The Anti-Reality TV Essay Every Woman Should Read

Eight months ago I published this piece:

The title is self-explanatory. To my surprise, it was liked by over 30,000 of you, and read by over 800,000 more. In footnote 18, I dropped this nugget:

“Perhaps my most controversial take is that reality TV is inherently immoral, degrading, and extremely harmful to both participant and viewer. Watching it is no different than patronizing a zoo that exploits and abuses its animals. . . . [Its effects are] not dissimilar to the effects of hardcore pornography.”

I assumed that would be a deeply controversial take back then, which is why I buried it deep in the footnotes. But now? Now I’m not so sure. There’s something in the air these days. A low, ambient hum of skepticism. I can feel it. Women are waking up or are, at the very least, open to new opinions on aspects of our culture that have been long dismissed as harmless guilty pleasures but, in reality, are products of inherently exploitative industries that damage women at large. In this essay, that product is reality TV.

A disclaimer before we start: many highly intelligent women watch reality TV, including certain ones close to me whom I love and respect. And I have watched certain programs myself in the past: I’ve consumed nearly every episode of Vanderpump Rules, a sin for which I’ve committed myself to Opus Dei-levels of penance. So, I am certainly not calling you dumb or pathetic for watching reality TV. We’re just all overdue for a serious talk about it.

My stance with all things is that we should turn a critical eye toward the systems that promote harmful products. But, at the same time, I believe women have agency and should critically analyze their consumption habits. Individual consumer agency is, in my view, the only way to galvanize large-scale social change in a world that has unfortunately proven, time and time again, that a dollar is worth more than a soul. I have little faith in spontaneous systemic change. I do have faith that women can collectively effectuate change through what we buy, watch, and discuss among our peers.

This article is long, because meaningful arguments warrant length and academic citations. But if you read through, I’ll cover how reality TV damages participant, viewer, and society at large, and how it is structurally similar to, and as dehumanizing as, pornography. I’ll also cover why the defenses in favor of it don’t hold their weight.

I. Why Should We Talk About Reality TV?

When reality TV hit, it hit us hard and fast. The seed was planted in 1992 with MTV’s The Real World, but the genre didn’t truly detonate until the summer of 2000 when Survivor and Big Brother landed within weeks of each other, garnering millions of views. The speed of the takeover was shocking. Within two years, networks that had been paying seven figures per sitcom episode discovered they could get bigger ratings from bribing civilians to eat bugs and plying 24-year-olds with unlimited alcohol, and talented TV writers found themselves suddenly googling “How To Learn to Code.” And the masses began gorging on all of these new shows and, frankly, they never stopped. Reality TV offered something scripted drama could not: the queasy, voyeuristic promise that the humiliation, drama, and tears were real. And that promise, however dubious, was apparently the most addictive substance American television had ever synthesized, a billion times more powerful than any scripted erotic gay hockey show could ever hope to be.

The early 2000s thrived on sanctioned cruelty. Tyra Banks cannibalized young wannabe models, The Biggest Loser gamified anorexia, To Catch a Predator fused law enforcement with unhinged vigilantism, and the press covered the AVN (Adult Video News) Awards with all the pomp and circumstance of the Oscars. The media treated women as consumables and never as human beings, and the culture’s dirtbag ironic tone, established by Perez Hilton and Howard Stern, gave us all permission to enjoy it. Now the post-hoc documentaries are slowly dropping, letting us consume our old cruelty a second time, except with the moral valence flipped.

Over the last two decades, we watched “The Learning Channel” morph from a respectable TV network into some postmodern Moloch feasting on the souls of the disenfranchised, churning the black soul mass into a franchise in and of itself. On E! (short for “Exploit ‘em All!”), we witnessed Anna Nicole Smith’s weight and speech cadence fluctuate wildly with each episode. We then watched the news of her death treat the deterioration we’d been tacitly enjoying as a quite shocking discovery. We watched morbidly obese people fall down the stairs, addicts storm out of interventions, and the women of The Swan undergo full-body plastic surgery makeovers that left them unrecognizable to their children. And yet, none of these moments really gave society pause about the ethics of the reality TV industry at large. In fact, these most delicious, dark moments arguably propelled the industry into the absolute juggernaut it is today.

And it’s not a bubble. Commercial research firms value the global reality TV production market at somewhere between fifteen and seventeen billion dollars, and forecast it will roughly double within a decade. A big duh given the ratings and the fact that reality TV is drastically cheaper to produce. And dating formats are the growth engine, because relationship content generates the social-media engagement and the 18–34 female demo that advertisers would harvest organs for. The machine is still scaling, still growing, and it’s not showing any signs of slowing. And that is precisely why we should be talking about it.

