“There is an insidious darkness beneath the fairytale” relationships on the show, which debuts a new season tonight, argues the cultural critic and NBA legend.
Sad news for the condom industry: millennials are having less sex than recent previous generations. A study published last month in the Archives of Sexual Behavior concludes that younger millennials (born in the 1990s) are more than twice as likely not to be having sex as the generation before them. Many people might be cheering this news as a move in the right moral direction, but that’s short-sighted. Rather than a triumph for increased gender respect it could be a symptom of a greater social problem: the replacement of sturdy realistic romantic love that might last a lifetime with the flimsy bedazzled imposter with the shelf life of a loaf of Wonder Bread. There are many lucrative business reasons for the pimping out of unrealistic romantic love in American popular culture, but the plastic face of it is the trendy Bachelor and Bachelorette franchise. As entertaining as these shows are (and they really are compelling fun), there is an insidious darkness beneath the fairytale pabulum they are serving up.
Before we go any further, we should agree that when discussing people on these reality shows, we are only talking about the characters that are represented through editing, not the real people, whom we can’t ever fully know. Some critics complain that we can’t learn any “real life” lessons from these shows precisely because of the editing and because we are watching people who know they are being filmed and therefore are faking their behavior, either to create a more obnoxious character for national attention (Chad Johnson) or to appear nicer than they really are (Josh Murray). However, the presence of cameras actually enhances the “real life” lessons because some castmembers are so desperate to manipulate their personas for the audience (and so inept at doing it) that we see them even clearer than if they didn’t know the cameras were there.
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