Desperate and Dateless TV: Making Over the Single Woman

While much critical attention has been directed towards well-known televised single women, such as those from Sex and the City, this chapter instead turns to single women in another form: reality television programmes geared towards single women’s purported desperation to be otherwise. To challenge claims that women’s singleness now enjoys a widespread form of cultural legitimacy it has not previously, there is no more obvious textual site than that of so-called ‘dating’ reality television. In this chapter, after commencing with a brief engagement with an Australian version of this style of television, The Farmer Wants A Wife, the centrepiece of my discussion is the American series, Tough Love, after which I move on to consider the most high profile of this genre, The Bachelor.1 A number of the observations made here about these particular shows and how they work to position single women are generalizable, applicable to this form of reality television as a whole (if not to popular culture more broadly). It is in such programmes that the single woman-as-lack becomes most evident and men, in apparently limited supply, become conceptualized as ‘prizes’ for which women must quite literally compete. That is, as outlined in previous chapters, a viable postfeminist subjectivity for women is presumed to be contingent on the search for, and attainment, of a man — a desire thoroughly normalized through these narratives.