Post-election thoughts

Some may chide me for being so invasively personal in this entry, in a potentially public setting, but I don't think now is the time for censorship, but rather that honesty is the best policy under the threat of an attack on freedom of speech. So here goes. 

It’s been two weeks since the election, and a month since leaving Twitter. In the deluge of alarming articles I’ve consumed over the past 2 weeks, a few have stood out, and one in particular holds the most urgent personal call to action I can do right now, while parts of me are still paralyzed by fear, and any activism I harbor is just starting to wake up from hibernation. As we head into a most assured autocracy/kleptocracy/borderline tyranny, a Dutch journalist who has covered these regimes recommends writing down personal values and things you’d conceivably never do, as things stand right now, since you will surely do them in the future for survival. This collection of thoughts, emotions, and values may therefore serve as a reminder of my morality in the scary times to come. I’m already feeling myself be slow to act, perhaps leaning on my white privilege even when I need to actively denounce white supremacy along with my white comrades, but at least this record can serve to show me what I was like at the beginning of the Trump era, lest things change for the absolute worst, which I am terrified will happen.

Tuesday night and Wednesday after the election were the most unstable I have ever felt in my entire life. I had already felt the stirrings of fear wrapped up in the multiplication of anxieties over the past 6 months, and a few days before the election I even told my mom, ‘this is the first time in my life that it feels like everything is not going to be ok.’ I was sobbing all day Wednesday, an absolutely inconsolable mess, as K had to pool together the puddles of me that had dripped with tears into her couch. I felt completely hopeless in a way I never had before, as if the election had rocked my moral center and life philosophy in a way that was irreparable. Optimism gone with nothing to replace it. The blows kept on coming as I realized further aspects of a Trump presidency that would probably come to fruition: the racism, xenophobia, and homophobia in a first wave (already started, even to me with that homophobic dude yelling out his car at me on Friday), the threat of nuclear war in a second wave (predictable given Trump’s short fuse), and then climate destruction (almost certain). Each realization left me sobbing again, and as news of Trump’s cabinet picks have unfolded these last two weeks, my anxiety feels justified again, just as it had pre- and post-Brexit.

Yet in these two weeks I have also felt myself actually grow up. It was almost a physical, tangible shift, as my pre-election priorities left my body, to be replaced with a resilient assertion of adulthood. Gone were my wistful notions of a return to Europe; I have to stay and fight. I waved a (temporary?) goodbye to the idea of working in TV in favor of a career shift towards sustainability (if only I can hold on to that motivation). The sense of duty as an American to be on the right side of history has become my priority; I don’t want to become one of the “nice neighbors who made the best Nazis.” Yet my belief in our political system is so weak right now, I haven’t been able to will myself to call Senators or go to rallies – all I’ve done is report that harassment and donate to charities. Next is hopefully using this career opportunity to enter the climate change arena, and continuing the work of dismantling the pervasiveness of white supremacy, first by acknowledging that it has afforded me much of my position in life, but that I must not coast on it.

So, to complete that assignment from the Dutch journalist, here are some things I must keep in mind about values and action over the next 4 years, as we see our freedoms start to erode away:

• Recognize that much of my success can be attributed to my relative privilege in life and therefore work to give back in a way that attempts to combat white supremacy (whether through time, money, words, civil disobedience, or other forms of resistance)
• Remember that being the most hysterical person in the room can be good sometimes; it reminds me that I have not normalized the situation and that anxiety can serve as a warning. But I must not let anxiety get the best of me and prevent action or clear thinking, as it has been doing for several months. I should, however, continue listening to my intuition, as I did when I worried that Twitter’s passive support of the alt-right would help Trump get elected.
• Remind myself that climate change is the thing that scares me the most, but that other things do too, in particular xenophobia and homophobia. I will not be prevented from living my life as an openly queer person nor will I condone xenophobia.
• Refuse to stop living my own life or recognizing the joy in things, while demanding the most out of life as I always have. I have high expectations for myself, and I don’t want that to stop, but sometimes, civic duty is a higher calling, and obligation can be both more rewarding and matter more than hedonistic personal pleasure.
• Commit. Commitment means a lot, especially now. I must not flake out on this commitment to a greener planet, even when my hope wavers. I may have lost my optimistic worldview, but if it is to be replaced with a pragmatism or even pessimism, I want to be able to honor my own character with a sense of commitment to the cause.
• Create a new set of goals. This is in the works, but I think it’s part of why I’ve been off balance even before the election—I had either achieved goals or they were no longer applicable, so I was grasping around, trying to clench onto anything that resembled an appropriate goal, but my fists kept coming up empty.  While the youth-entrapped Kate valued externally motivated goals such as global travel, language learning, media consumption, and adventurous self-expansion, the new, more adult Kate is starting to formulate more internally motivated goals such as physical and mental health, a career dedicated to more than myself, and self-expansion through writing/reading/knowledge.
• Finally, practice radical love and patience to the best of my ability. These times may test our patience and dedication, but I will try to invoke patience, love, and compassion more often than not, especially when encountering differences of opinion.