No show illustrates the cult mechanics of reality TV better than Love Island, whose popularity should alarm anyone paying attention. Its fandom bears striking similarities with any religious congregation. The faithful vote through the app, dispatching contestants like a synod voting on excommunications. They write Substack think-pieces, gather for giant watch parties, wear the merch, and speak the liturgical language that marks insider from outsider as reliably as any glossolalia. And like any cult worth its Nikes, the congregation polices its own doctrine with terrifying zeal. Fans excavate contestants’ social media histories, organize mass reporting campaigns, and sometimes even issue death threats to 23-year-olds whose sin was choosing the wrong partner on a television program. Islanders have required security details for surviving a breakup arc. The show’s producers now issue pre-season pleas begging viewers not to harass the cast. It’s like Reverend Jim Jones gently asking his flock to stop taking the sermons so literally all while designing next week’s sermon to hit even harder. This is the hideous parasocial machine at full industrial capacity, and it’s enough to make me shudder.

II. Why Is It So Popular?

The reasons behind the allure of reality TV, and particularly relationship shows, have been debated ad nauseam. Most of what I read on this subject has been reduced to “we crave the slop because we’re tired and want to unwind,” which explains the rise of passive media consumption generally but not the meteoric popularity of surveilled intimacy shows specifically. Personally, I think it boils down to two things, which are really one and the same. The first is the slow disintegration of the traditional anchors — occupational security, family, religion, community involvement — that used to let a person feel seen without having to broadcast. I discuss this more in Section VII below. The second is the great “smoothening,” whereby modern life has been systematically engineered to remove interpersonal friction. The anchors were made of obligation, and obligation is friction, and we spent twenty years paying good money to remove it from our lives.

None of us can deny that life has become quite comfortable recently. Phone calls are now texts. The negotiation with the cab driver or the Chinese take-out joint is now a faceless app order. And the most terrifying thing in the world — cold approaching a stranger with romantic ambition — is now a swipe that can be deployed while taking a hangover shit on your porcelain throne. Conflict itself is being bred out of existence through ghosting, going no contact, grey-rocking. Writers Tim Wu and Byung-Chul Han have both circled the great “smoothening” from different directions,1 but one thing is clear from the body of evidence: humankind will default toward whatever’s easiest because friction is unpleasant in the moment even when it is nutritive and NECESSARY over time.

So we hunger for friction even as we flee from it. And reality TV (and social media) functions as drama-on-demand, offering a Temu conflict experience. And, best of all, it’s extracted from participants you will never have to face at a wedding. It’s like eating ass through Saran Wrap: approximately 53% of the satisfaction but none of the nasty shit flavor.

Yes, yes, I know, vicarious drama is nothing new. Gossip is as old as time itself. Greek tragedy was explicitly designed as outsourced catharsis, and humans have always consumed secondhand conflict through plays, books, and something my one friend calls a “kiki.” What’s new is the ratio. Village gossip supplemented a life already dense with unavoidable friction. The modern arrangement, however, approaches near-full substitution: a life engineered toward zero direct friction, paired with unlimited synthetic supply.

And here is where the genre sorts itself by gender, which I take up in the next section. The friction being replaced is relational (the argument, the falling-out, the repair, etc.0 and relational labor has always been women’s assignment. So when the obligations thinned out and the market moved in to plug the hole, it did not offer everyone the same product. It offered women the thing they had been trained since girlhood to manage, and then to miss.

III. The Gender Dynamics

And as some of you may have deduced from my outrageous clickbait title, I believe reality TV is bad, though I acknowledge that it exists on a spectrum — so if you’re worried about me shitting on The Great British Bake Off or Beat (Off) Bobby Flay, this essay is not that. This article focuses on surveilled intimacy shows. These are the most dangerous and they are also profoundly gendered. The audience skews young and female. One can determine the demographic from the commercial breaks, which in the UK ran a rather tasteless breast augmentation ad until the regulators intervened.2 Advertisers know exactly who is in that room. The flagship formats (Housewives, dating shows, Kardashians) both focus on women and are unapologetically built for female viewership. As writer Roxane Gay admits, “No one shines more luridly on this faux-real stage than a woman.”3

The sub-genres sort by gender with comic legibility. Women get surveilled intimacy (dating shows, Housewives, wedding and body formats), men get skilled competition (Deadliest Catch, Forged in Fire, Ink Master). The male formats typically film men doing things while the female formats focus on human interiority and film women being things. And the harms are gendered because the extraction is too. It is the female-coded surveilled intimacy shows that get the parasocial machine firing on all cylinders. Female-coded shows also typically reinforce tired gender norms; female reality stars “are often called upon to perform their gender.”4 And the dysmorphia pipeline, which I discuss below, runs overwhelmingly through women’s formats. That’s because the female-coded shows are the ones where the body itself is central to the content. Nobody gives a shit how hot an Ice Road Trucker is, though I’m willing to be proven wrong here.

