Despite the enormous female audience of The Bachelor (and its female-led spin-off, The Bachelorette), the show really has no fucks to give about women—and it really doesn't care if you know that or not.
Last night, after Bachelor Chris Soules picked a fertility nurse over a virgin, the mostly-female audience at the live "After the Final Rose" special tensely waited for bro-host Chris Harrison to reveal who the next Bachelorette would be. This is the custom—the end of The Bachelor bleeds into the beginning of The Bachelorette, and vice versa, so that the "search for true love" is constantly churning.
Harrison threw a wrench into the machine though; the show's producers couldn't decide whether to pick L.A. waitress, Britt Nilsson, or Canadian dance instructor, Kaitlyn Bristowe. So they—gasp!—chose both. That's not so bad—The Bachelor/Bachelorette franchise has long been in need of a format change to spice things up. And even though ABC clearly hasn't learned from the mistakes of VH1's 2008 show, Real Chance of Love, a rom-competition reality show co-starring Ahmad "Real" Givens and Kamal "Chance" Givens that ran into problems because it was just too freaking weird watching two brothers divide human women among them based on which ones they wanted to smash, at least the network was trying new things.
But then Harrison announced the second part of the deal. "The 25 men, on night one, are going to have the ultimate say about who they think would make the best wife," he gleefully stated, somehow making an already offensive conceit sound even more horrible.
What this idea says about how ABC feels about the majority of people who watch these shows is shocking. After a full season of making women ride tractors in bikinis and use their virginity (or lack thereof) as chess pieces on The Bachelor, at least the tables were going to turn with The Bachelorette, and by summer, idiot bros would be doing stupid shit at the behest of a Queen B(achelorette). BUT NOPE. On a show that's supposed to be about a woman making all the choices on her own, this next season's first episode will feature a group of men deciding to cast some poor woman aside.
This is what The Bachelorette has taught us: Women aren't in charge of their own relationships, and when two women are in the same room, they must compete against each other, because only one of them can be worthy of male affection. And what's worse, ABC has so little respect for you, female viewer, that they're positive you'll watch anyway.
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