Who knows where the next few years will take us, and I am scared to see how this last, gasping whitelash will shape generations to come for the worse, but at least, two weeks out, I am not quite as continuously despairing as I was on November 9th. I’d like to think of it more as a workable anxiety, not a hopeless one.

'Finding Love' on Reality TV

Today on the subway I was sitting next to K, goofing off in the way we do, even in public, and a man sitting across from us smiled and said, "I've seen you two before, and you always look so happy. What's your secret?" That gave us both pause, to which I could only brush off an answer, jokingly: "It's only been six months...and it's all a façade!" Joking aside, it made us stop and muse about serendipity, human connection and the small ways in which the universe organizes itself to confirm things that feel right (or that we just make things into signs of that rightness by the power of our own will).

These small moments of kismet come in direct opposition to a theme in summer's reality TV, which seems overrun by programs in which people attempt to 'find love' on camera. There are three in particular on this trend that I've been consuming with abject fascination and just a little guilt lately: "Bachelor in Paradise," "Finding Prince Charming," and "Married at First Sight." The first takes former "Bachelor" contestants and puts them on a beach together with enough competition to pair off that the pressure is on to find a mate. "Finding Prince Charming" takes the "Bachelor" concept and mixes it up with all-gay contestants, and "Married at First Sight" does exactly what its title indicates: matching two strangers in a legally binding marriage, at the alter, and seeing what unfolds for six weeks, after which they choose to stay together or divorce.

meet Finding Prince Charming's (mostly basic) "gay Bachelor" and his suitors

These three shows are deeply formulaic in their orchestration of connection, yet their conflicts are vastly different, even though they all involve the almost desperate striving by participants, and some sort of achievement or competition that enforces compliance with the formula. With something so variant and unpredictable as love, why do these shows win us (or me, an ever-sappy consumer of romantic stories) over with their formula? Have we come to believe that the trappings of romance, and the repetitive way its stories play out in media, are legitimate enough to be mistaken for actual connection? Are butterflies enough to go on? The contestants on these shows seem to think so, judging by how often they utter the word 'connection' as the token or proof of something promising, and legitimate.

I actually don't think it's just a matter of enjoying these stories because our hearts have been pumped full of romantic comedies. I am legitimately interested in how we 'perform' love in conjunction with our expectations for it, and reality TV is a perfect medium to explore this phenomenon. Think about it: assuming we all desire romantic human connection, what better way is there than consuming it vicariously, sped up, on TV, as it happens to 'real' people? But we must remember the artifice of the concept of reality TV love, which may or may not have any realness involved, and here's where it gets juicy. You get to see people's emotional baggage affect their behavior, their dispositions create conflict, and their expectations for the future either enhance or sabotage their search for connection (or just fame), all under the pressure of performance. Also, if you're introspective like I am, you may be able to turn the camera's lens on yourself in the process and think of how your own history would inform your performance of love on TV; would you be able to stay authentic or exaggerate yourself as you get sucked up into the 15 minutes of fame? Furthermore, how do you, yourself, perform love in your life?