IV. Exploitation of Participant

Most reality shows are exploitative by nature. With respect to the surveilled intimacy format, the self-image harm is the most obvious because it is visible and measurable. Love Island is its cleanest case study, though the thread runs through the vast majority of female-coded reality TV shows. The casting standard itself is surgically diseased. The Love Island aesthetic is a specific, purchasable look that I need not describe because you all understand what I mean. Participants arrive often having had “work done” to get cast. They then spend eight weeks being ranked against each other in swimwear on national television while the audience live-tweets assessments of their bodies—something I would absolutely rather be launched into the sun than subject myself to.

Former Love Islander Malin Andersson publicly spoke about leaving the experience with dysmorphia. She also described her post-show surgery cascade in the language of addiction. And that is not mere coincidence. Reality TV (and much of lifestyle social media content) collapses the distance between self and image that ordinarily buffers a person, because the image is the career. And I will scream it from the mountaintop: that buffer is so, so incredibly important to a woman’s mental health. This is canonical objectification theory.5 It is that buffer that protects us against the existential dread of Being Perceived, that thwarts our innate narcissistic tendencies, and that allows us to be fully present in the moment, to live.

Once your face/body is the asset, maintenance of the asset becomes obligatory. Each procedure is a business expense and the dysmorphic spiral wears the cloak of professionalism. It is why plastic surgery surges in Hollywood and other face-forward professions, and amongst women highly active on social media.

The depression data coming out is where the harm becomes undeniable, partially because the body count forced the issue into public record. The suicides of two former Love Island contestants and one host triggered UK parliamentary scrutiny and resulted in a series of duty-of-care protocols (psychological screening, aftercare windows, social media training). And the suicide of Hana Kimura on the more humane reality series Terrace House suggests that the core harm is caused by putting a real person’s real interiority in front of a parasocial audience and not necessarily how “mean” the show is. Of course, I have seen many comments arguing that these suicides “had nothing to do with the show” or that this is simply “a completely normal amount of suicides”—very unalarming remarks that gave me a fantastic idea for a new reality TV show called “Suicide House,” which I think we all know people would watch and viciously defend as a guilty pleasure if it was allowed to air. Let people enjoy things!

Former reality TV participants often paint a grim yet consistent clinical picture: an extreme fame spike with no infrastructure, followed by a steep decay curve as the fame plateaus then declines. In “lay people” shows, all of this lands on a person who has typically left a normal ecosystem to participate. Tack onto that the truly demented seasoning of parasocial reality fame where the audience believes it knows you personally and voilà, you have a perfect depression-generating machine. Identity destabilization, social comparison at maximum intensity, public rejection, economic precarity, topped off with an ironclad NDA. It is all nasty work. I would joke that the raw material is ripe for a cleverly spun Black Mirror episode, but in truth, the fact that millions of young people are hooked on Love Island under the mass-sanctioned belief that “it’s just trash TV” is far darker than anything those writers could ever cook up. We just can’t see the darkness because it crept in slowly. And because, of course, TV has always held itself out as our most faithful friend.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying: that villa cannot be stocked with mentally well human beings. And I don’t need to watch a single episode or meet a single cast member to say that. I need only focus on the entrance requirements: a person who (i) will submit to total surveillance for eight weeks, (ii) will conduct intimacy, rejection, and grief on camera for public scoring, and (iii) has, by the impressionable age of 24, treated their face/body as a public science project. These women’s vulnerability, insecurity, instability are what the cameras are there to collect for you to enjoy.

The harm profile shifts with the show format but never disappears. On 90 Day Fiancé, the cameras attach to people already inside a coercion architecture and double-down on it. At the show’s worst moments, producers invite us to watch glorified sex-trafficking. The Housewives tier of upper-class privileged women is more interesting. Years ago I used to be an avid watcher of Vanderpump Rules. I justified it by telling myself it was a victimless crime, like a wealthy Brooklynite shoving a rotisserie chicken up her skirt and waddling out of the Park Slope Whole Foods. But that is not true. These high-end franchises inflict a slower, stranger injury than mere ambush: conversion—the gradual transformation of a real human life into inventory until virtually no unfilmed self remains. The annihilation of the private “unfilmed self” is in and of itself insidious; it trickles down to viewers who may not have a TV spot but are nonetheless encouraged to funnel their energy into self-surveillance “lifestyle” content on social media.

