Hi, welcome to A Manly podcast. I’m your host, Matthew. On A Manly Podcast, I talk about issues related to men and masculinity in American culture and society.
Today’s episode is all about the reality shows my wife watches, but I don’t. And those are mostly dating and Bravo shows. She’s a big TV watcher who’s seen a lot of shows, and I mean a lot of TV shows. Pretty much any dating show you can think of, she’s seen it: Married at First Sight, Ex on the Beach, Love is Blind, all the different types of Bachelors, and even the most camp show on television, Bachelor in Paradise. The opener to Bachelor in Paradise is a truly delightful two minutes of television. It’s so pleasant and yet so bizarre you could probably find it in a David Lynch film.
Now that I’m thinking of it, our TV habits tend to be pretty traditional in some ways. I like watching sports shows, superhero cartoons, and Star Wars shows. She loves watching dating shows. Now we do watch some reality shows together like Celebrity Bear Hunt on Netflix, we watch The Traitors, which is a terrific reality show, and Big Brother every summer, which is the most grueling reality show.
Her shows are honestly much more interesting though for thinking about men and masculinity. I end up watching at least half her shows because we’re in the same room together. I’m doing something else and she’s mesmerized by the drama on screen. She loves a good episode of Love Island like the return at the end of Casa Amor, or there was “Scandoval” and Vanderpump Rules, Lindsay and Carl calling off their wedding in Summer House, and she eagerly awaits to see the breakup of Craig and Paige on camera. It’s fun to see the drama unfold, but it’s just as much fun to dissect each person’s perspective and perception of the situation.
As a viewer, we have the opportunity to take a bird’s eye, really objective view of deeply personal and emotional issues between people. Now, men in dating shows come from all walks of life and there’s all different types of guys, from memorable villains like Luke and Devin on The Bachelorette, to the ridiculous bros of Love Island like Kem, Curtis, or Kordell from last season.
Love Island has been around for about 10 years now and when it first started, really cracked the code for creating a raw and authentic dating show. The first couple seasons are quite raunchy and unfiltered. There’s a lot of booze, a lot of sex, and the showrunners kind of just threw the contestants like guinea pigs into the social experiment of the villa. They get to spend a month sleeping, eating, talking, and hanging out by the pool with each other. The goal is to develop romantic connections, find the one, and find some friends along the way.
My wife first saw Love Island on Hulu in 2017, and that’s when it was just starting to get really popular. The show has evolved from its early days as a kind of endless summer party into a much more curated experience focused on developing romance and emotional connections, but also creates the drama by driving wedges into these relationships with manipulative games and the ultimate test. The temptation of meeting new and attractive men or women at Casa Amor away from their partner, about halfway through the show to test the romantic connections.
A stereotypical myth about women related to men and masculinity that Love Island dispels season after season is that women are more emotional than men. Anyone who’s watched Love Island knows that the men are just as emotional as the women. I’ve seen so many men on this show season after season break down into tears as the guys huddle around them and comfort them and give them support. Now many of the men who come on Love Island, they have big egos, they can be a bit narcissistic, and some of them are players. Some of them are toxic a-holes to the girls. A lot of the men who come on Love Island UK have big social media followings. Same goes for Love Island US now. Some of them are already semi-famous. They may have been on another reality show or maybe they’re a footballer. But a lot of them though, even the famous ones, end up being big teddy bears on the show. It shows men working through issues and challenges in relationships in real time and them reflecting on it with their bros.
Can they talk through an issue with their partner? Can they acknowledge and empathize with another person’s feelings? Can they have nuanced conversations about their own feelings and desires with a partner they love and care about? Men are traditionally portrayed in American culture as stoic breadwinners that are the rock of a relationship. There’s that old idea that daddy doesn’t cry because he’s a strong man. He’s the protector of his wife and family. Relationships in Love Island fully debunk the image of a man or husband as a patriarchal emotionless protector. The romances that develop on Love Island show viewers that people have to be co-equal partners in a relationship where they agree on certain values, ideas, and life goals. Not all, but most of these things have to align for two people to commit to loving each other and be in a long-lasting relationship. Only a few of the couples from Love Island have gotten married, but it gives viewers, especially men, a more realist view of how relationships naturally develop over time through conversation and companionship. How people grow stronger feelings for each other over time, and how people are human and get hurt too.
On Bravo as in Love Island, they tap into the same thing. People have to talk through a lot of deep emotions and thoughts about themselves and others on these shows. They have to work through their problems and conflicts on camera, which is why people watch. The audience loves drama and the drama brings ratings. The audience is attached to them as characters they know and love. They feel they could run into them on the street and talk like old friends, even though these cast members have a 10-foot pole from their audience. They say, “Come to BravoCon. You can see me there.”
These reality shows can be one of the few places in American culture and media where we see men having challenging and difficult conversations about their emotions and feelings in relationships. It shows men working through conflict in healthy and productive ways, whether it’s in relationships, friendships, or making life decisions. If they stay on TV long enough, we see how they grow or change through the years, or don’t. Carl is someone who started Summer House as a drunken frat party boy, but in the last season, even though Lindsay berated him most of the time, he was a pretty calm, level-headed guy. He wanted to keep talking with her, he wanted to keep communicating his feelings, and he kept an open dialogue, which kind of made Lindsay look like the unreasonable one in the relationship. I took a big sigh of relief seeing cooler heads this season. Carl is an imperfect person, but he’s learned to be a better version of himself, both physically and mentally.
