Reality TV is *hermeneutic labor*, OK?
Reconsidering the gendered aspects of my most enduring guilty pleasure.
Before meeting me, my husband Christopher had never watched reality TV. I’ve since given him a wide-ranging tour of the genre—everything from Alone to Bachelor in Paradise. I’ve explained the conventions when it comes to things like roses and reunion episodes, but also the social engineering behind casting choices, the manipulative tactics behind talking-head interviews, and other forms of reality-TV trickery.
I’d always seen my “expertise,” opposite his prior ignorance of the genre, as generational and pop cultural. He’s just three years older than me, but I figured those years made all the difference when it came to the impact of the explosion of reality-TV. Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about the gendered aspects of my relationship to reality TV, a genre overwhelmingly watched by women.
As a teenager, I studied The Real World and Road Rules as a guide to the world awaiting me. I learned what to wear and how to dress and what to say. This studying wasn’t just a matter of social research but also romantic preparedness. I got ideas about flirtation and sexiness. I watched the women on these shows through the imagined eyes of the straight men on the show, in the TV audience, and the world at large.
The fact that these women were followed around by cameras all the time was imminently relatable. As John Berger wrote in Way of Seeing, “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” Often, we watch other women with an internalized “male gaze.” Berger says, “The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed is female.”
I had crushes on some of the men on these shows, but for all the ways they kindled my desire, they also provided me with a particular set of eyes for surveying myself.
Of course, all of this social “study,” romantic preparedness, and self-surveillance speaks to how girls are socialized. It’s deeply gendered—and so, too, is the way that I turned to reality TV as I got older. It became less of a guidebook and more a practicing ground for the kind of emotional analysis that women tend to disproportionately perform in heteronormative relationships.
The researcher Ellie Anderson recently coined the term “hermeneutic labor” to describe the work of, in part, understanding another person’s “feelings, desires, intentions, and motivations” by “interpreting their verbal and nonverbal cues,” and “inventing solutions for relational issues arising from interpersonal tensions.” This includes everything from parsing opaque text messages from a romantic interest to strategizing with friends over how to have a hard conversation with a partner. The training for this starts early: “girls are socialized to become relationship maintenance experts,” writes Anderson.
Reality TV is all about this kind of relational sense-making and problem solving, not to mention “interpersonal tension.” Does he like her? Why did she do that? Is he here for the “right reasons”? Contestants on the show engage in this analysis and viewers do, too. A huge part of the pleasure of watching reality TV is “hermeneutic entertainment,” if you will.
Recently, I’ve noticed women posting TikToks of their husbands watching reality TV. “MY MAN WHO HATES MY ‘GIRL SHOWS,’” reads the on-screen text in a recent viral video. It’s candid footage of said man talking excitedly on the phone with his buddy about the blow-by-blow of Love is Blind. There are countless videos that follow that same framework: despite previous misgivings about this “girly” show, the man is pulled in. He loses himself in the drama, suspense, and emotional analysis.
Part of the joke is that the men in these clips are typically reacting to a man’s bad behavior—like, say, Clay’s mixed messages on Love is Blind.
Anderson’s work might suggest another angle to these TikToks. She writes that “the most common pattern of communication between heterosexual dating couples” is the “gendered demand-withdraw pattern,” where, typically, a woman “attempts to bring up a topic for discussion, and the man avoids the topic or ends the conversation.” She makes a request, a plea, to please join her in some of the relationship maintenance, and he runs away.
You could say these men on TikTok who are unwittingly pulled into Love is Blind are meeting that relational demand by proxy. Maybe that’s why I detect delight in the woman’s voice in some of these TikToks: these men are engaging in relational sense-making specifically around the horrors of heteronormative dating.
I don’t experience the demand-withdraw pattern in my own relationship, thankfully, but I completely relate to the pleasure of watching a straight man react to another straight man’s bad behavior. These shows can feel like a catalog of the worst that is out there for women who date men. Years ago, while watching Love Island, a show that traffics in some of the most virulent misogyny I’ve ever seen on a reality TV show, Christopher turned to me and said bleakly: “We’re just watching symptoms of the disease of patriarchy.” Do I get a dark satisfaction from having him witness those symptoms with me? From seeing his horror?
Absolutely.
Want more cultural analysis like this? Here are a few related reads (and please consider upgrading to a paid subscription or, if you already have, gifting one to a friend so I can keep cataloging this stuff).
I'm doing the chef's kiss emoji after reading this. <3 Loved it!