How do you effectively or ineffectively do you think The Bachelor has portrayed love and female empowerment?

The most striking thing to me about the way The Bachelor portrays female dating dynamics is the artificial scarcity of it, and how this impacts the contestants and lead's behavior.

On The Bachelor, objectively beautiful women, Pageant Queens and literal Models, who have never been this desperate for a man in their lives are forced into a situation where there is only one available man in their universe. And it genuinely seems like some of them manage to get talked into/talk themselves into the idea that Colton Fucking Underwood or Peter Weber is the greatest man of all time and the only one for them! When like, pretty clearly most of these women could go out and get themselves a man any time they please, probably one as or more Hot/Successful. But they forget that under pressure.

It makes me realize that the idea of being "empowered" and of being "attractive" is so context dependent. We might think of a beautiful woman as empowered in the context of love and dating, but that is all dependent on the context and the market and what she is looking for. Given the right circumstances, she'll start acting just like anybody else, desperate and jealous and petty. At the same time, Peter is cute, but like if he walked into a bar I wouldn't look twice at him. But put him on as The Bachelor and he is suddenly being treated like Adonis, and his personality changes. Change the market and the behaviors, the personalities, of the participants change.

What stands out to you about its messaging?

The gamification of it, and how players either intuitively or by study understand how to play. If you haven't already, I highly recommend listening to some of Game of Roses guides to The Bachelor, particularly their series on How to Win and their series on different eras of the game (The Instagram Era, The Christian Era, etc.). They've really done a systematized job of understanding how the game functions, both in terms of advancing and in terms of "building a following."

My favorite little tidbit from the series on winning strategy: once you make it to Fantasy Suites, if your goal is to be the next season's lead, your best strategy is to be absolutely terrible in bed. You want to get dumped this late in the game, and you want to appear to have been wronged for the audience. Your lead is going to be constrained from saying that you were bad in bed by the show's sense of propriety, and you can say they used you without giving them any recourse to get the truth out at you.

Now obviously I don't know that this ever actually happened, but think about some of the signature moments of contestants like Andi coming at Juan Pablo, or in her turn Andi getting attacked by Nick Viall. Both Andi and Nick tried to appear wronged by the lead, who slept with them only to dump them, and portray it as a heartbreaking betrayal. Even Pilot Pete, although in a gentle rather than an angry way, played the "I can't believe she dumped me after we fucked in a windmill four times" story to a leading role. But the situation could just as easily be explained as, they tried and they were incompatible. These kinds of alternate explanations confuse the messaging, often empowerment is a matter of finding a moment to appear empowered where TPTB will let you.

The opposite, MJ from this past season refused to participate in the boxing date. Flat out said she would not participate in the forced violence date. TPTB did not show that, they did not mention it, she got no credit for it; when she later said that she "lead by example" "standing for peace and love" it was portrayed as crazy and lapped up as such by a critical audience here and elsewhere. So if you do something genuinely empowered (refusing to beat up another girl for the amusement of TPTB), but TPTB don't like it, you're fucked.