On last night’s episode of The Bachelorette, the bloke set up as ‘Mr. Perfect’ from the get-go, Charlie Newling, would not stop talking about how Ali Oetjen should be behaving at this point in the game.
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Here’s a full recap if you missed it to get you up to speed:
Newling was essentially saying that by this point – a little past the halfway point, considering we started with 18 lads and at the beginning of last night’s ep we had only eight left – he thinks Oetjen should already be spending some extra quality time with her favourites. She should be fully invested in a couple guys because this is her “last shot at love” (it isn’t, as Todd rightly points out). It came across mostly as bitterness that she hadn’t yet asked him on a second date.
“It’s been some time now since me and Ali had our single date – in my mind with how strong our connection is I would assume she’d want a second one with me.”
But the undertone – and then the overtone – of the way he was speaking, both to the other blokes and to Oetjen herself, was that she’d been kissing too many men, that she was behaving, in a word, ‘easy’/’slutty’/whatever.
“Everyone’s come home with a kiss, everyone’s come home with a rose, everyone’s come home with the same connection,” Newling said.
It’s some deeply toxic shit to say to and about someone who is starring in a show where the entire purpose is for her to find a partner. You’ve gotta figure out if there’s a spark there, and you’ve gotta find out fast. Bad kissers need to be dumped pretty much immediately.
If anything, the very first thing she should’ve done episode one was snog ’em all so she could drop whoever’s not up to scratch in the pash department.
Why is it so toxic though? Why was the entire Twitterverse throwing their leftover Halloween choccie at their tellies because of his slut-shaming behaviour?
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bploc3AHOUq/?taken-by=alioetjen
It’s because what he implies by talking this way is that a woman who behaves like Ali – who dates multiple blokes at the same time, and shock, horror, kisses them – is doing something wrong, is a lesser person. The idea that women have to be pure and virginal to be worthy of men’s attention/affection is deeply outdated and fucked up. We don’t need to be chaste to be desirable.
And a really overt part of this season is that it seems to have been predicated on a certain interpretation of Oetjen – that she falls in love too easily. We’ve seen her on telly snogging Tim Robards and Grant Kemp before. We’ve heard the unkind rumours about what happened with Kemp. We’ve even had those rumours, about her infidelity, which we have no proof of aside from a jilted lover’s word, brought up on this season. The blokes have gone onto the show knowing who Oetjen is, and there’s no doubt some went in there thinking of her as someone who ‘puts out’.
It’s also really interesting to stack Oetjen’s behaviour up against Nick Cummins‘ on this year’s season of The Bachelor.
Here’s some facts: Ali’s properly snogged five guys in seven episodes of The Bachelorette: Charlie, Rob, Bill, Taite and Todd. Aside from the cheeky cocktail party pash with Rob on episode two after their chemistry on a group date, she’s kissed all of them in the context of single dates. Sure, that’s every dude she has ever taken on a single date, but the dates were goin’ good baby!
On The Bachelor, over the course of seven episodes, Nick Cummins smooched five women: Brittany, Brooke, Dasha, Sophie and Tenille. Aside from Brooke, who took him on a date using her fancy first ep rose, he kissed all of them again on single dates. Sure, he actively avoided kissing Shannon, Romy and later Rhiannon, on their single dates, but that seems to have been mostly because it was either far too early, or the chemistry just wasn’t there.
At no point would anyone have even brought up that he was “spread[ing] out“/”spreading [his] basket around” – which has its own very gross sexual connotation – by kissing five women in the show.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BpEOuotAAyR/?taken-by=charlienewling
Something that’s genuinely bold about The Bachelorette – Oetjen rubbing her hands over near-nude dudes, ogling them ferociously, admitting when she feels horny – is that a woman on television is given permission to be desiring. She’s not, like women in so much media, reduced to only desirable, an object to be looked at. She is the active party here, she is the lusty one, she is meant to be the one with power.
And Charlie’s slut-shaming conversation with her is an attempt to strip her of her power, to stifle her desire and confine her to a more traditional idea of womanhood, because a woman with sexual power is threatening. A woman who decides to kiss who she wants to kiss, and to explore her attraction to multiple men – which is dating in 2018, let’s be honest – is opposed to Newling’s idea of how a woman should behave.
There’s a weird double standard in casual relationships in 2018 – a woman who might be seeing multiple people, who is more likely to have dated someone else recently, or dare I say it, have slept with someone else recently, can be made to feel bad for being desiring, or romantically/sexually active. A dude in the same situation, congratulated. It’s bullshit.
The dating world is fkn hard enough without shaming women for being with more than one person – especially when the woman being shamed, by one of her partners no doubt, is literally the Bachelorette. It can not be said too many times that dating multiple dudes, and exploring her feelings for them – sometimes that involves physical chemistry, hey – is precisely what this show is. And that kind of controlling talk from Newling is literally no one else’s business.
To quote Oetjen herself, in response to Newling, and to literally all slut-shaming dudes who try to make you adhere to an arbitrary, restrictive model of femininity: “…Yeah, I’ve got this.”