If I were still well-versed in film theory I might be able to dig up some scholar's argument about the documentary film's inherent alteration of its subject, but broad strokes may suffice here: reality TV either has verisimilitude, or it doesn't at all. My question is, does the performance of love on TV, or even the audience's consumption of that performance, give it some sort of validity if there is even a smidgen of real feelings involved? The love doesn't have to be of the mind-altering, love-of-your-life caliber, but just the enacting of an inkling of chemistry, and the television's documentation of it, perhaps makes it so, because it creates a trope much like how romantic comedies encourage us to buy roses and chocolate for our loved ones. In clearer terms, the love might not last, or withstand real-world circumstances, but in showing us an example of how we could act in our pursuit of love, we end up playing the part in our own lives too -- looking for 'a connection' on OKCupid, listening to the fluttering of our stomachs on a first date, or even dramatizing a conflict "like they do on TV." It's like the Kardashians, who've achieved truly blurred lines between their TV selves and their authentic ones.

Any good story has a conflict, too, and in an attempt to spin a story out of 'reality,' reality TV love consumes conflict like wind to a fire for the sake of storytelling. Conflicts go from fabricated to authentic back to fabricated in the pursuit of a story arc; Chris Harrison arrives with a new 'date card' for the player who's just kissed someone else, or the gay bachelor conceals himself as a contestant to get 'true' first impressions of his suitors. I love this finagling of reality to produce conflict, because we watch as artifice has the potential to spur on actual conflict between actual humans. The humans may ham it up on camera, but I believe anger and jealousy are hard to fake.Yet the key difference between your own conflicts and the ones televised on these reality programs is that the camera has the power to change the performance and content of them, as the behavior triggered by the problem becomes more important than the root of it. I would say that most of us value equilibrium over conflict in our relationships, so we try to resolve issues, while reality TV contestants are perhaps emotional masochists in which they mine the circumstances for conflict, hence enhancing it.

It's so easy to get disillusioned, though, about love when we watch too many of these shows, because the formula becomes too prescriptive. The danger of reality TV is that it goes for sweeping gestures, romantic or dramatic, instead of mundane ones that have the potential to be so much more powerful. I, for one, am learning to recognize the small moments that build upon the big stuff in my relationship with K, and trying to silence that desire for broad, symbolic moments that fit so nicely into a crafted, neat story about love. The funny thing is, in recognizing a promise to love the moment for what it is, you are inherently building it into a story you tell yourselves, warts and all.

The Core of Togetherness, and Me

Recently a certain someone giggled when I told her that the reason I dreamed of studying film was because of the Lord of the Rings special features. Yup, in high school my sister and I would watch "Cameras in Middle Earth" over and over, and not just for the fun of watching Legolas swing up onto that Oliphaunt.  I loved learning how tricky camera angles and painstaking animation work transformed Tolkien's words on the screen. So in giggling, she reminded me, rightfully so, that I am a (film) nerd. Somehow, though, over the past few years, I have misplaced that excitement, and that makes me nervous.

In HBO's Togetherness, Brett has also misplaced his. A father of two young kids and a saccharine but somewhat distant husband, Brett finds his life somewhat lackluster. He's a sound editor for the movies, and watching his friend Alex and sister-in-law Tina struggle financially has lulled him into inertia. In the first season, a memorable scene features him throwing a bit of a tantrum during a long film editing session because he's hungry (but really because the director doesn't like his attempt at some original sound-mixing). As Alex's career takes off in the second season, and after a brief confession of infidelity by Brett's wife blindsides him, Brett spins out in desperation; to cope with the news he follows Alex on a convalescent pilgrimage to their hometown of Detroit. There, they fall into the typical regression into boyhood, but it's fruitful thanks to a dug-up time capsule that contains a letter from teenage Brett and Alex to their adult selves. In it, they beg their future selves not to "be lulled into a mediocrity like everyone else and to remember our vow to stay true to the spirit of life." It's a majestic scene that contends with something so essential; the worry that in adulthood, we fork ourselves over to our numbing responsibilities.