V. Exploitation of Viewer

A. Body Damage

The body harm to viewers is pretty much the participant harm with the supply chain extended one link. The mechanism is comparison, and reality TV/social media weaponizes it in a way purely scripted media does not. The entire premise of such media is that these are ordinary people, not actresses or models. This framework obliterates the exemption viewers typically apply to protect themselves from comparison with “professional” beauty. A young woman can discount Margot Robbie as Margot Robbie. She may have a much harder time discounting a 22-year-old dental nurse presented to her as a peer. The irony, of course, is that this contestant has already been pre-selected for a surgically standardized look, lit, filtered, and shot by professionals, in addition to whatever manmade horrors to which she subjects herself in order to prepare for her season.

Cosmetic surgeons and clinics regularly report a major spike in patient inquiries and procedure requests for fillers, Botox, and breast augmentations whenever Love Island airs.6 I don’t know how anyone can dispute that these shows manufacture dysmorphia in participants and then resell it to the audience as aspiration. Even if you’re a self-assured, savvy viewer, one must question the psychological impact of assaulting millions of women with images of surgically distorted faces and bodies through these shows, social media, and an increasing number of films. Add that to the classic photoshop, filters, and completely fake AI humans we now routinely see, and it’s enough to induce psychosis in the most rational mind.

Here I must OUIJA in the spirit of Andrea Dworkin, whose core insight was that the deepest injury male dominance inflicts is not the one done to women but the one women are enlisted to do to themselves. That occupation is complete not when the territory is held but when the occupied staff the checkpoints voluntarily, believing it to be pure authentic desire. Note, finally, whose face the filler face converges on: the same lips, the same cheeks, the same jaw, on ten thousand distinct faces the world over. It is the Porn Face—the less graceful elder sister of Instagram Face—which has now bled out from behind the RedTube screen into the real world like some terrible, Cronenbergian Videodrome virus. And that virus spreads the more the image is replicated—through TV, through social media, through cinema (this is where I start weeping btw).

B. Mind Damage

I think we can agree that much of the genre is engineered around conflict, humiliation, and social comparison. Arguably, the entire point of these shows is to allow the viewers to both gawk at the human zoo and measure their own bodies, relationships, and lifestyles against cast members. The format normalizes toxic relational behavior such as gossip (which, no—is not just “women’s culture”), betrayal, oversharing/trauma-dumping, and emotional volatility. Negative flaws in IRL society spun as positives in the entertainment industry. Even more concerning, all of this is set against a backdrop of genre’s bingeable structure with its rolling drama and endless spinoffs.

We are in the early stages of studying the impact of reality TV on the human psyche, but certain studies show:

• In one experiment, participants watched various TV programs (a surveillance reality show, a violent crime drama, or neutral programming), and then played a game in which the winner could punish the loser with a burst of unpleasant noise. The reality TV group chose to inflict louder and longer bursts than the group that had just watched the violent drama.7

• A three-year study by Sarah Coyne following 467 adolescents found that watching relational aggression on television predicted relational aggression in real life, while early aggression did not predict later viewing. In other words, mean kids are not simply seeking out mean television.8

• In a 2019 YouGov survey of 4,505 UK adults commissioned by the Mental Health Foundation, 24% of respondents aged 18–24 said reality TV made them worry about their body image.9

• One 2014 study in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery found that among viewers of cosmetic surgery reality programs, believing the content was real predicted greater acceptance of cosmetic surgery, and so did following a cast member on Twitter, independently. The recommendation to surgeons? Advertise on cosmetic surgery reality TV.10

Still, no one has yet run a longitudinal study tying reality TV specifically to depression or anxiety.

But do we really need a peer-reviewed longitudinal study linking reality TV to anxiety/depression to warrant concern about something this insanely popular, particularly amongst young people? The crudest question we can ask about a television show is whether it makes us feel shitty.

Catharine MacKinnon is a feminist legal scholar and one of the most radioactive figures second wave feminism produced.11 She highlighted this very issue in her critique of the shortcomings in scientific studies on the effects of pornography. She wrote that “the dominant view is that pornography must cause harm just as car accidents cause harm, or its effects are not cognizable as harm.”12 She lambasted this “individuated, atomistic, linear, exclusive, isolated, narrowly tortlike—in a word, positivistic—conception of injury,”13 noting that it disregards the systemic way pornography targets and defines members of the group women.

And besides, real influence — the dangerous kind — has always operated subtly, subconsciously, below the surface of mood. It works through the slow recalibration of what we consider normal. Again, MacKinnon argued that “pornography contributes causally to attitudes and behaviors of violence and discrimination which define the treatment of half the population.” Her words shouldn’t be controversial. For over half a century media researchers have referred to this as “cultivation theory.”14 Developed by George Gerbner in the 60s, the theory argues that long-term exposure to media, especially television, dictates how people perceive reality. I highly recommend taking the four minutes to watch the below video (pardon the silly animation), which explains how exposure to media subtly shapes viewers’ worldviews and reinforces (potentially harmful) social and cultural narratives.