Craig Conover is a fascinating man, although he’s been a bit of a brat about the whole podcast thing with Austin. I especially enjoy the scenes of Southern Charm where he’s starting to sew and thinking about creating a business for himself that becomes Sewing Down South. It made him very relatable, but also cute to see a middle-aged man walk into Joann Fabrics and kindly ask the older women about sewing and for sewing tips, for design recommendations, what kind of fabric to buy, and it was fun seeing him find a passion for the art of sewing and then envision a business around it. It was inspiring, especially for something like sewing that’s thought of in American culture and society as traditionally feminine. To me, it was another instance where a man worked through conflict in a productive way, leaving behind what is thought of as a traditionally masculine profession in being a lawyer and developing a business around something traditionally thought of as a woman’s work.
Now certainly for as many men working through conflict in productive and healthy ways on reality shows, there’s toxicity too. The countless screaming matches in the back of SUR during Vanderpump Rules, the dinners that devolve into bitter arguments on Summer House, watching Whitney hold court in his old southern mansion. Not to mention he’s been quite demeaning to Shep this season. And Shep is a hot mess, but he doesn’t deserve to be told he’s completely past his prime and undesirable.
Of course, the most notorious reality TV villain is Tom Sandoval, who created “Scandoval,” which mutated his career from just being a reality star to the pop culture icon of “don’t be that guy in a relationship.” He slept with another cast member behind the back of his girlfriend of nine years, Ariana Madix and the entire production crew. The show where this was revealed got over 12 million viewers and the season was nominated for an Emmy. Ariana would never speak to Tom again, and it really degraded the chemistry of their friendship group. For the new season of Vanderpump Rules, as you might suspect, they have a brand new cast. Ariana’s career shot through the roof. She starred on Broadway in Chicago, she’s the host of Love Island, and I’m sure her asking price for another season of Vanderpump Rules is way too much for them.
As you might suspect, Tom received a lot of hate from fans for what he did. And at one point last season, he came to Lisa telling her about how depressed he was and if she could bridge the divide in their friend group. It really didn’t work. Ariana and her close friends were never going to forgive him, nor should they. Tom knows what he did is wrong and he did some really bad stuff, but no one deserves that much hate either.
I mean, I’m a little surprised. He lives a pretty decent life. He made six figures appearing on Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test, then got to go on Traitors, he tours with his band, he has a new girlfriend he’s been with for over a year, and he doesn’t have to be on Vanderpump Rules anymore. I mean, he’s a work in progress, but it could be a lot worse.
Men who are toxic on most dating shows will have to atone or apologize in some way to the cast or other contestants because people will come down hard on them if there’s an injustice that’s not righted. Now, this isn’t true for everyone. Some of the guys who come on Temptation Island are looking forward to dumping their partner and there have been guys on The Bachelorette and Love Island pretending to look for romance, but they’re really there just to build their influencer business.
In a revealing New York Times profile by Irina Aleksander, she says, “Sandoval is so well trained at narrating his innermost thoughts out loud that he sometimes has to remind himself not to do it outside of filming. ‘You lose track of what a normal conversation would be like with people that aren’t on the show,’ he said.” Now, I’m going to look past the obvious that Sandoval hid his deep, dark secret of an affair for months from everyone, and take this at face value because it reveals a larger insight about reality TV as a whole. Revealing one’s innermost thoughts for men can be a really positive masculine trait because it gets you to talk about your problems and feelings with others. It makes guys comfortable having uncomfortable conversations. On the other hand, it gives more space for men to be emotionally volatile and the possibility of toxic behavior. Often, this is what creates the drama the showrunners are looking for that drives ratings.
They need men to make mistakes in their friendships and relationships. They need men to be a bit messy and toxic to make these shows work. It’s the circle of life in reality TV. One drama gets resolved, another comes up or blows up into something bigger, and as the audience, we keep following it till the bubble pops. And the cycle starts all over again. What these shows unknowingly do well is portray different young to middle-aged men reacting in various ways to different friendship and relationship scenarios. For men watching and women in relationships or dating men, it gives people a good barometer for reflecting on what is considered toxic behavior for men in society, reflecting on what values, ideas, or beliefs a woman may want in a partner, and what a man wants to be a better version of themselves. I know a lot of people are watching these shows as escapist content at the end of a long day. That doesn’t mean though we’re not absorbing the emotional complexity of the social dynamic. They give a in-the-moment cultural and social barometer for how men express their masculinity across the world. Men on Asian dating shows, for instance, tend to be a bit more introverted than the men on American dating shows. And on Latin dating shows, they party harder and have more fun than Americans on their dating shows. Men, whether they’re a dating show contestant or they’ve been on Southern Charm for 10+ years, show how complex masculinity can be and how it doesn’t fit for most people into strictly ‘traditional’ or ‘alternative’ boxes.
Men express themselves in many different ways, and they should feel free to express themselves however they want, as long as they’re not hurting or harming others. Men should feel free to be themselves without societal or cultural pressures to look or act or behave a certain way that may lead them to toxic, or worse extremist viewpoints.
Reality shows my wife watches help reaffirm a diversity of masculine expression and give constructive examples of men at different crossroads in their lives that can lead us as the audience to reflect on how to be better people ourselves.
Thanks so much for taking the time to watch or listen to a Manly podcast. Please like and subscribe here on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Bye! Till next time!
Matthew M. Pincus 
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