Regressing means thrift store suits

Despite its naivete, the core of their adolescent wish resonates with me--someone who's seen their interests morph over time. Five years ago, film and culture dictated my passionate disposition and geographic location, but now I find myself less enthusiastic about those things -- so is the question that the core of me is muted, or has it merely changed? On the one hand, I'm nostalgic for the days I thought I knew what I loved. On the other, I think maybe I should accept that interests evolve but don't have to segment into disconnected pieces. Maybe my desire for pop culture informs my job in social media, which informs certain social justice leanings.

More recently, though, I think I've been conflating complacency with fear, and that's where it gets perilous. As a fascist presidential candidate gets more and more amplified thanks to our 24/7 news cycle, I wonder if I'm being paranoid, thinking that being complacent means I'm part of the problem, as a propagator and consumer of mass media. Am I a bystander of this terrifying political climate, or are my media habits actually doing some harm? Furthermore, have I lost all perspective on my core by being so exposed to media, something I've always been interested in?

Maybe it's a matter of rewatching Mr. Robot to assuage my guilty conscience.

What is Genius? From Mozart in the Jungle to London Spy

When I was in college I took a film class on Biopics. The central question of the class was, What makes a great life? And furthermore, What makes that great life worth telling? Indeed, the crux of a compelling narrative is, in my opinion, interesting characters. But so much of our current television landscape goes beyond depicting simply interesting characters into depicting extraordinary ones, however that may look. Don Draper, Walter White, Carrie Mathison, and Eliot from Mr Robot are all exceptional people in some way or another. Commonplace lives are boring, while great ones are watchable.

So how do you tell the story of genius? Amadeus (1984) picked the lens of mediocrity in Salieri, using his averageness to elevate and evaluate Mozart's talent. I still maintain that movie is one of the finest depictions of humans grappling with the edges of their abilities ever made. Yet more often, biopics take the genius as a given and instead depict the life circumstances surrounding that genius, rarely questioning it in the first place.

This is why Mozart in the Jungle, Amazon's surprise winner at the Golden Globes, is refreshing to me. It's about the New York Symphony, with its conductor and all its players, so it's not about an individual genius - it's about an entire body of people channeling some original sort of genius lying dormant in classical sheet music through their own individual interpretations, and hence risking being second-rate. Rodrigo, the flamboyantly rule-breaking conductor, has a multitude of talent as a musician and conductor, but he must contend with the mediocrity of his orchestra; as he says after a performance, "it wasn't bad. But it was also not not bad." Hailey, one of his youngest oboists, wants to be great someday, but only within the confines of an orchestra - why not on her own as a soloist? There's also Gloria, who gave up her singing career in favor of fundraising, or Thomas, the maestro emeritus who's now trying his hand at composing and will not listen to the critics who call him derivative. In essence, what I like about this different take on talent is that it cannot be taken for granted because it is not a constant. It's a highly flammable variable that can get extinguished at any time thanks to disuse, fear, or lack of work ethic.

Does Rodrigo hear his orchestra's talent going astray? 

Stories then seem especially tragic when talent is extinguished too early, as in when someone dies. In London Spy, BBC2's emotional spy thriller, Danny (the always watchable Ben Whishaw) falls for an inscrutable investment banker, Alex (Edward Holcroft), whose tight-lipped, tight-assed virginal innocence stands in for the more sinister government secrets locked in his mind. When Danny discovers Alex's decomposing body in a trunk at the end of the first episode, he's convinced that Alex was murdered because he knew something important. Over the course of the five episodes, we go from disbelief to disregard to conviction of Alex's mathematical genius as we get closer to what those secrets are. Yet if Alex hadn't been endowed with such gifts, how would his life have been different? Would he have loved the same way? The show is brooding and dark, and at the end we're left a bit unsure of everything except what genius can do to haunt someone's life.

What did Alex know?

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, knows about the haunting notion of genius. In her new book Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear, she gives all us wannabe-artists the hope we need by reconstructing the concept of genius. Nodding to her previous book's enormous success, she writes that she would be plagued with self-doubt as a writer when tasked with chasing that success if she had believed that a genius was something she just inextricably was. Instead, she believes, as we all should, that genius is like magic, lingering in the atmosphere, and if we're lucky enough and we work hard enough, it may flow through us momentarily. That's why similar movies get made at the same time, or why two startup ideas are weirdly similar, or why someone may write 'your' book before you do. It's the genius finding a vessel, or few, at just the right time. Most of the time, our creativity is a slog of hard work, but we do it so we can be ready to receive the genius if it comes.

