Bachelor Nation

by Amy Kaufman

  Later, during a heart-to-heart with Chris Harrison, she confessed she’d had sex with Viall.

  “To be honest, I was kind of disappointed in myself,” she told the host. “After my one-on-one, we went back to my hotel, and I just really regret it.”

  “Well, that’s good,” Harrison replied, insinuating that her behavior was, in fact, regrettable. “We all screw up. And the way I feel is: Where do you go from there? That’s a sign of good character.”

  Eventually, she told Shawn Booth—the man she’d end up engaged to at the end of the season—about her relations with Viall. Though he had a difficult time accepting the news, obviously Booth was able to move past the admission. America, however, couldn’t seem to look past Bristowe’s pre–Fantasy Suite rendezvous.

  When Bristowe sat down with Harrison during the “Men Tell All” episode after the season wrapped, she revealed that she was being bullied online by those who disagreed with the way she’d conducted herself on The Bachelorette. The host proceeded to read some of the mean stuff that had been directed toward Bristowe, including a tweet calling her a “whore” and an email that said she had “no morals” and “should just crawl in a hole and die. I hope the fans break her spirit so that our kids can see that whoring behavior isn’t rewarded.”

  Andi Zeisler, co-founder of the nonprofit feminist organization Bitch Media, believes the vitriol stemmed from the discomfort many viewers still have with the idea that women have the capacity to date and have sex without emotional attachment.

  “People are very threatened by the idea that that is actually something that occurs and has become a pretty standard part of contemporary dating life,” said Zeisler, also the author of We Were Feminists Once. “And the show made the entire storyline that season about the fact that she had slept with one of the suitors ‘too soon.’ It became such a central storyline in a way that it never had and never would on The Bachelor.”

  Conversely, if a contestant makes it clear they won’t be having sex due to religious or moral beliefs, that also garners a lot of attention. Sean Lowe was dubbed “The VIRGIN Bachelor” on the cover of Us Weekly after he declared he didn’t plan on sleeping with anyone on the show. He wasn’t technically even a virgin; he had recommitted himself to Christ after a few premarital encounters and vowed to remain celibate until he walked down the aisle.

  Nonetheless, the idea that a twentysomething Bachelor would pass up the opportunity to hop into bed with a handful of ladies proved to be juicy tabloid fodder. “The girls are stunned to learn Sean’s saving himself for marriage,” Us Weekly’s 2013 headline continued, promising to explain how “awkward” the Fantasy Suite dates were and how “the winner copes with her sexless engagement.”

  While he may have made headlines, unlike Bristowe, Lowe was embraced by Bachelor Nation because of his beliefs.

  “I think a lot of people found it refreshing,” he said. “Like ‘Wow, OK. So this show doesn’t necessarily have to be on the scandalous side. Here’s a guy that believes what I believe and he’s kind of a stand-up guy. He’s not ashamed to say that he’s not handling the Fantasy Suites the way that most people do.’”

  Heading into the show, Lowe said he knew he wanted to make his intentions clear to both the women on the show and Bachelor fans. Whether he liked it or not, he said, he knew people would be looking up to him, and he wanted to represent himself and his faith accurately.

  Desiree Siegfried, who is also a practicing Christian, felt the same way when she was Bachelorette.

  “I would never go have sex with three different guys. I actually wouldn’t condone it,” she said. “I love girls like Andi and Kaitlyn, because they are like ‘girl power’ and whatever. But you are on TV, so regardless of if you want to be a role model or you don’t—you are one. Ten-year-olds are going to watch you. We shouldn’t just give in to so many guys—we need to be empowered in the way of, ‘Yeah, the guy is going to pursue me, but I don’t need to give it up.’”

  Regardless of your gender, Lowe argued, having sex on all your Fantasy Suite dates is “unhealthy.” And it can cause trouble down the line. “Even if you end up with the fantasy proposal that everybody wants at the end,” he said, “then you’re left answering questions with your new fiancée about why you did those things. Maybe that’s my personal convictions, but sleeping with three people in three days can’t be good for you.”

