Feminist Kryptonite, Episode 1

Every fiber of my being screamed “don’t watch it!” But I couldn’t resist the constant marketing of “Ready for Love” so I dove in.

Yes, I dove in to that awful dirty sludge and felt the mud ooze into my hair and I couldn’t stop it. It’s feminist kryptonite, this show. Here’s the premise:

Three uber-hot, relatively wealthy guys are so pathetically tired of being alone that they enlisted the help of three matchmakers to find them the love of their lives. The matchmakers selected four women, and the men select three of those women, which when you take the square root of human indecency and multiply it by product placement galore, each man has nine women to choose from.

So the uber-hot, relatively wealthy guy goes on a date with all nine women at once (and really, Mormons get a bad rap for polygamy? Puh-leeze.) And because of his male privilege, Tuesday’s date was doing what the man did for a living: write and perform music.

“Hi girls. Worship me. Sing to me. Finish the lyrics to this song that I can’t write, mmkay?”

(P.S. in the bottom corner while watching these girls sing off-key in a studio, an ad appears to buy the actual single on iTunes. Clever, Plain White Ts-man. Clever.)

This week’s man, Tim, calls the matchmakers to see who he should spend more time with. Let’s sum these up.

Girl 1: tells a story of how she farted on a guy’s lap once.
Girl 2: tells Tim she has a list of 50 qualities she wants in a man, and that he has over half of them! Half!
Girl 3: Puts the moves on by playing the piano and admitting she’s “darker.” (Code for baggage.) Girlfriend plays the piano and looks at Tim longingly. (Code for awkwardly.)

The next phase of the show involves the matchmakers taking the girls to task over how they behaved on the 9:1 date.

Matchmaker tells Girl 1 “You should never say f-a-r-t in front of a man.”
Matchmaker tells Girl 2 that her list is stupid. Though I’m pretty sure she disagrees with him.
Matchmaker tells Girl 3 that she really used her “eyes” to “make a connection.”

A word here about how the girls appear onstage: in glass encasements, similar to the drive-up banking tubes.

The matchmakers then select the three girls who performed the worst on the 9:1 date, and Tim gets to save one immediately. Tonight, he saves Fart-Girl. Then he takes two other girls to a fabricated garden and lets the other two girls beg him to stay on the show. Tim cries and feels sick to his stomach. He sends home the most unlikeable girl out of the nine, consoles her, and then watches her leave.

I haven’t really made myself blog regularly, and even though I never watched The Bachelor, I enjoyed Bill Simmons’ wife’s Bachelor blogs. So the plan is to blog this gem of a program each week.

Like Joel McHale, I’ll watch “Ready for Love” so you don’t have to.