So to faithful viewers, the grotesque reality TV diet of strategic gossip, alliance-building, and confrontation-as-communication eventually stops registering as spectacle and starts functioning as a template, whether they think they’re too smart for it or not. Women’s shows almost always reinforce tired gender stereotypes; a young woman who has absorbed four hundred hours of this content has been taught what a woman is supposed to want, how she is supposed to compete, and who she is supposed to be measured against. The shows promote treating manufactured conflict as normal relational work and teach viewers to measure self-worth by the metric the shows reward: physical appearance.

The same rewiring happens with gender and relationships. And the genre’s most seductive mechanism, parasocial connection, is probably its most corrosive. These shows are addictive because they deliver the one-way intimacy of knowing a cast member (and all their insecurities) across seasons. It feels like a relationship because the brain processes it with much of the same wiring, but it’s just a cheap dopamine rush with all the nutrients removed. These shows train us to prefer the company of people who can never know us. That is not a substitute for connection so much as a prophylactic against it.

C. Societal Damage

There’s a genealogy to every Instagram and TikTok feed that runs straight through reality TV. Media scholar Mark Andrejevic predicted it in 2004, well before Facebook left campus. In his book Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched,15 Andrejevic argued that the genre’s real historical function was rebranding Orwell’s dystopian Big Brother. Reality TV’s endgame was to take the totalitarian all-seeing eye, the thing an entire century of dystopian literature taught us to fear, and recast it as an exciting new opportunity.

Reality TV was suddenly a route to celebrity, a therapeutic tool, a hip attribute of the contemporary world. Notably, the cast members he interviewed described surveillance as personal growth rather than a price paid. The narrative sold was that being watched around the clock was how you found yourself, proved yourself, de-Pinocchio’d yourself and became most fully real. The unfilmed life is the unrealized one. To quote the genius Annie Clark (St. Vincent) in her song “Digital Witness”:

If I can’t show it, if you can’t see me

What’s the point of doing anything?

Won’t somebody sell me back to me?

We were all arguably groomed by reality TV. Grooming is, after all, the patient normalization of exploitation before it arrives. And it did arrive: the platforms that launched in reality TV’s immediate wake asked millions to pimp themselves voluntarily, continuously, and do what reality TV stars do without the paycheck. They implored us to narrate our inner monologues in public, perform our relationships, film our breakdowns, convert our most private selves into a stream of consumable disclosures. Reality TV said: pull out your guts for strangers and you will be rewarded—if not through money then through attention (though, as we know, the two are cosmically intertwined).16 Every woman crying into her phone camera for attention online is the daughter of reality TV’s quite successful indoctrination campaign. And she was ready for the camera because reality television had spent years teaching us all that this is what a self is.

VI. The Uncomfortable Reality TV / Pornography Connection

I’ve noticed that female perspectives on pornography have genuinely shifted in the last several years. The shift shows up in the polling: Gallup recorded a record-high 43% of Americans calling pornography morally acceptable in 2018; by 2026 that had fallen to 31%.17

The new porn skepticism skews young, female, and, like a lot of Gen Z skepticism, decidedly post-ideological. It typically arrives through wellness and attachment language rather than Dworkin: complaints about partners’ insane porn-shaped expectations, the choking discourse, the “porn brain” and dopamine framings, and anxiety about one’s own body compared to performers. And that whole Bonnie Blue fiasco, something not even Stephen King could conjure on massive amounts of cocaine, is extreme enough to make any woman shudder regardless of ideology.

Anecdotally, Gen Z women seem much more anti-porn than millennial women did at the same age. That’s not surprising to me given the massive psyop of the early 2000s to trick women into believing that selling their bodies was functionally no different than scanning SKUs at Target or piling roast beef onto a sub at Jimmy John’s. In many ways we were led to believe it was superior to most lines of work, quite possibly the most highly evolved form of Girl Bossism available to those beautiful and brave enough to seize this exciting opportunity.18 Interestingly, however, this emerging anti-porn stance appears to transcend political affiliation: trad-coded and feminist-coded women seem to be arriving at adjacent conclusions from opposite premises. It’s like spotting rayne fisher-quann and Freya India out together on a picnic. I find it a beautiful thing.

