I can admit that I, like many others in the world, have a guilty pleasure and it involves roses, exotic getaways and a lot ugly crying. You know what I’m talking about –– The Bachelor franchise. I was on Twitter recently, looking at the reactions from the latest episode, and I kept seeing some of the same tweets pop up. Between every few reaction posts, there were tweets about how terrible the show is or about how it goes against a person’s morals, yet they still watched it. It made me question myself: Am I a bad feminist if I watch The Bachelor?
For a long time, I thought of The Bachelor as a guilty pleasure, too. It was a show I watched with shock and fascination. It’s a lot like watching a car crash in slow motion –– you really can’t look away. I’m not here to defend The Bachelor as a show; it’s as ridiculous as it is entertaining. I’m defending the fact that you shouldn’t feel guilty for watching a TV show.
If you’ve been living under a rock for the past ten years, I’ll give you a quick run-down on the show. The Bachelor features about 20 women who are contending for the heart of one “Bachelor.” Similarly, their sister show, The Bachelorette, features about 20 men contending for the heart of one “Bachelorette.” I don’t want to ignore the obvious problems with the show. One of the main issues is how it’s done an incredibly poor job of including minorities of both men and women. It took 13 seasons for The Bachelorette to feature an African American woman, Rachel Lindsay, as the Bachelorette. The franchise has yet to feature a minority Bachelor.
People have their reasons for watching or not watching the show, and I don’t want to undermine people’s opinions. However, to get back to my main question (“Am I a bad feminist?”) I had to think about my definition of a feminist. Personally, I see feminism as the ability of women to have equal rights as well as the ability to do what they please without the fear of judgment. Basically, women should be able to do whatever they want. And you know what, I want to watch The Bachelor. So why shouldn’t I?
For a long time, there has been a stigma around being a feminist, that you should be this or that – a “perfect” feminist. There are beliefs that a woman shouldn’t shave her legs because it’s a beauty standard or that a woman shouldn’t want to wear makeup, and that these are rules would make a real feminist. Even when women are trying to escape the confines of society’s standards, there seems to be an entire new set of rules for feminism.
However, this idea of a “perfect” feminist was more prominent in the 1960s when the second wave of feminism hit. We are now in a new wave of feminism, where women are more accepting of other women and their beliefs. There are women out there who aspire to be stay-at-home mothers or pursue a career in baking simply because it is their passion. The point is, if a woman wants to be something or wants to do something as little as watch a TV show, who’s to stop them?
We are a new generation of women who get to decide what it means to be a feminist. The feminists of the 1960s pushed incredibly hard for women to be able to achieve what we have today. At the time, feminism was new and constantly evolving. The feminist wave excluded a lot of women because of strict standards that determined what it meant to be a “good” feminist. It was a much more exclusive group of women and much less diverse than the men and women who identify as feminists today. Second wave feminism brought women a lot of new rights, such as more workplace equality and the ability to have more of a voice in society. However, just like anything in this world, feminism has grown to encompass so much more. Now, it creates a community that advocates for the empowerment of women and encourages women to be who they wish to be.
Maybe I am a bad feminist, and maybe I’m okay with that. I like that I get to choose who I want to be. I’m not going to feel guilty about something that has brought me closer to others in my life. It’s something I can talk to my mom about every week and it’s something I can talk about to my best friend who lives 300 miles away. The Bachelor isn’t exactly going to help me find the secrets to life, but it’s entertaining and it creates conversation.
So, be a bad feminist. We, as a generation, get to make our own definition of the word. That’s the beauty in this new age of feminism –– it’s messy, complicated and completely our own.