This is such a healthier perspective on genius, I wish film and tv shows would pick it up more. That way, all of us with any sort of creative aspirations wouldn't be crippled by insecurity if we saw more people like us on screen. We're ordinary, we work hard, and perhaps the work possesses genius. The trouble is, is that watchable?

Representing Sexual Abuse in Outlander and Spotlight

I spent this weekend in 1740's Scotland and 2000's Boston thanks to Starz's Outlander and Tom McCarthy's Spotlight. These are two very different (excellent) stories depicting two very different times, but they overlap on one key element: they both contain stories of rape and molestation committed by men, on men (or boys). Here's my attempt to work out how those representations worked, and what they might mean.

Outlander's male protagonist is the strapping, fearless Scottish Jacobite soldier Jamie Fraser who is married to Claire, a time-traveling combat nurse pulled back to 1743 from 1945 (forgive the premise; it's actually great). Jamie's dealings with the Scottish rebellion from the British has left a price on his head, and when he is captured and sent to prison close to the end of the first season, Claire musters up some comrades and cattle (yes, cattle) to break Jamie out before he is hanged. However, it's not Claire who gets to him first but rather the show's villain, "Black" Jack Randall, a redcoat gone rogue who has a perverse obsession with Jamie. How perverse? Let's just say that movie blood hardly ever makes me squeamish, but Black Jack's brutal flogging -- 100 lashes -- of Jamie midway through the season made me yelp in protest despite being alone in my apartment.

Black Jack's goal is not just to torture Jamie. He wants to break him. Tobias Menzies, who plays Randall, has said that he thinks Randall is an exercise in sadism and that some viewers reckon Randall loves him, and he plays the character with just enough empathy for the viewer to feel horror and pity in equal measure. I won't go into all the details, but Black Jack breaks Jamie down not only by raping him but by inflicting so much shame against his masculinity, sexuality, and love for Claire that he is left staring, unmoving, wishing for death. And we see it all.

 Randall's sadism at work

Spotlight, on the other hand, relies on testimony by victims of Boston's priest abuse scandal to represent male sexual abuse. What starts as a seemingly regional story based on a single priest and a few hush-hush settlements begins to spiral as more leads point to a city- and even country-wide scandal. It's as if all of Boston had been muzzled for decades by the Catholic Church; the abuse was rampant, everyone knew, and no one could speak up. Shame and silencing were everywhere. We don't see reenactments of these crimes but rather feel their gravity thanks their simple multitude. Numbers speak loudly here -- 13 priests becomes 90 becomes 250 -- and the breaking down of a few survivors as the film employs them to recount what happened to them as boys is more than enough. We feel those broken spirits multiply as we see the names and addresses of the priests tally up.

One of many of the Boston priests' victims, Phil Saviano

Both stories examine what it means to be a victim just as much as they examine what it means to be a predator, especially when those victims are male. For some reason, watching Randall rape Jamie made me more uncomfortable than watching him attempt to rape Claire, which he does earlier in the season. Maybe it's because I have seen rapes against women on screen before. Heck, SVU is dedicated almost entirely to this phenomenon. Yet I think it's because seeing an ultra-masculine man who builds his manhood on his strength being broken down into helplessness was as tragic as the thought of pedophile priests singling out boys from poor families with absent fathers.  The victims are different but their pain is the same. It's that of the predators boring shame so deeply into their souls that silence is their only companion. Especially when those predators have incredibly unshakable systems of power to shelter them from justice (the priests were simply sent elsewhere; Black Jack's got Britain propping him up by his Redcoat).