  And yet if you watch the Bach, you’re probably under the impression that most finalists have sex in the Fantasy Suite. Of course, plenty do—often because they’re so worked up after weeks of unresolved sexual tension.

  “People underestimate how horny you get,” one Bachelor contestant told me. “What I cannot believe is that more people did not bring vibrators. You’re in these constant situations where there’s a lot of buildup. There’s a lot of making out, and then you’re pulled away from each other. After a while, I just wanted to fuck him so bad.”

  When contestants finally make it to the Fantasy Suite, what happens there doesn’t necessarily remain a secret. Producers almost always know what goes down behind closed doors because oftentimes, they sleep in the same two-room villa as the special couple—just a wall over, where they can literally hear what’s going on. But most cast members aren’t that tight-lipped about the overnights anyway. It’s that whole “if a tree falls in the forest” thing—plus, by that point in the competition, contestants have been primed to spill every detail in ITMs.

  Of course, it’s also easy to employ smoke and mirrors, making it look as if two people had a racy night together when, in fact, they kept their clothes on. Maybe you film a shot of the lights in the bedroom switching off before the cast members even get there. Or exclude the moment when someone leaves the suite after a few hours of late-night conversation.

  “There were a lot of girls that would go into the suite with him and then puss out and be like, ‘I’m going. Make sure you show me leaving,’” said Carroll. “And of course, we may or may not show her leaving.”

  Once you’re inside the Fantasy Suite, the suggestion that you’re supposed to be having sex isn’t exactly subtle. In addition to the rose petals, plush bed, and soaker tubs, producers will leave a handheld camera and bowls of condoms everywhere. “It was like, ‘Oh, OK, so we can be safe if we want to be,’” said former Bachelorette Jen Schefft. “But honestly? We don’t need a bowlful.”

  Schefft, for one, said she was so tired by her third Fantasy Suite date that the idea she’d stay up all night having some crazy sex romp was laughable. By the time she got back to the room, she said, it was four a.m., and she had to be up in four hours to resume filming. So she passed out instead.

  Crawley also remembers feeling exhausted. “I was so worn out from having to be ‘on’ the whole time that I just wanted to sleep so bad,” she said. And while she was awake, she was busy enjoying seeing how Galavis acted without the cameras on him. At one point in the evening, she recalled, he disappeared into the bathroom. When she crept in to see what he was up to, she was surprised to see him dancing alone in front of the mirror.

  “He was literally doing a body roll, watching himself body roll in the mirror to this music,” she said with a laugh. “I was like, ‘Is this for real? Is this really fucking happening?’”

  Because there are no producers physically around, it can feel like “Mom and Dad are gone,” as Lowe put it. Contestants begin to unveil their truly authentic selves, finally given the opportunity to ask all the questions they’ve been holding in. Sometimes, the inquiries are mundane: “What do you do all day? Where the hell do they keep you?” Or they’re the kind of thing you wouldn’t want to ask in front of a producer: “Why did you get that tattoo? Do you really want five kids?”

  “Oh, and are you sure you really want to have sex with me on national television?”

  “You may not be here next week, so are you gonna fucking hate me forever if we do this?” Flajnik said
he asked the women he brought on his Fantasy Suite dates. “I very much left the ball in their court, because I totally understood the position they were in.”

  After all, you don’t want to be faced with a scorned lover when that reunion taping rolls around a few months later. That’s what happened to Andi Dorfman after she slept with, and subsequently rejected, Nick Viall.

  When the Bachelorette had to talk to her ex during the “Men Tell All” episode, a bitter Viall asked: “If you weren’t in love with me, I’m just not sure why, like, why you made love with me.”

  Dorfman didn’t take to the question well. She said it was “below the belt” to reveal they’d had sex and that the moment “should have been kept private.” And the reveal would later send Dorfman’s then fiancé, Josh Murray, into such a rage that she thinks it ultimately led to the demise of their relationship.

  For his part, Viall said he regrets what he said to Dorfman—even though he doesn’t feel he was slut-shaming her.