Together with Dworkin, MacKinnon waged the 1980s war on pornography, long before it grew into the behemoth it is today. Her core move was borrowed directly from Marx:19 she refused to treat desire as evidence and believed that, just as capitalism manufactures the worker’s contentment, male dominance manufactures female appetite. She also insisted that consent is often the harm’s delivery method rather than its negation, a tenet that can be applied to many things other than pornography. And while this new generation of women may not have studied her, they appear to be developing the very analytical reflex for which she advocated: thinking critically about the ethics of manufactured consent and how content itself installs desire.

But the analysis is often applied selectively. I’ve noticed that many women who can now recognize porn as exploitation wearing consent as a costume and that content trains audience appetites will watch garbage like Love Island that evening without that same reflex firing once, though the parallels are unshakable.

“In contemporary society, pornography is an industry that mass produces sexual intrusion on, access to, possession and use of women by and for men for profit.”20 Swap a few words and you have the business model of every surveilled intimacy show on television: an industry that mass produces emotional intrusion on, access to, possession and use of women, typically by and for women, for profit. The sentence survives the substitution intact, which should tell you how much of MacKinnon’s objection was ever really about the sex itself. “Pornography distorts Eros . . . mistakes it, mis-images it, misrepresents it.”21 Surveillance shows unequivocally pervert human interiority and intimacy in the exact same way, all for the consumer's pleasure. Many of us have decided the body is sacred and worth defending, but what of our most private, emotional moments? For almost all of human history, we reserved these for a select few individuals—people we knew, people we cared for—now all quite promiscuously auctioned off for a dollar, a bot comment, a lowly cartoon heart.

Both industries share the same labor-law black hole, the same recruitment pool, the same intoxication economy, and the same product: “authentic” female interiority/exteriority extracted under inauthentic conditions and repackaged to consumers as the real deal. The logical conclusion is that porn and reality TV are essentially the same machine operating at different points on a clothing-optional spectrum. And the super hot take is that the reality TV end is in some ways the purer specimen because it proves the exploitation mechanism still works without the sex act. And yet the critique that has finally reached pornography has not yet reached our beloved guilty pleasure of these surveilled intimacy shows, with most women treating it as a different business altogether.

If I think about why the firewall holds, the answers are unflattering. Partly it’s the sex itself doing some puritanical signaling. The new porn critique, unlike MacKinnon’s, is substantially organized around the sex acts themselves and what they normalize in bedrooms/male conduct. Under that lens, an industry that extracts everything except the anal naturally reads as more innocent. But in the Marxian analysis, the sex act itself was never the core harm; it was always the conversion of a person into content/commodity: “pornography turns a woman into a thing to be acquired and used.”22

The imagined consumer’s gender is also likely to blame. The emerging anti-porn position is, at bottom, a critique of male consumption and his habits, his distorted expectations, his complicity in something unpalatable. In this regard, the porn critique is rather cheap for a female viewer to adopt since the indicted appetite is that of Just Some Guy (and probably a disgusting one). Reality TV (and very large swaths of “lifestyle” social media), on the other hand, is her appetite. So, an indictment of reality TV is more expensive; it threatens the Sunday night ritual, the group chat, the relationship comparison engine’s nightly dividend (“that is so not us, babe”). And beneath all of this, viewer cynicism is doing real heavy lifting. Unlike the lowly male gooner, the savvy reality TV viewer watches ironically, critically, with full literacy that functions as insulation. But the supply chain doesn’t care how sophisticated the viewer is. It never has, and it never will.

All of this leads me to the uncomfortable conclusion that much of this updated critique of porn on behalf of women arguably terminates precisely at the boundary of the critic’s own taste. And a critique with that stopping point is more of a gussied-up taste preference than a critical structural analysis. Many women seemingly have no issue condemning the extraction of human bodies for male consumption, but remain silent/ignorant about the extraction of human interiority for female consumption, even though the math is extremely similar. The test of whether the new awareness is analysis or fashion is whether it can cross that line. Can the viewer who grimaces at the disgusting Pornhub site learn to read reality TV with the same eyes? If she cannot recognize the glaring similarities, that grimace is just the irony-poisoned smirk of the early 2000s running in reverse.

VII. The Postmodern Identity Void and the Defenses

I am absolutely expecting a great deal of pushback on this piece. Over the last few years I’ve noticed a growing, fervent defensiveness in response to any criticism of some product, artist, TV show, podcast, etc. that someone enjoys. It can downright border on rabidity these days. And I believe that is because a substitution has occurred over the last half-century. The identities that used to be issued by early adulthood have, in many ways, become too precarious to build a self on. A young person cannot anchor a stable identity to a worthless degree, a job with no security, a city they’ll be priced out of, an institution they don’t trust, a church they don’t attend, or a family they’re not close with (or that simply doesn’t exist yet).

