The Problem with Protectors

and why I can’t quit The Bachelor

My mother and I are trying to stomach our way through this season of The Bachelorette. I wish my attention to that show were more ironic than it is. Sometimes I catch myself, curled into the end of the couch, smiling like an idiot at scenes edited down to pure platitude for my pleasure.

“This whole journey with you has been amazing.”

“I've always been afraid of getting hurt–”

“I’ll do whatever it takes to protect you, protect your heart.”

I’ve reveled in all the promise and all the shame of it.

But in recent years, our attention to the show has waned. When I’m visiting in the summer, my mom and I push ourselves through the episodes without the old enthusiasm. Our post-show debrief is nonexistent. We load the dishwasher, lock the doors, say goodnight.

“Are we too old?” My mom asked the other night. 

“No, just tired,” I told her. 

In 47 seasons, little of the show has changed. I’ve been desperate for a LGBTQ+ season even as I know it won’t happen. The show’s recent attempts at righting the wrongs of their racism have been clumsy and self-serving. And how long can a canned formula entertain even the most witless of minds? 

There’s been a certain glee in knowing we’re smarter than the show. Or at least, believing ourselves smarter than the show. Parsing the edits and predicting the relationship problems that will arrive post-show. It’s been fun. But I don’t think that’s what’s kept me watching all these years, and why even when I don’t enjoy it as much, I continue to tune in. It’s like the lackluster make up/break up relationship I was in in my early twenties. What keeps me coming back?

THE SHAME

A friend and I began a “‘Confession Friday” practice this past year. They’re usually silly: the admission of watching power-washing videos, avoiding certain people’s phone calls, liking the smell of baby farts. I tried it out with my students because we were talking about the role of shame in literature. It’s a Gender in Literature class filled with brilliant young feminists, and I’ve tried to do right by them, introducing (or reintroducing) them to Audre Lorde, Rebecca Solnit, Anne Sexton, Roxanne Gay, Susan Sontag, James Baldwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, bell hooks, Virginia Woolf, Carmen Maria Machado, Angela Carter, Andrew McMillan– I’ll stop. I try, really hard. 

And here we were, our final weeks together, and I’m confessing to them my devotion to The Bachelor. 

Even as my students discuss gender stereotypes, frustrations with double-standards, they also confess (on occasion) being attracted to the personality traits they’ve just reviled in literature and class discussions. “Why am I still attracted to this asshole?” In our lexicon, an asshole’s primary qualities are often, but not exclusively: dominant, controlling, self-important.

The Bachelor Nation (the show’s pet term for its contestants and its watchers) has its own lexicon: 

• all the contestants aren’t on a show, they’re on a “journey”; 

• interested in a serious relationship is “here for the right reasons”; 

• two-faced is "she's one way in the house and one way with you”; 

• struggling to befriend the other contestants translates as “I’m not here to make friends”; 

• unsure of the process and the lead character makes for a “villian”; 

• the good guy signals with “I will protect your heart.”

THE CONDITIONING

In Brave New World, Huxley introduces the idea of “hypnopaedia” as a means of moral conditioning. Hypnopaedia is the attempt to learn while sleeping– it’s where the myth of cramming for a test by putting the book over your face or listening to the lecture in your sleep originated. It’s been long debunked by neurologists, but in his novel, Huxley’s children characters are conditioned to the new world they will enter through platitudes in their sleep: “Everybody belongs to everyone else”; “When the individual feels, the community reels;” “Ending is better than mending.” They’re easy to remember with their sing-song internal rhymes. 

On Monday, Charity (the bachelorette, repeatedly referred to, without irony, as “a real life Disney princess”, but also a child and family therapist), took Warwick on a date to a San Diego amusement park. Lots of screams and aah’s later, they’re in an ice cream shop and Charity has chosen cotton candy flavor, but Warwick is still waffling. (He will choose raspberry cheesecake.) Charity, wearing a rather fluffy coat, is struggling to scoop her cotton candy. Her sleeve keeps getting in the ice cream tub. It makes me uncomfortable just watching it. Take the coat off, Charity! But as she’s struggling, and Warwick is dithering, we hear her later interview in a voice-over: “For me, scooping my own ice cream, it sucks,” she laments to a producer. “I would love to see him be a gentleman. It’s a little disappointing.”