  “I’m not trying to defend it—it wasn’t the platform,” he acknowledged. “But I also wasn’t trying to shame her. If sex isn’t shameful, then you can’t shame someone for saying they’ve had sex. The truth is, if a girl had done that, all the feminists in the world would have been like, ‘You go, girl! Way to call him out!’”

  Slut-shaming became a big topic of discussion again in the wake of the Bachelor in Paradise scandal in the summer of 2017. After news broke that Corinne Olympios was the one involved in the alleged misconduct, many stories recalled her sexual behavior on Viall’s season. During her stint on The Bachelor, she took off her bikini top on a group date and later snuck out of her hotel room late one night to try to have sex with Viall pre–Fantasy Suite.

  Even though she said she did not recall the Bachelor in Paradise incident—she was too drunk, she said—she publicly described herself as a victim. Was she in control of her actions that night? Did DeMario Jackson cross a line by hooking up with her? Did production watch misconduct unfold before their very eyes?

  The controversial encounter began a discussion about consent on reality television, and when the cast returned to Mexico—sans Olympios or Jackson—the show did attempt to create a teachable moment, with Chris Harrison leading a discussion on the meaning of consent.

  “How do you know when someone has given consent when you are getting intimate with somebody?” Harrison asked the group. What about if somebody is passed out or unresponsive? What if they’re drunk?

  “Verbal consent is the best way to know that someone’s giving consent,” replied cast member Taylor Nolan. “People can give you nonverbal cues with their body language that they are consenting, but I think it’s also really important to get that verbal consent to make sure.”

  “Just because somebody gives consent in the beginning doesn’t mean that they can’t have the right to say no at any point,” added contestant Ben Zorn. “So consent needs to be throughout everything.”

  The discussion was surprisingly well handled, but it still left many feeling icky given the fact that the show was milking the Olympios/Jackson drama over a two-night premiere. And anyway, did the chat—or the new rules implemented by Warner Bros.—actually lead to more mindful drinking or sexual activity on the show?

  According to Vinny Ventiera, who was in Paradise both before and after the season-four shutdown, Wells Adams—who served as the bartender—kept a log to make sure no contestant had more than two drinks per hour. But because the cast knew they were restricted to two drinks per hour, “people made sure they were getting two drinks every hour consistently,” Ventiera, who works as a DJ, said. In other words, the new rule might have actually resulted in the cast getting more drunk than before the rule was instituted.

  And by the time Canadian Daniel Maguire arrived in Mexico—he missed all of the Olympios/Jackson drama—the rules were even more lax.

  “There was a gray area too,” Maguire told me. “Like, they weren’t super strict on it when I was there. There was no log. If people really wanted to drink, they would find a drink somewhere.”

  The other new rule, however—the one about asking for producer permission before having sex—was followed strictly. If two contestants wanted to spend the night together, Ventiera explained, each would separately go to their respective producer to express that desire in a filmed declaration.

  But even behind so-called closed doors, the contestants are well aware they’re being filmed. On the third season of Paradise, Ventiera said he once placed a flower vase over a security night-vision camera he spotted on a table so that it wouldn’t catch him getting intimate. “This year,” he said, “they put that camera on the ceiling so nobody could touch it.”

  Why I’m a Fan

  JOSHUA MALINA

  I don’t know if I can claim to have seen every episode, but I think I’ve seen almost every season. That’s probably something I should be whispering to you, or not admitting in an interview altogether, but I believe I’ve watched almost the entire series in its entirety.

  As an actor, I’m supposed to say reality TV is anathema to me because every reality show is replacing a show that I could be on. There was always this concern that reality TV was going to put actors out of work. I even remember a time when the mega-success of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? seemed to be threatening the continued airing of Sports Night. That was the first time I thought, “Well, maybe I am feeding this thing that is out to kill me and my ilk.”

  As a genre, there are some super-duper low-end reality TV shows that are not the best of our culture or high art, but even those can be fun to watch at the end of the day as you plunk down onto the couch. They generally ask very little of you and there’s something to be said for that kind of TV as well. I like my BBC, Downton Abbey, The Wire—but there are often times when I want to dial down the brain to about 3 percent and watch something else.

