The Golden Bachelorette changes nothing

Male attention makes women visible, at any age.

Only Joan could have been The Golden Bachelorette.

Back in October, I wrote about The Golden Bachelor’s vague politics of anti-ageism, and the severe lack of authentic hags on the show.

The Golden Bachelor Changes Nothing

Well, here we are again. The Golden Bachelorette, the latest iteration of the perpetually out-of-touch, behind-the-times reality TV franchise for heterosexual people that will not die and now officially has way too many spinoffs, premiered a couple weeks ago. This time it stars hot, thin, blonde 61-year-old grandma Joan Vassos.

And here I am, still wondering, where are the crones?

As I wrote during the tenure of our first Golden Bachelor—72-year-old Gerry Turner, who later married Theresa Nist on TV then divorced three months later:

Like many of the franchise’s attempts to remain current, The Golden Bachelor emphasizes that it’s a significant departure from what we’ve seen in the past. This time the franchise is, allegedly, radically breaking the mold of age. Some agree. The show has been called “groundbreaking” by WaPo, in an article that claims the show shatters stereotypes and allows the women competing for Gerry’s heart, all in their 60s and 70s, to “raise a little hell” and have some “me” time.

But… what?

The 7 million viewers of Gerry and Theresa’s Golden Wedding seem to like this show— although, the franchise garnered all those viewers before Gerry and Theresa’s Golden Divorce, which upset a lot of people, so maybe the tides have turned?

Either way, love the show or hate it, I cannot blame you. There is something absolutely heart-warming about watching older people fall in love, and there is no shortage of fresh cliches to bolster this new type of dating show, including the “getting a second chance” and “it’s never too late“ of it all.

Some unverified sources, however, put The Golden Bachelorette ratings as the lowest in franchise history, which has me wondering. Are people less willing to watch an older woman search for love and partnership? Was last season just too bad for viewers to try again?

Personally, what I have found most boring about this new version of the franchise is that there is simply no good drama— the show is so preoccupied with its careful representation of the older crowd that it doesn’t really let us have any fun with the Boomery and well, older, nature of the contestants, save a few jokes about 401ks and naps.

By most accounts, in fact, it was Gerry who ended up becoming the villain of The Golden Bachelor, after it was revealed that he was misrepresenting his work history and that he had a checkered dating history after his wife’s death. The facts of this more honest account of his life were not necessarily his downfall (at least not totally)— the image that emerged of him as the show ended was just so out of alignment with the cloyingly sweet, goofy, charming, chaste grandpa he claimed to be on the show. We felt duped.

The women on Gerry’s season, however, even those who were briefly and very mildly villainized, mostly got away unscathed. I respect this. There is something really distasteful, to say the least—even for a show known for its distaste, and racism, and and— about making fun of older women. Certainly the show itself is treading lightly, lest it veer into really blatant ageist misogyny.

But in doing so, they’ve also youth-washed the cast. These are not 20-somethings “opening up” for the first time and trying to “build a life.” So let’s get the love story in their own language, ya know?

What also failed about last season was, of course, the pervasive practice of pickleball amongst every contestant, including Gerry himself. Nothing against pickleball! But the emphasis on this and other fitness routines on the show was excessive, signaling a certain class mentality about retirement and old age. And honestly, I don’t even want to begin to deconstruct here the physical optics of these casts who not only completely embrace diet and beauty culture and “aging well” and “gracefully” as though we all have universal healthcare or something, all while espousing their beliefs that age is nothing but a number.

But that does bring me back to this season’s new Bachelorette, Joan Vassos, who absolutely looks younger than I do. And I mean, great— I love this for her. But let’s just be real, this show is not a radical representation of aging, because you can barely tell that she has?

And I mean this not only in terms of the contestants’ physical appearances, but in regard to how people on the show talk about love and partnership. Perhaps what’s been most dissapointing about an otherwise kind of fun frame for a dating show— I’m all for people of any age finding love and pleasure, let’s go!— has been the show’s insistence on narrowly adapting the traditional hetero fairy tale that it has always pushed elsewhere in the franchise.

For example. Gerry was a widower, and he had to be, because otherwise, he would have been a divorced man, or a man who feared commitment. Joan, too, is a widow, because otherwise, more radically, she might have once been happy without a man.

She is also, like Gerry, pretty chaste (she has taken beds out of the fantasy suites)— which tells a certain story about age and sex and desire, namely that they don’t belong together, even as the show proclaims it’s saying some new thing. But what exactly is new here?

I will concede that in some circles, even today, remarrying after the loss of a spouse is something people still argue about. I have an older family member, for instance, who lost his wife a few years ago. He recently started dating a new woman. This woman’s family is not at all accepting of the new relationship. She recently lost her longterm husband, and her children are not accepting of her new partner because they see this new relationship as some sort of betrayal of the former husband, their father. This strikes me as an incredibly unfair way to think about the rules of love, grief, and a mother’s life.

