Last week on the Big Bang Theory, creator Chuck Lorre called The Bachelor “idiotic.” This led to an idiotic exchange on Twitter that included an ABC executive’s demand for a forced apology. Well, the ABC reality show got its apology last night, though it was sarcastic and directed even more criticism at the show, this time for being sexist and archaic.
Lorre’s post-episode vanity card said,
“I need to apologize. In an earlier vanity card I made a derisive comment about a popular reality show because I thought its premise — a group of single women compete with one another to win the affections of, and ultimately marry, an eligible man — was more threatening to the sanctity of marriage than gay people tying the knot. After careful consideration, I now realize that I couldn’t have been more wrong. My mistake was that I was looking at the show through the tired old eyes of 60’s feminism. But we are clearly in a post-feminist era. The patriarchal sexism that treated women as chattel and dictated how much they could earn or how much control they could have over their own bodies is a thing of the past, a curious relic of a dark, unenlightened time. Likewise, the idea that a woman without a man was somehow incomplete has long ago been consigned to the overflowing dustbin of humankind’s misbegotten thinking. Women are now free to do anything they want, and that includes going on a reality show and using all their female wiles to snag Mr. Right.
I really don’t know what else to say except, ‘I’m sorry and, um… you go, girl!'”
This is pretty terrific criticism, though there is significant irony in Lorre calling a TV show out for its “patriarchal sexism” and for “[treating] women as chattel,” since he also created a series, Two and a Half Men, that has been called a “sometimes creepy, misogynistic comedy.” Perhaps that’s entirely the work of its other creator?
discuss this story