The Winter of 'Are You The One' and Our Discontent

10 single women, 10 single men, copious amounts of alcohol, and a Trojan condom sponsorship.

Hi again. It’s been awhile, though not for lack of trying. My drafts folder is filled with, well, two unfinished newsletters about some hugely important subjects, but sadly I’ve been diagnosed with Mush Brain, a disorder that can occur when your brain is mush. Mush Brain has stopped me from forming any intelligible collection of insightful thoughts, and so you’re getting a newsletter about the MTV dating show Are You the One? instead.

I was first introduced to this show by my friend Kate Dries, an early adapter when it comes to so-bad-they’re-good TV series (she also introduced me to Selling Sunset, bless her). It was two Christmases ago when I sat in my in-laws basement rec room in Kansas City and watched an entire Are You the One? season over the course of two days, completely enthralled but also slightly appalled. If you haven’t seen it, the concept is this: 10 single women and 10 single men are put into a house with copious amounts of alcohol and a Trojan condom sponsorship. All suck at relationships and have — through algorithms and matchmakers, according to MTV — been placed in the house with their perfect match, a person who will ideally provide balance and stability, but also chemistry. The catch is that no one knows who their match is, so they have to rely on guesswork and a weekly ominous lighting ceremony to figure it out. If anyone fails to find their favorite match by the end, the group collectively loses out on $1 million.

There are more details of how the show works, but I’m going to avoid getting into them because it’s confusing and I’d rather you just watch an episode. You probably won’t regret it, or maybe you might, but really, what else do you have going on these days? Now, we all have different barometers for the trash TV we’re willing to watch. I, for one, can’t stomach the violence of football or MMA, but am more than willing — eager even — to watch a Real Housewife spiral so out of control that she’s arrested and carted off to rehab, in some cases multiple times. Grimly, the reality TV that I consume has featured emotional, verbal, and physical abuse, and even suicides. But I still watch, and have even devoted a large part of my writing career to covering the sociology and cultural impact of the genre. Whereas art may hold a mirror up to society, reality television is our mirror fun house, reflecting back at us the most twisted, distorted, and grotesque versions of ourselves.

This jumps out particularly strong in Are You the One?, a show that both encourages casual sex among its cast while also — in its concept, but maybe not its practice — promoting fairly rigid gender norms and heteronormativity, even during its queer season which featured a non-binary, pansexual group. Contestants have one perfect match in the house, the show dictates. Stray from them and you’re not just falling into old and unhealthy patterns, you’re also refusing to give love, in this limited definition, a chance. Ignore someone who’s coming onto you aggressively and again you’re not giving love a chance, no matter how uninterested or uncomfortable you are. Have sex with someone you actually like but isn’t your match and you’re not just a whore, you’re also risking the whole cast’s prize money. It won’t surprise you to learn that the women face this kind of criticism and scorn far more often than the men.

So what, despite these horrors, makes the series so easy and enjoyable to watch? I’m obviously not above finding entertainment in watching young hotties as they struggle to solve the most basic of puzzles, or delighting in that — after all these seasons — no one has figured out whether to follow “heart” or “strategy” to win the final meager prize money. That these dummies can’t even decide what a strategy is — though I promise you, after watching a few episodes, you can figure it out for yourself — is it’s own special pleasure. But the biggest appeal for me is that it largely requires zero thought to process. In trying times such as these, there’s an appeal to something so intellectually frictionless; it’s like eating an entire sleeve of Pringles in one sitting. Was it good? Maybe! All I remember is the salt (nice!) and that it felt satisfying to shove them in my mouth one after the other until they were gone. All these episodes watched and I can’t remember most plots or cast members. We constantly have to remind ourselves who is who, and by the next scene we forget again. This is the frivolity I crave!

But annoyingly, I can only exist that way for so long until a pesky thought burrows its way through the fluff and grease that blissfully clogs my mind, forcing me actually think about something (boo) and its repercussions (booo). With Are You the One?, this happened in Season Four.

Throughout the fourth season, contestant Julia, boring but beautiful, is the fascination and frustration of many of the house’s men. First, John, a nascent alcoholic who likes to punish everyone around him when he’s unhappy, decides that Julia is his match because they’re “both from the south” and she washed his dishes one time, making her wife-y material. Julia isn’t interested in John. She doesn’t turn him down directly, but she also never acts particularly enthralled. When Julia makes a connection with a different man in the house, one she actually likes, John thinks that she played him even though she’s promised him nothing. Later, another male contestant, Gio, becomes obsessed with Julia, insisting she’s his perfect match despite them barely exchanging words and her obvious affection for another man. Frustrated by her lack of attention, Gio shows increasingly aggressive behavior, at one point punching through a glass door and, at another, trying to fight Julia’s boyfriend. Throughout it all, Gio tries to win competitions that, as a prize, will allow him to take any of the women in the house on a date. To no one’s surprise and everyone’s discomfort, he picks Julia when he wins.

That production allowed and maybe even encouraged this to happen is deeply disturbing. Gio has repeatedly demonstrated disrespect for Julia’s boundaries and reacted with violence upon rejection. On the date, he insists on playing with her hands, talking in her ear, and touching her legs, as again, she smiles passively, is physically unresponsive, and is deeply uncomfortable. The entire house turns on Gio as he spirals further out of control, but the producers clearly eat it up. “Whoever cast Gio must’ve been fired after this,” my partner said at the end of one episode. Oh, my sweet innocent lamb, I thought. They absolutely got a promotion.

This wasn’t the first or last questionable incident to occur on Are You the One?. I’ve kept watching even as I take issue with it, because I am weak and bored. (Programming note: If the tension between loving something while also hating it isn’t something you relate to or find interesting, this newsletter is probably not for you.) But MTV has a history of crossing the line like this. The network gleefully promoted Snooki getting punched in the face by a man at a club on Jersey Shore like it was a pay-per-view boxing match. Irene getting hit by a male cast mate on The Real World: Seattle was hyped as “the slap heard ‘round the world.” In the seasons I’ve watched so far, only one man has been kicked off of Are You the One?, and it was because he angrily shoved a woman contestant by the neck into a mattress. He deserved to be kicked out, but so did she, for initiating the fight by throwing a cup at his face in anger.

MTV, as repeatedly demonstrated, does not take issue with violence against women. Irene getting hit on Real World: Seattle was long considered iconic TV. The man who hit her stayed on the show, going on to appear on Battle of the Seasons. The network only stopped celebrating Snooki being punched after viewers complained. And so, at the risk of losing money, MTV slightly evolved. Physical violence between a man and a woman is now taken somewhat seriously. Other types of violence are not: women can hit men, men can hit men, women can hit women, and cast members are encouraged through alcohol to rage at each other and their environment. Emotional or psychological abuse isn’t considered problematic, probably because it’s what competitive reality shows rely on. There’s still slut-shaming and gaslighting and denying contestants basic needs like sleep to keep them at their worst. One depressing insight you can gain from watching them, however, is the wretchedness inherent to our ideas of what makes a man, what makes a woman, and how genders should mix.

There’s no conclusion here, unfortunately. With very few exceptions, being problematic and displaying off-putting human behavior is the gas that reality TV runs on. Despite my best efforts, I’ve found few things that are actually mindlessly enjoyable, because, like you, I unfortunately have a mind, even if it’s been stricken with Mush Brain.