What resonates most with me when comparing these stories is that we can't and shouldn't qualify shame by degree, and that watching a depiction of abuse is just as powerful as not seeing it. We tend to think of masculinity as synonymous with resiliency, as if men should be unbreakable. And if they are broken, their pain must be suffered in silence, lest they betray weakness or invoke systemic abuse. So whether or not a film or TV show chooses to physically show an instance of male sexual abuse, it's so incredibly moving and sad and important to infuse the subject matter with vulnerability and to show the power dynamics at play. In Spotlight, the Boston Globe must go after the Church and not the individual priests to make the magnitude of the scandal resonate, and that's what stories about male sexual abuse should do too, if they are approached well; they should go after the system. They can expose the cracks in the power structures that keep hegemonic masculinity afloat by emphasizing the importance of speaking up and being vulnerable. I'm not saying that every show should undertake a rape scene, but rather I am happy that these two stories were able to humanize and empathize with victims while simultaneously exposing the cowardice of the people in power to keep such atrocities under wraps.

Mr. Robot and my guilty conscience

Permit me to explode for a moment about Mr. Robot, USA's remarkable summer series about unreliable narrator Elliot (Rami Malek) and his hacker involvement in taking down corporations.

This show is un-effing-believable. And not just because we have a hard time believing Elliot. It's visually stunning, morally argumentative, powerfully written and narratively captivating. Think Fight Club and American Psycho and A Clockwork Orange for 2015, in a 10-episode serialized form.

What I love most about this show is Elliot's unabashed, paranoid take-down of capitalism, corporate America and the hyper-connectivity of our world. There are several standout characters, including Tyrell with his Swedish chill (the excellent Martin Wallström), and Mr. Robot himself, but Elliot is the most compelling (and confusing). As a skilled hacker whose delusions fuel his drive both to destroy and also unite, Elliot's world is scattered and disjointed yet webbed like a computer security network, bits and pieces whirring together. He's an angry young man who hates greed and people and in his extreme loneliness he may or may not have the means to destroy both these things. I won't spoil it, but the question of what's real nowadays, for Elliot and hence the viewer, is ever wavering after the explosive finale.

This show unhinged me a bit this week. His stance on social media (as well as consumerism, naiveté and a host of other social maladies) is that it's an infectious disease--super spreadable and toxic. Complacency through social media leads to laziness which leads to helplessness and mental illness. It's a strong viewpoint to be fair, but it left me nevertheless extremely conflicted about how networked my life is, personally and professionally.

Here's the thing about Mr. Robot. I watched it relentlessly, captivated, glued to the TV while trying to avoid spoilers on Twitter. But as soon as a huge plot point or character reveal happened (ummmm BD Wong as the White Rose?? Wut that was amazing!) I wanted to tweet my heart out with others watching. Thus employing what Elliot denounces. Thus buying into the system he crusades against. Sam Esmail, the creator of the show, seems to be using Mr. Robot as a platform for his brutalist perspective on the world, yet he nevertheless has a platform entirely supported by advertising to get his message across (ie, basic cable broadcasting). Such a morally complicated narrative would be a no-brainer fit somewhere like HBO or Showtime, whose subscribers dictate the kind of stories told on the channel, not like USA.  Which is why this show fascinates me - it actively calls out the evils of advertising/corporations/the 1% even though those things are its foundation. That this particular show exists on basic cable makes me think of Brutalist architect Le Corbusier's Pilotis pillars (PS do he and Sam Esmail share a philosophical brain?), those concrete columns that hold up stories upon stories of concrete.  If those pillars crumble, so does the whole structure, but they are deceptively, relentless strong. So is capitalism. So is advertising. So is Mr. Robot.

 Pilotis : brutalism :: advertising : Mr. Robot

I can't wait for the next season.

The UnReal-ity of the 'Bachelor' Universe

It's been a hot minute, I know. Working in TV and social media makes it harder to dedicate your free time to TV and social media. Who knew?

Nevertheless, I am currently swept up in the faraway land known as the Bachelor/ette/inParadise franchise. There is something very interesting happening in this world, which I've written about before, but you might not know it unless you are an avid fan able to parse out which tropes and codes are being disrupted in the Bachelor-verse this summer. These disruptions fall under two categories; one within the series The Bachelorette, the other outside it, namely the seriously compelling Lifetime (what, did I say those words together?) show UnReal. 

