Elimidate
We are all guilty of watching at least one reality TV show during our lifetime. Since I have started college I have not had much time to watch much TV, but during high school and during the summer, before I had a job, I watched them constantly. The ones I enjoyed most were makeover shows. But I watched shows from Extreme Makeover to Fear Factor. And when I was in the early years oh high school, I watched a lot of dating shows- the one I watched most often was Elimidate. So I decided to visit my younger days by watching another episode of that for this assignment. And looking back at that I hope I only watched it because there was nothing else on. So here is how it works, the show starts out with four flawless looking girls and one guy, and the point of the show is for the guy to eliminate one girl every round so he can be with the last one (the girl he likes out of the four). So the whole time you are watching four, skinny, barely dressed girls competing for this one man’s attention. There are two things wrong with this picture; one, the TV show attracts the attention of a young audience like me in high school, and it presents the idea that you need to look a certain way (skinny and flawless) and you need to dress a certain way (barley dress at all) in order to gain a man’s attention and approval (as if your existence depended and revolved around that). Second, is showed beautiful women going out of their way to please a guy. Basically the point was not to be eliminated, so they were to do anything that the man asked to stay in the game. If that meant it was necessary to strip and get into a hoot tub with a man and three women you did not know, then so be it. If it meant making out with the guy on demand, then that’s what you have to do. So it taught young girls to do what is necessary to get that one man you are after, even if it means degrading or humiliating yourself.
The women on this show were usually white, skinny, with nice hair, flawless skin, and perfect teeth. They were usually very scantly dressed to show off their “perfect� bodies in order to impress the one man they are trying to get. The men on the show were usually between the average to good-looking range and, of course, were pleased with the idea that multiple women are competing for their affection and would bend over on demand. It portrayed women as weak and slave like (that they have to correspond with the man’s every demands). It is even more disturbing when these women got into fights over the man. One particular episode, one woman got out of her seat and went to spell her drink on another one because the man asked her to do something daring and that woman was bothering her. In another episode two women got into a fight and one of them tells the other that she is not going to take her seriously because she is fashion retarded for wearing white after labor day; are you serious, all that for some guy. Just like Marla Harris said in Gender Trouble in Paradise (Hotel), or a Good Woman is Hard to Find “…women are readily typecast by fellow contestants as bitches, flirts, sluts, and nags.� Imagine how many girls actually watched this in high school? What kind of message did they receive, be a slave to male dominance?