TV experiments with the unbearable importance of looks, from "More To Love" to "Dating in the Dark"
By Heather Havrilesky
Read more: TV, ABC, FOX, Arts & Entertainment, Reality TV, Heather Havrilesky, I Like to Watch
July 26, 2009 | Sometimes when the underdog rises triumphantly to take a big bite out of the Snausage of life, people stand up and applaud. Other times, people gather in small groups, tittering mercilessly at the underdog's slobbery lips and scrappy, misshapen tail.
We're living in the age of the former outcast, in which the big-boned gal, the nerd or the misfit finds redemption in one narrative after another. But a victory for the victimized is still just a funny story to natural-born winners who've never tasted the agony of defeat (which tastes like blood and wet gravel, in case you're wondering).
Most of us, whether we're dorks or hipsters or lumpy parents or slick professionals or something in between, are only equipped with so much "You go, girl!" supportiveness for the downtrodden. We're all about cheering on the marginalized cat ladies and former chubby kids, the Susan Boyles and Adam Lamberts of the world, but we still want them to clean up nice and feed us pithy sound bites in their "Today" show interviews. We embrace them in theory, but in practice, their jittery eyes and sweaty palms and insecure asides test our patience. "Kiss the golden ring and move the fuck on already," we snap, selfishly nostalgic for a world dominated by the charismatic, the smoothly self-assured, the wittily concise.
Big love
This summer, network executives reveal a secret fascination with the mistreated, pretending to embrace and support them, then snickering behind their hands as the cameras roll. No show demonstrates this phenomenon more unnervingly than Fox's "More to Love" (premieres 9 p.m. Monday, July 27), a dating competition in which a flock of big-boned gals compete to win the heart of one big-boned guy. Luke, a 26-year-old real estate developer from Santa Maria, Calif., confesses that he loves food and knows what it feels like to be treated badly because of his weight.
Not a bad start, until the show's editors get their sticky fingers into this pie, and then all we get is one clip after another of a big-boned lady weeping over her inability to find love, thanks to her size:
"Sometimes it seems like the guys are all talking to my friends that are smaller than me, that they're not really acknowledging me."
"I've actually never had a boyfriend. I didn't have a date to the prom. Of course all the skinny girls have dates and they have boyfriends and they got to go with their Prince Charmings."
"I think that I would be wonderful for a guy." (Wiping back tears) "And I haven't found one who thinks that yet."
"Nobody really looks at who you are on the inside."
"I've never had a second date."
Obviously size is a central issue in these women's lives. But if you took a group of medium-size single women in their 20s and asked them the same questions about how successful they've been at finding love, you'd hear variations on the same theme. Average-looking women would claim that their cute friends get all the guys. Women with incredible figures would worry that men only like them for their big racks. Women with advanced degrees would say that men reject them because they're smart and successful. Assertive women would claim that men don't like assertiveness while timid women would say that they're too shy to charm good men.
The real problem is that most men in their 20s aren't all that serious about finding love, period. They would not like it in a boat, they would not, could not, with a goat. Sadly, though, instead of identifying the real cause -- flinchy, commitment-phobic young men -- most women assume that there's some fatal flaw that prevents them from finding true love.
"More to Love" aims to open our eyes to a glorious alternate reality where everyone focuses on "what's on the inside," but instead of actually learning what these women are like on the inside, all we hear about is their outsides -- how they feel about their weight, how many disappointments can be linked to their weight, how they're wearing Spanx right now. It's like airing a show about addiction and recovery that features a room full of addicts rhapsodizing over the crazy stuff they did when they were high.
What's worse, Luke is greeted as a hero for daring to date women who, on average, weight about 100 pounds less than he does. The second that Luke pledges that he wants to focus on the women's personalities and asks them all to do the same for him, the room is filled with swooning, cooing ladies. "Luke is an amazing man for stepping up and saying I like big women!" gushes one contestant (who later gets sent packing). Luke may be a rare creature -- we all know big men who refuse to date big women and average-looking men who expect to land total babes. But congratulating Luke for being halfway reasonable and rewarding him with a roomful of fawning women, most of whom will be sent home in tears, isn't exactly progress.
Taking reality shows seriously isn't progress either, but this is the mood you land in after watching big ladies weep about the impossibility of finding true love for a solid hour. If the tone of the show is supposed to be empowering, someone probably should've sent a memo to the editing room. From the opening cocktail party to the final elimination, we keep cutting away to women telling the camera how lonely they've been thanks to their weight, and how hopeful they are that Luke is the one, since no one else will ever love them.
Obviously if you want to do a dating competition with big women the right way, you have to treat the women like (gasp) regular human beings. Many of them seem more interesting and confident than their skinny "Bachelor" counterparts, so why do we have to talk about nothing but weight?
Stay tuned for the barbecue episode (and I guarantee there'll be one) where everyone talks about how much they love to eat, and how tormented they are by it. But we all love to eat, and we've all been lonely before, so leave the big girls alone already.
Next page: "Dance Your Ass Off": A festival of empowerment?
The triumph of the uncelebrity
