with, and doesn’t want to live a life of burying herself in her work. She confesses that she has always thought her love for her career would get her through life but realizes now, with horror, that her life is without love and that she does not want a life without Jake. She is determined to get him back. Viewers watch as Ali calls Jake and tells him she made a huge mistake and wants a second chance. She apologizes for making the wrong decision and acting out of fear. Jake tells her that, as much as he cares about her, she can’t come back because he


has moved on to a deeper level with the remaining women. Ali tells him she will forever regret her decision. This scene emphasizes the need to commit to the process of the series, to stay on the series despite the difficulties, because doing so enables participants to develop deep feelings for one another.

Ali and Jake get off the phone, and Ali says to the camera that she is completely heartbroken, that she has made the absolute wrong decision – driving home for audiences the importance of opening up to the experiences of the series as a path to love. She sobs, lamenting that she doesn’t know whether she will ever find anyone like Jake again. One of the last images of Ali is of her crying, putting her head in her hands. The suggestion is that, had she remained on the series, Jake might have developed just as strong if not stronger feelings for her as those he went on to develop for the other women who were willing to take the risk for love. Ali suffers because she will never know what might have been, since she was a coward who hid from love by running to her work. Finding love for the women on the series implic-itly means willingness to risk being financially vulnerable. As well, the series makes clear that a woman’s inability to work through her fears marks her as unlovable: Ali has not proven she is ready for love.

Ali, however, gets a second chance when she is chosen to star in the sixth season of The Bachelorette. This time she fully commits to the process and vows that she will give up all for love. On the first episode of The Bachelorette, she revisits her fateful choice on The Bachelor, affirming the need to choose love over career, stating that “choosing a desk and computer and keyboard over someone who could be the love of my life” was the wrong thing to do, a statement that attests to her readiness for love now. She explains that it has always been difficult for her to put love first, adding that she let insecurity and fear dictate her life. Here we see the repeated equation of making work a priority with being fearful and insecure, which is ulti-mately framed as a symptom of not being able to open up to letting love into one’s life. The logical solution, viewers are led to believe, is for Ali to put career on the back burner so she can prioritize letting a man into her life. Ali’s ability to recognize the need to do this, and her willingness to carry it through, is presented not only as brave but also as therapeutic and redemptive, testifying that she has overcome fear and insecurity.

As the example of Ali poignantly illustrates, the women are in danger not only because they have difficulty opening up to love but also because their careers stand in the way of them doing so. In some cases, careers are presented as shields that protect a woman from feeling vulnerable to finding love – a dangerous scenario, the series suggests, specific to the women.

Love versus Career: A Gendered Struggle

In The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, the struggle between work and love is gen-dered. While some of the men mention that a focus on work interfered with their ability to find love (bachelor Brad, for instance, who admits that a focus on career earlier in his life is the reason he is still single), the space of The Bachelor and The


Bachelorette is not one where men are seen suffering for having chosen career over love, nor, more importantly, is it one used to therapeutically transform them by showing them the need to learn to make better decisions by choosing love over career, as it is for the women.

In all seasons of both shows, there is only one instance when a man struggles with the choice between work and love. On episode five of season five of The Bach-elorette, Ed, one of the male participants, tells Jillian (the starring bachelorette) that he has received a call from his boss with an ultimatum: get back to work immedi-ately or lose your job. Similarly to the struggles I outline above for the female stars, Ed must choose between the possibility of finding love with Jillian and keeping his job as a technology consultant for Microsoft. Ed tells Jillian he is torn because she is everything he is looking for in a woman. Nonetheless, Ed decides to leave to save his job. However, he quickly makes up for this wrong choice and, in episode seven, returns, telling Jillian he made a huge mistake and begging for another shot. He promises that he now has his priorities in order and vows to never let her down again. She lets him return, and ultimately chooses him at the end of the series.

What is notable is that Ed is not shown suffering for his mistakes or struggling to overcome them. Ed’s experience stands in stark contrast to the experiences of the women I discuss. In particular, as I detail above, the trajectory followed by the women who prioritize career over love is presented as deeply emotional – some-times traumatic – and the actions of the women are pathologized. Unlike with Ed, or even Brad, who admits to having focused on career too much in the past, the consequences for women who make the wrong choice are significant: they lose the chance for love on The Bachelor, and their redemption occurs only after much regret and heartache for making the wrong choice. The women can only return and become suitable romantic partners once they demonstrate they have been trans-formed by their previous experience and learned their lesson (to always choose love). Only upon their return as stars of The Bachelorette do they get to show how much they have learned. At this point, they are granted access to the rewards of the show – love. Ed, on the other hand, is presented as having a comparatively easy time rectifying his mistakes; his learning curve is significantly shorter than that of the women. As well, unlike what happens with the women, Ed’s redemptive journey is not a focus of the series; he is immediately forgiven and eventually rewarded by being chosen as Jillian’s final man.

Closing Thoughts

Parts of the story outlined above echo a classic postfeminist tale: choose love over career, always, otherwise suffer a life filled with loneliness and regret. The twist is in the intertwining of postfeminist tensions between career and love and the ability to take a leap of faith (the necessary risk to find love), all framed as part of an important therapeutic transformation that good women (women suitable for love) need to go through. While women should have a career – in fact, as I argued in my earlier work on the shows (2011), this is a precondition for entry into the space of


The Bachelor and The Bachelorette – what transforms the women therapeutically for the better is their ability to overcome the desire to make career central to their lives. In this way, the experiences of the women in the context of surveillance that is The Bachelor and The Bachelorette enable them to come to the necessary realization that the only way to be happy is to make love (marriage and children to follow) a priority.

Not only are career and love set up in opposition but a focus on career for women is pathologized – it is what is done by women who are not emotionally ready for love. Healthy women are women ready for love, and healthy women forsake career for love, always. For those who are late to the party, The Bachelorette becomes a place of opportunity, where women who temporarily lose their way can be redirected.

Acknowledgments

I thank Emily Ryalls and Debby Dubrofsky for their careful reading of this piece and wonderful insights, and Laurie Ouellette for her great suggestions to make the piece come together.

Notes

1 I see race as a social construct that emerges contextually and locally. My noting of raciali-zation is situated (not essentialized) within a given context, relying on an understanding of how bodies and identities are read in specific spaces. However, though racialized identities are mutable, the impact of how they are read has significant and real consequences.

2 I work on the assumption that all behavior is a performance of sorts.3 Part of the logic of the series suggests that, if a woman is ready for love, she will find it.

Concomitantly, if she does not find love, she is not ready. However, a woman should not despair because all she needs to do to find love is reorder her priorities. For Jillian, Ali, and Ashley, the problem is too much focus on career, a situation easily resolved by simply prioritizing love over career, which results in the women winning the opportunity to star on The Bachelorette and select a man from a group of willing men who might propose marriage.

4 Ashley is in her mid-twenties and Brad is in his mid-thirties. The underlying implication is that, while Brad, as a man, had the luxury of putting love and family on the back burner while focusing on career, Ashley does not have this same privilege because of her biological clock.

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