But the human need for identity is not optional, so what did everyone do? We all went shopping. Slowly, consumption mutated from necessity into identity infrastructure. You are no longer a person who just buys things, you are a person constituted by them: a Lana girl, a Bravo head, an A24 chick, a Swiftie, Pilates clean girl, cottagecore, someone whose politics are legible from her tote bag. These are all self-ratifying memberships with their own rituals, vocabularies, and heresies. This is the soil from which “feminism as consumer choice” grows, and it’s why the reduction shouldn’t be condemned as some moral failure on behalf of individual women. It’s really more of a structural inevitability given the state of the world today.

When identity itself has been rebuilt on a shaky foundation of consumption, of course “what I watch” feels like “who I am,” and a critique of your favorite show feels like an attack on your very personhood. And with reality TV specifically, there is a second layer because the product is people. You’re not only defending a purchase but a living, breathing woman whom you have watched cry, whom you feel you know better than most of your coworkers, and who has never once known you. Criticize the machine and it feels like you have insulted a friend, which is exactly the parasocial arrangement the machine was built to produce.

Yes, I do believe that watching these shows is harmful to the viewer. They normalize bad behaviors, inflict dysmorphia, and promote exploitation. That does not mean I’m calling you dumb or pathetic for watching them. A critique of a harmful, addictive product is not a critique of you yourself, only the industry that has a vested interest in convincing you it’s part of who you are.

A. It’s Just Not That Deep, Babes.

I’m not sure when and where “It’s Just Not That Deep, Babes” was invented, but I am sure it was invented by an extremely powerful woman. It remains one of the most potent attacks on any criticism lobbed towards anything, ever. A single sentence that hits harder than an atom bomb, effortlessly delivered by a woman probably wearing vintage Y2K Miu Miu. It’s a claim about jurisdiction, and jurisdictional rulings can only be obeyed or defied. The phrase is designed to end all inquiry without ever engaging it, and it’s so damn slick because our culture has been poisoned by a dreadful amount of irony these days.

The phrase also contains a glaring philosophical error. It confuses the register of the object (a TV show or a social media post) with the register of its function. No, a cigarette is not that deep. But the tobacco industry’s fifty-year epistemological warfare campaign is deep. Balls deep, even. Obviously the object can be trivial while the system that produces, distributes, and profits from it can deserve more than short shrift.

The phrase also has a well-documented employment history and, when unmasked, the Scooby Doo villain is usually the same. Trace any consequential harm that was successfully deferred for decades and you’ll find “it’s not that deep” snickering in an industry-funded costume. It’s just a cigarette; some people are prone to excess. It’s just a drink; know your limit. It’s just a gun; only people kill people. It’s just an app; grow a spine and put your phone down if it bothers you. In every case, a systemic problem is reframed as an individual foible: relocate the analysis from the industry to the user, and cast anyone who examines the system as a sanctimonious little scold with a proportionality problem (which, TBF, I totally am <3)

B. I’m Not Watching Earnestly. I’m a Cultural Anthropologist!

Ah yes, the cultural anthropologist. When confronted about their reality TV habits, many women before me have slowly morphed into Werner Herzog and exclaimed “The poet must not avert his eyes!” in a shaky German accent. Perhaps I was even once something of a poet myself.

And the most reductive version of this defense always presents reality TV as nothing more than a David Attenborough nature documentary. As if a cheetah on the savannah is the same as a young woman aware of herself being filmed, how the audience received her, or what the edit decided she was. Any attempt to justify reality TV in the language of NatGeo is quite literally the viewer dehumanizing the players to distance herself from a harmful ecosystem. I’m not aware of any cheetah that left an episode of Planet Earth with body dysmorphia, depression, or a rape threat from IG user BigTateFan94.

But this view is as toxic as it is popular. Cynicism is perhaps the most dangerous compliance mechanism out there. Savviness feels like resistance but functions as a license. It allows one to stay “above the fray” and yet keep consuming, because the ironic awareness diminishes (if not discharges) the critical obligation. A whole vocabulary of ironic self-diagnosis (doomscrolling, brain rot, guilty pleasure, girl math, etc.) has evolved over the last few decades. And we all love these terms because, while they feel like critique, they really offer us absolution.

David Foster Wallace, perhaps television’s most anxious apostate, said it best: “irony tyrannizes us.”23 The ironic mode of viewing is frankly worse than the credulous mode because it inoculates. Irony allows the viewer to experience critique and complicity as a single pleasurable act; you get all the delicious degradation and the moral credit for seeing through the smoke. MacKinnon was wildly contemptuous of what she saw as liberal feminism’s tendency to convert structural problems into questions of individual attitude. The bad feminist confesses (guilty!), the structure persists, and the confession itself becomes a commodity in some grotesque girlypop ouroboros.

