"More to Love"

My saga of waiting for the cable person to arrive and connect our television still continues. For this reason, I haven't been able to watch More to Love, a new show by Fox that models itself on the Bachelor but has regular looking women instead of the usual size 2 heroines of the dating shows. Still, I haven't been able to avoid reading about this show on many different feminist sites.

"Finally, a show that will prove that it is possible for size 12-18 women to find love, too," people on those sites say. My only question when I read this kind of responses to the show is: has everybody suddenly gone insane? Since when do we need to "prove" something that is an obvious fact of reality? Have we reached a point where television has suddenly become more real than what we observe around us every single day? How is it possible for people to forget that nobody in real life looks like the characters on TV shows? Even the actors who play them don't look like that in life.

I love television as much (or even more) than the next person. But if the moment has come when you need televised reassurance that it is in no way more difficult for a woman who wears size 16 to find love than a woman who wears size 4, then you need to step away from that remote control right now. Go outside, walk around the block, go into a bar or a coffee-shop. That's where the real people are. Reality television isn't actually based on reality. It's entertainment, it's finctionalized, it isn't real.