  I spend a lot of time saying to my kids, “Don’t do that or that,” while we watch The Bachelor. It’s kind of an object lesson in how not to comport yourself. “Don’t go on group dates. That’s not a thing. This is not normal. Don’t make out with eight people in one night. You don’t have to make out with somebody the first time you meet them at all. And if you do, maybe explore your relationship with that person for the entire rest of the day. As romantic as it might sound to arrange for a private concert with your date, it’s really not romantic and it’s very horrible and awkward. So if you’re ever tempted to pay for a tertiary-level pop star to serenade your date, don’t do it.” So rather than banning my children from watching it, it’s like: Let’s see what we can learn from this.

  The show lies right on this delicate line between feeding my cynical side, which is major—being snarky and laughing at people and seeing ridiculous people do ridiculous things in order to get dates and supposedly win love. But like most cynics, my cynicism is born out of disappointment in things not being the ideal that I would prefer. The show can be savored on two levels—the laughing and pointing at people putting themselves in absurd situations on television for my entertainment, but underneath it, what I’m hoping for is to see romance and real connection.

  I mean, I will watch a video of a woman who raised a lion for twenty-five years, and then five years later she comes back to see the lion and he recognizes her and runs over to her. And I love it. I’m spending most of my time on Twitter snarking on people and then I’m like: “Wait a minute. Lion reunion!” There’s just something life- and soul-affirming to see true love. It may not be there in abundance, but it is there occasionally on The Bachelor.

  And I did not go, but I got invited to Jade and Tanner’s wedding. It was a very brief conversation with my wife, who looked at me like, Honey, we watch the show, and that’s where it ends. She was looking at me like, Am I going to lose you to Bachelor Nation? I would have liked to tell the story.

  —Joshua Malina, actor (Scandal, The West Wing)

 
; CHAPTER 9

  Falling for the Fairy Tale

  Jade,” the note read, “your presence is requested at a royal ball tomorrow evening from 8 pm until the last stroke of midnight. Shhhh, it’s a secret—the prince doesn’t know you are coming.”

  Jade Roper drew her hand to her mouth and gasped. The women who had gathered around her on the couch, waiting to hear who had been selected to go on a one-on-one date with the Bachelor, immediately became envious. “It’s like Cinderella!” one cooed. “I’m so jelly,” another lamented.

  Soon, a glam squad descended upon the mansion. “We have to get you ready for your ball tonight!” a pink-haired stylist told Roper, taking her by the hand. “We are going to transform you!”

  The lucky contestant was brought to a room that had been outfitted with dozens of gowns, designer heels, and diamond jewelry. “Like, everything a princess can imagine,” Roper described in a subsequent ITM.

  She tried on numerous dresses and a pair of Christian Louboutin shoes that were meant to resemble glass slippers. “If you like them,” the stylist teased, “you can keep them.” The twenty-eight-year-old former Playboy model was also gifted a pair of diamond earrings from Neil Lane.

  After she was all dolled up, Roper walked down a red carpet and got into the old-school Rolls-Royce that would chauffeur her to the royal ball. There, Bachelor Chris Soules was waiting, nervously rehearsing the waltz in his tuxedo.

  “I have never been to a royal ball before. I mean, I live in northeast Iowa, and I farm,” he told the camera. “Tonight, I’m a prince, and I’m looking for my Cinderella. . . . I hope this is the beginning of my fairy tale. And I hope that at the end of all this, my fairy tale comes true.”

  Once Roper arrived, the two enjoyed an intimate dinner. Then Soules took her to a nearby ballroom, where a full orchestra was waiting. He escorted her up to a platform in the center of the room, and they danced in the shadow of a movie screen playing a clip from Cinderella, the 2015 Disney live-action remake of the classic animated film. The movie was set to hit theaters just a few weeks after the fairy tale–themed episode of The Bachelor aired on ABC, which is owned by The Walt Disney Company.