Have you ever been watching a show, chilling in your own little bubble, until your mother takes one look at it and announces it looks like “utter rubbish”?
If so: Hi, nice to meet you! I’m Mathilde, and I’m your mum’s worst nightmare.
For years I had immense trouble focusing while completing even the most basic of tasks. (Don’t bother trying to diagnose me, many have tried and many have failed.) With time I found that, for some reason, something that helped me was to put on a reality TV show as background noise. How convenient was it that this solution just happened to involve watching more shows on Netflix??
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| ID: the cast of The Ultimatum: Queer Love. Credit: Netflix |
Specifically, I am addicted to dating shows. I have watched all seasons (multiple times) of The Ultimatum (US, France, South Africa and Queer Love), Love is Blind (US, UK, Sweden and Mexico), Too Hot to Handle, Perfect Match and Dated and Related. Do the contestants make me feel incredibly self-aware of my incredibly average (at best) looks? Yes. Do they also say some of the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard in my life, therefore making me feel better about myself? Yes. Are they sometimes relatable because a few are incredibly insecure and have crazy lore? Absolutely.
I fell in love with these shows, and we lived happily ever after.
Except we didn’t.
I have one teensy, tiny, minuscule (except it’s actually massive) f**king issue with Netflix’s reality TV shows.
[clears throat]
WHERE ARE THE GAYS?
[crickets]
Sorry about that, but let’s be real here. Lack of and/or negative queer representation in the media is a topic that continues to come up again and again.
And again.
And AGAIN.
Stereotypically written LGBT+ characters, sometimes borderline offensive, often completely absent…One may think reality TV would be different, because, as the denomination indicates, it’s meant to be REALITY. Is it constantly accused of being (and probably somewhat) scripted? Yes. (I know, it breaks my heart too.) But staged or not, trash or gold (I vote gold), the ONE thing reality TV should have (besides unbelievably conventionally attractive women, mid to ugly men and tons of sex), is a diverse and inclusive cast. Otherwise, what’s the point? If I wanted to watch cringe and cliché straight people flirting and being obnoxious, I would go back to my Catholic highschool.
Ironically enough, Netflix’s dating shows are often a mix of outlandish and atypical concepts mixed with very ‘standard’ and normative casts. For example, Love is Blind’s whole concept is to get engaged to someone without ever seeing them, yet most of the cast is relatively conventionally attractive. For participants who aren’t, such as mid-sized to plus-sized people, it becomes one of the main focuses in the show or in the subsequent audience feedback.
This topic is light-hearted, as these shows are often not taken very seriously and are meant to be fun and entertaining, but also touches on many important subjects that do matter in the LGBT+ community, not just representation: sexuality erasure, heteronormativism, lesbian fetishisation, misgendering, harmful bisexuality stereotypes, to name a few.
So, let’s talk about it! (aka I’ll write a long rant and you read, enjoy and hopefully agree).
Every time I start a new show or season, I hope I will be proven wrong, but the very few times LGBT+ representation has (finally) been included, it is laughably disastrous.
My favourite examples of this (I will try to summarise them as much as possible and will avoid spoilers):
- Love is Blind (season 1): One of the couples got engaged, and only after did the man come out as bisexual. Both parties reacted horrendously. The woman’s reaction came off as possibly ‘slut shaming’, questioning how he knew he wanted to be with a girl, and repeatedly saying he’d misled her and “played the experiment”. The man was extremely aggressive, called her a “bitch”, victimised himself and went on to be horrible to the rest of the cast (even years later during reunion episodes).
- Perfect Match (season 1): One of the men on the show was matched with a girl who identified as bisexual. When she asked how he felt about it, his comments included: “My parents laugh every time I tell them my future wife needs to be bisexual” ; “bring home a woman anytime you want”. Additionally, despite her story and her heartwarming descriptions of her experience with coming out and the dating world, she later made out with one of the girls in front of the rest of the cast (almost as if they were putting on a show) when both of them were still seriously matched with people. Maybe it’s ironic that I’m criticising them for “putting on a show” when one may argue that’s the whole point of reality TV, but to me it was unnecessary and left a bad taste in my mouth. It’s giving drunk straight girls tbh, except coming from within the community?? Betrayal! The girls then went on to say it was “an innocent kiss” and they were just friends, and one of them gaslit her match and said they were only insecure because they weren’t confident enough about their own sexuality. Another one of the men said “it’s hot” about his match’s bisexuality.
- The Ultimatum, Queer Love: This show was honestly a complete mess and the feedback reflected that. The cast was exclusively made up of women and nonbinary people, yet preferred pronouns were not indicated/were ignored so a lot of them were continuously misgendered. They couldn’t even bother to choose an LGBT+ host.
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| ID: Carlton Morton and Diamond Jack from Love is Blind. Credit: Netflix |
I’ll admit that Love is Blind is more complex to re-organise as a LGBT+ inclusive show than Too Hot to Handle. The thing is, Love is Blind and Too Hot to Handle are arguably the two most popular “dating” shows on Netflix, so it’s surprising to me that an LGBT+ version still hasn’t been done. After a reddit deep drive, I realised one of the difficulties with a Love is Blind queer edition is that a major part of the show is the separation of the men and women’s living quarters. Each has a lounge where they gossip and discuss in depth the different connections they’re forming. Drama often ends up breaking out if two women have feelings for the same man, or vice-versa. Obviously, this would pose a specific problem if, say, a lesbian Love is Blind were made. You couldn’t put each cast member in a sort of “solitary confinement” because that takes out an important component of the show. However, there are also ways around this because, spoiler alert: when you put on your thinking cap and make an effort, you can find solutions to be more inclusive. It’s not that deep. Divide the cast 50-50 randomly and have a show with even more drama: will the members fall in love with the people they date in the pods, or with the members they share a lounge with? Sure, it wouldn’t be exactly the same show, but does that really matter? I know I’d still happily binge watch it.
All this to say that on behalf of the girls, the gays and the theys (or just me at least), we want queer versions of all of these shows. At this point it’s just odd that it hasn’t been done, and the longer the writers wait, the weirder it is. Tick tock bitches.
By Mathilde (she/her)