Being a gentleman on The Bachelorette is about doing things for the woman that the woman can do herself. “I just want a man to protect my heart” is a common refrain, as if their hearts are out of their control. Protection is often named as one of the desired qualities bachelorettes have for their future fiancé. Several years ago, one contestant was so intent on proving that he would guard and protect the bachelorette’s heart, he snuck off to a tattoo parlor and got it inked on his arm. (He did not win.)

THE PROTECTED SEX

When I was 26, my roommate decided to see about a boy in San Diego, so I was moving in with new housemates with the help of my boyfriend, Ben, and his friend. I’d rented a big van, the biggest vehicle I’d ever driven. As I was backing it into the spot reserved in front of my Dupont Circle apartment, I heard a crunch. More than a crunch: a crash. I’d hit the yellow truck behind me, shattered its headlight and bent its fender. 

Before I’d even emerged from the front seat, a man was sprinting across the street, yelling obscenities at me. What kind of stupid bitch couldn’t see a bright yellow truck? Streams of saliva accompanied the abuse. I was dumbfounded. Ben’s friend stepped between us, shouting at the guy to back the fuck off. But Ben stood on the sidewalk, not raising his voice, waiting for the screaming to stop. My mortification at this stranger restructured itself into resentment toward my boyfriend, what I saw as his lack of response blooming into a belief in his lack of manliness. 

When I asked Ben later that night, as we sat in the backyard of my new home, why he didn’t get mad, he responded, “I was mad. But he was an asshole. What good would that have done for me to be an asshole, too?”

This is such a simple story. Such an obvious one. But it’s those small obvious moments that reveal our bias to ourselves. In her essay “Man Child”, Audre Lorde recounts a moment when her son comes home having been hit and bullied. Her instinctual reaction, despite years of work as a feminist activist, is to hiss “the next time you come in here crying…” These desires for physical male toughness run deep, beyond romance. 

In chivalric code, the qualities expected of an ideal knight were courage, honor, courtesy, justice, and a readiness to help the weak. All virtuous. Except who are “the weak” being helped by today’s gentlemen?  

It’s never explicit, but being a gentleman protector is about doing, and there’s a passivity to being with a gentleman protector. A flaccidity to not opening doors, not scooping ice cream, not mediating a person screaming in your face. What happens when we’re repeatedly being taken care of? We lose agency in our own lives. We hear “I want someone to protect my heart” over and over again in our fantasies, and we begin to think we can’t take care of it, our own heart. Ourself. 

In leadership, protectors create the same kind of imbalance and ineptitude they do in relationships. The whole construct is based on fear: fear that you can’t do, without the protector helping or telling you what to do. A learned helplessness transpires. Fear leads to less collaboration, less innovation. It zaps the organization– as it does the relationship– of oxygen. The protector, once a protector, can’t help themselves because they’re authoritarian, which does a rat-a-tat-tat on the brain; it’s the ultimate mindfuck. Just look at Putin. Russians have a saying: держать фигу в кармане, which translates: “keep your middle finger in your pocket.”

So as a leader-protector, everyone is flipping the bird at you, you just can’t see it. The more you protect, the more you stifle.

The Bachelor drip feeds me the big desire of male protection even as the show’s claustrophobic tropes keep on keeping on. It doesn’t even need a sing-song quality like Huxley’s hypnopaedia. Just repeat it enough, and you’ll believe it.

And while I didn’t marry a protector (I married Ben), I sure like to watch one on television.

Virginia Woolf published her feminist treaty A Room of One’s Own in 1929. She ends the second chapter with a hope for the next century: “Moreover, in a hundred years, I thought, reaching my own doorstep, women will have ceased to be the protected sex.” 

I love the thought of Woolf on her own doorstep, a threshold, considering the effect this extended essay and the others around her engaged in first-wave feminism will have a century later. And here we are: six years away from that hundred years’ point. And primetime shows are glorifying male protectors. And feminists on their couches are watching. 

It’s time to let go, I know. But for this last season, you’ll know where to find me Monday night, 9PM EST. Trying really hard not to smile.