So, in that sense, especially in more conservative circles, I guess we could say the show is introducing some spicy takes on old age. But the show— I’ll be generous here— is still finding its footing in terms of highlighting how aging can bring with it more complex narratives about love and partnership. And nearly every courtship for Joan in the most recent episode involved discussion of purportedly perfect prior marriages.

Joan has already identified herself as a woman who has devoted her entire life to her husband and children. In the first episode, in fact, when introducing herself to the audience, she says her husband made her feel visible (also “safe and special,” which is lovely!) every day of their 33-year marriage. She asks whether it’s possible to have “two great loves” in one lifetime. Against a musical backdrop of Kacey Musgraves and Phil Collins, Joan insists she is a mother and grandmother first, but now it’s time to do something for herself. And she assures us that the way you look and the way you feel are two different things— all while looking great.

As with last season, we are getting some motions toward the real marginalization older women feel in American culture, but they are always couched in the language of maternity, narrow definitions of both family and love, and loss. Joan says she previously felt “invisible,” but she doesn’t trace this feeling to the cultural perception of aging women. She says she feels invisible because she lost her husband so suddenly—he who always saw her, somewhat into being.

This made me think of what one showrunner said in that WaPo piece that came out in 2023: “[The women] don’t feel seen in their private lives or their public lives. Instead, they’re really only seen as people who can serve a purpose to others: They’re caretakers, they’re grandmothers, they’re mothers. But they’re not seen for just themselves.” What happened to exploring that? It would be a hefty stretch to say that we’ve seen much, if any, of who Joan is outside her marriage and her roles as grandmother and mother.

Instead, we are getting more of the same in this idea that a woman only truly becomes herself, only sees herself, through the eyes of a man who loves her. As several of Joan’s suitors put it, what we are meant to love about Joan is not her refusal of the invisibility that comes with age— but rather, how “selfless” she has been all her life, always putting “family first.”

In the last season, the women competing for Gerry’s approval also repeatedly reminded him— and viewers—that they had been good mothers, good wives, good caretakers. And they were still hot and still cooked! Gerry’s ladies never spoke a negative word about their previous husbands, and they wanted Gerry and all of us to know that they had put in their time as moms and homemakers, and therefore were qualified to be there—still worthy of love and male attention because they had done their feminine duty for years.

More qualifiers, because I watch this stuff for my love of love (and drama!): wonderful that Joan is finally, after 61 years of life, stepping out and getting some “me” time! Wonderful that she has felt seen by a man ever!

But why are we still, in the year 2024, applauding her for giving her entire life over to her family, and using that as a metric of whether she is now deserving of a second chance at love or even “fun”? Or perhaps the better question is simply: what are the stakes of continuing to tell that story to millions, especially right now, amid so much highly public, political rhetoric about what makes women worthy of not just love and fun, but full citizenship?

What troubles me, in other words, isn’t Joan’s story per se—she can feel how she feels! live your hot 61yo life Joan Vassos!—but how the show puts her story and similar stories to use. Lost love is used to avoid addressing a potentially more interesting possibility for women of a certain age: the question of what happens and who we become when our view of love and partnership changes through the years, looks more unconventional, and how women (and men) find love again after they drop the rope or step off the path. And what of late love for those who never followed the prescribed path in the first place?

After all, divorce is skyrocketing not only among the very online women of my generation, but among Boomers. “Gray divorce” is on the rise, nearly 49% of adults 65-74 have experienced it, and women initiate about 60% of gray divorces.

Such women, of course, would never get to be the first Golden Bachelorette, even if they would be a more accurate reflection of women’s lived “golden years,” because such women threaten the lifelong-love-as-romantic-success plot in which the franchise is so invested.

And I guess it’s also worth noting that those women probably wouldn’t even be interested in participating in a show like this. As I wrote in October:

More than half of women in America are unpartnered or single, and most older single women, in contrast to their male counterparts, aren’t looking to date. But the show continues the franchise’s tradition of feeding a conservative ideology that sees women as incomplete without male partnership. This is, perhaps, the central theme in The Bachelor franchise and reality dating TV in general—the idea that life for women is unfulfilling without men, and that women cannot find belonging without a male partner.

Back then, I hoped for the following, but as predicted, we didn’t get it:

Maybe next we’ll get The Golden Bachelorette, starring an unruly divorced woman who just wants to have sex (or not!) and who is actually vocally over taking care of men—or one who is just looking for some other crones she can stir up trouble with. I would watch those versions of the show, but somehow, I doubt we’ll get to.

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