Did you look at this years Bachie line-up and think “Bachie So White”? Yeah, you’re not alone. The fact that, more than any other season, this years Bachelor casting is literally an ocean of white girls hasn’t gone unnoticed by host of SBS‘ The Feed, Creative Director at Media Diversity Australia, and ex-Triple J movie guy Marc Fennell.
“It’s like the media industry is saying this is the image of beauty in Australia and it has a very specific shade,” he said. “We know that the demographics of Australia are changing, we know that what Australia looks like are changing and it seems very, very backwards to not represent this in 2017. Surely it wasn’t that hard to find people of different ethnicities.”
“If you have a show that makes you feel like you don’t belong and you don’t fall under a category of beauty, why would you be interested in the products that advertise around them?” he says. “If I was an advertiser on that show I’d be really concerned…if that show is excluding or being wilfully ignorant of the changing demographic in Australia, I’d be alarmed as an advertiser.”
The bachelor contestants… Are very… White.
— ? Jess McKenzie (@_jeloise) July 25, 2017
— Iain Dawson (@iainisthenew) July 23, 2017
Something about the girls on Australia’s next season of The Bachelor… can’t quite put my finger on it pic.twitter.com/t3BXDCmFnc
— brad esposito (@braddybb) July 23, 2017
As well as erasing the past 70 years of gender progress, they erase past 70 years of immigration.
*(Also last 60,000 years of ATSI peoples)— Giovanni Torre (@GiovanniTorre) July 23, 2017
“The capacity is there, it just requires the will to make a chance. Somebody has to decide it’s important to make your casting call for a show look like the country it represents,” he says.
Amen to that.
