I will confess, I have never watched an episode of The Bachelor. Perhaps that’s why, when friends described to me the events that took place on the popular ABC dating show earlier this month and the debate that followed, I wondered at the levels of degradation our culture has sunk to over the decades that we believe there’s something to legitimately argue over.
The details, sordid and tawdry, are thus: This season’s man-on-a-romantic-mission, Clayton Echard, had sex with all three women he invited on “fantasy suite” dates to Iceland. He also claimed to be “in love” with each of them. (This is a man who takes the Stephen Stills lyrics “love the one you’re with” far too much to heart.)
To Echard’s annoyance, one of the women, Susie Evans, objected to this state of, ahem, affairs. When she voiced her complaints, he promptly kicked her to the curb.
A bit of online digging revealed that the discussion that followed among the largely female fan base known as “Bachelor Nation” wasn’t over how big a cad Echard was to sleep with multiple women. Instead, it was about whether Evans should have informed him up front that she had some bizarre hang up over sharing her body with someone who’d already been sharing his body with two other bodies.
Former Bachelor contestant and Bachelorette star Kaitlyn Bristowe brushed the issue off as a matter of trying people on, as one tries on a pair of shoes, to see if they’re comfortable.
“When you’re in that position,” she said about the episode on Instagram, “you are making a life-altering decision. You genuinely fall in love with more [than one] person, so why would you not be intimate with more than one person and when you’re trying to find the person to spend the rest of your life with? Why do we judge so hard on this?”
For the male analysis, former Bachelor star Jesse Palmer (who has since become a Bachelor host since Chris Harrison was fired for insufficient wokeness) also went with the Cinderella slipper defense on Echard’s behalf, telling Variety that there have been “multiple Bachelors and Bachelorettes who have slept with three people on their seasons.”
Oh, well. That’s all fine then.
Palmer went on to say, “In general, sexual compatibility in any relationship is extremely important. And in a situation like this when the stakes are so high and there’s an expectation that someone is going to be getting down on one knee and you’re going to be living with one person the rest of your life, you do have to explore and discover that.”
Because what girl doesn’t want to hear that a man needed to sleep with multiple other women to confirm that she was the one for him?
The most debasing part of this episode is that, of course, Echard was not in love with any of the women. Such language is the fig leaf those who know nothing of authentic attachment cling to in a bid to cover their vapid inability to understand deeper emotions. And on some level, Evans — who, it in an epic plot twist, debased herself by contacting Echard again and landing him in the end — must know it.
While there were cases of specific, legitimate abuse, much of the unspoken fury that came out of the MeToo movement seemed to stem more from a society that shamed women for expecting some measure of exclusivity and relationship with sex. The Cosmo era of Second Wave feminism that insisted women could and should freely fornicate with no expectations of relationship or caring unleashed the rage that has reverberated over the last few years.
This kind of feminism, which rejects innate sex differences, ultimately devalues women because it teaches men that they don’t have any unique obligation to act as their protectors. Indeed, they are invited to act as predators. As Echard did.
While the free love plays out on TV, in the real world, many young women are increasingly waking up to the bad bargain this kind of empowerment has offered them.
As one Gen Z’er named Katie told Buzzfeed last year:
“It feels like we were tricked into exploiting ourselves [and] tricked into thinking it was our idea. I would say I gathered this mostly from media, Sex and the City, Girls — HBO somehow did a number on me — books, social media… You read a lot about [sex positivity] on Tumblr, you read a lot about it on Twitter when you were in high school, [and] it gets really ingrained in your brain that you need to be comfortable having sex with someone you’re not committed to. I think in my feeble 18-year-old mind, it was probably not what I needed to hear.”
Katie finished by saying that the “sex positivity” movement now strikes her as a cross between a “male conspiracy and a cynical marketing ploy.”
“I really think it’s overlord men, somehow,” she told the outlet. “There’s always a Don Draper behind it.”
She’s right. And in this case, for the millions of young women who make Bachelor Nation, the Don Draper is ABC.
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.