Let's start with how Kaitlyn Bristowe, the most recent Bachelorette to be whisked away by the glamor of 'dating' 25 men on TV, purposely or purposelessly spun the show on its head. See, Kaitlyn seems to behave like a woman of 2015, meaning she has a sex drive that leads to certain events. A few weeks into the courtship, when there are still ~8 men left in the game, she sleeps with one of the contestants. Normally in this show, sex happens under verrrryyy controlled circumstances and locations that are actually called 'fantasy suites,' which serial viewers of the franchise will tell you only pop out when there are 3 guys left. Usually these 'overnight dates' happen on a tropical island, complete with pillows and candles and maybe some palm trees rustling in the wind. Everyone knows sex goes on, but it is never talked about, because the show seems to pander to what it believes to be Middle American values (for its Midwestern mom demographic, maybe). This season, Kaitlyn sleeps with Nick in Dublin, in a hotel room. It's so pedestrian in comparison, but so much more real, because the next morning the crew catches her on camera having a heart-to-heart with one of the producers on her balcony, reciting all those things we millenial women sometimes recite to ourselves and to friends after sleeping with someone too early. She doesn't regret it, but now she has to figure out how to break the news to the others. Furthermore, she had already told another contestant in private (Shawn, who would end up with her heart), that he was the one.

How did the production team approach this behavior? They sort of embraced it and altered the format of the show. Yes, they seem to have scrapped the other exotic locations in favor of staying in Dublin with a shorter schedule (could this have been a weird punishment? Nah, since producers will do whatever they can for ratings), but they actually gave Kaitlyn the go-ahead to have overnights with four men, not three. They also exposed all the slut-shaming tweets aimed at Kaitlyn in a reunion special (and my feminist heart whined as I heard this vitriol) in order to incite and maybe defend their now-controversial commentary on sex. Then Kaitlyn only met two families instead of 3, which was probably a good call on the producers' part when they must have known pretty concretely that Kaitlyn only really cared about those two guys. It may have been a misstep on the production's part to bring the 'loser' all the way to a proposal, but again, ratings rule.

 "raise your hand if you have ever felt personally victimized by Regina George Twitter trolls"

Why is this important? Finally, after a bajillion seasons of this show perpetuated archaic values, romantic inventions, and hegemonic gender roles, we're finally seeing the cracks in that rigidity. I wouldn't go so far as to say that we're getting a positive representation of healthy relationships, but Kaitlyn has ushered in a frankness about sexuality that is welcome on a show that has, for better or worse, dictated some standards around courtship and romance in pop culture. That this franchise is also responsible for Bachelor in Paradise is interesting because the otherwise proper values steeped in the Bachelor/ette are nowhere to be found in "Paradise," where sex, backstabbing, and manipulation are called "love" to hide the jealousy and competition that draws us in like any good trashy tv.

Then there's UnReal. A scripted series that draws quite tightly from the Bachelor universe (it's basically a fictional behind-the-scenes look at the Bachelor), it tells the story of the backstabbing, manipulative producers responsible for this good trashy tv. What's great about UnReal isn't so much the scandals and cat-fights the producers encourage, but that these producers are women living in the feminist/post-feminist media landscape, grappling with their conflicting desires: power and morality, danger and safety, love and lust. For example, the female showrunner Quinn is a ruthless yet intuitive boss gunning for her own franchise, and she wants to take her best associate producer, Rachel, with her, despite Rachel's paranoia that this world is drawing her irreversibly farther away from escaping the manipulations and destruction she happens to be good at.

 Quinn certainly isn't nice, but she knows people, and she knows what makes good TV.

Honestly, I sometimes feel like Rachel. It is difficult to work in media without internalizing a general feeling that the internet brings out the worst in people. Being addicted to social media, like many in my generation, has made me less patient, less able to be in the moment, less empathetic, and less able to think deeply about issues larger than 140 characters. Yet when I see complex stories on TV about complex women, I feel like at least I have a voice, because stories like mine are starting to be told in mass media. I'm trying to escape it all, but I end up sucking myself back in. Maybe it's a vicious cycle, condemning the hand that feeds me because media also tells the stories I care about, but the fact that dating shows actually resonate on my feminist scale gives me hope.