And TV eagerly absorbed the ironic critique and started selling it back to us with great success. It flattered us. Ah yes, the knowing viewer — so critical, so literate, so smart and, dare I say, not like the savages who consume this slop quite earnestly, or worse, the savages who subject themselves to the gaze. But the industry does not care why you watch. One of my loyal readers recently very astutely commented that “eating a Twinkie ironically is still eating a Twinkie,” which sent me deep into a nostalgia spiral about every terrible bartender/magician/comedian penis I quite ironically sucked in my youth. But alas, a dick sucked ironically is a dick sucked nonetheless, and I’ll take that L to my grave.

C. Damn, Let a Bitch Enjoy Things

Look, I know you enjoy it. But you enjoy it for a reason. This defense assumes that enjoyment is testimony from somewhere outside the system, perhaps arriving in the interior of a meteor crashing into earth’s crust from deep space. Marx never argued that the worker was lying about her contentment with her job, only that capitalism produces the subjectivity that reconciles the worker to it. In the same vein, the radical feminist account says the pleasure is perfectly real and exactly the problem. The masterstroke of dominance is arranging for submission to masquerade as one’s own appetite. Like most drugs, these shows are made and edited to be incredibly addicting and to cultivate the very thirst they’re designed to slake. They’re literally the Afrin nosespray of media.

The sophisticated version of this defense says “yes, my desire was manufactured, yes, I can see the killing floor from here but uuhhhh I’m going to keep enjoying it anyway but transparently.” This position is popular; it does, after all, allow us to feel smart without having to change anything whatsoever. It deserves engagement because it concedes the Marxist premise. Its founding document is Roxane Gay’s “Bad Feminist,” recommended to me by a subscriber.

Gay is an American writer, professor, editor, and cultural critic. Through her essays, she dissected reality TV’s gendered cruelty machine, admitted “the women are undoubtedly exploited,”24 but decided to continue watching anyway. Her core ideology is rooted in her 2012 essay “Bad Feminist” (expanded into the 2014 collection).25 There, she pushed back on austere “essential feminism.” Her complaint was that this version (mainly championed by middle-class white women) couldn’t accommodate actual human contradiction. Real women want discordant things and live inside the culture they critique, and essential feminism functioned as a purity test that mostly expelled people, and made the movement smaller and more joyless while doing nothing structural. But the essay was designed to be a corrective and correctives are dosage-dependent. The following decade arguably produced a feminism with no real boundaries. For all its alleged lack of joie de vivre and inclusivity, second wave feminism at least had a shared account of what was wrong — you could be wrong inside it, because there was at least something to be wrong about. The “bad feminist” framework is so seductively easy (dare I say, frictionless) that it won out completely, and in so winning dissolved the tension that gave it meaning in the first place.

The result is that much of contemporary self-proclaimed feminist analysis tends to become rigorous and structural when the appetite under examination is someone else’s (his porn, his videogames, his gaze), yet suddenly supple, complex, and anti-purity when the appetite is one’s own (my Bravo, my TikTok, my Juvederm, my true crime).26 It’s touted as an accessible, user-friendly feminism with generous boundaries. In reality, it’s a shapeshifting shadow-feminism whose boundaries are drawn fresh for each transaction, always around the speaker’s pleasures and through everyone else’s. More bluntly, however, it’s just consumerism.

And I should be honest because I very much enjoyed Vanderpump Rules when I watched it years ago. But the more demented and parasocial reality TV grew with each passing year, the less interested I became. I didn’t discipline myself out of it so much as develop an allergy, so I really don’t hold this out to be some great moral achievement. Once the veil was lifted, it had the same effect as watching a magician after someone has explained the trick. Womp womp.

I’m sure I’ll get some “yawn”-type comments asking the rhetorical question: isn’t it exhausting to adopt such a tiresome view toward something as trifling as reality TV? My answer is no. It’s 2026 — it’s essentially a Lotus Eater’s paradise for anyone with a modicum of free time in a first world country. There are countless less exploitative and harmful things to watch through a dumb screen and, even better, to do; countless other ways to bond with my female friends. I don’t miss reality TV. At the same time, if a friend absolutely insists on putting on four back-to-back episodes of Real Housewives at a sleepover (which does still happen in my life), I don’t hit her with a reality TV exploitation screed. I smile, negotiate it down to one episode, and relieve my frustration on my 24,000 nameless Substack subscribers six weeks later. God bless you all.

D. The Ol’ Misogyny Argument

Some may accuse this essay of rehashing the same old contempt for women-coded art that came for the Austen novel, the soap opera, and the BookTok werewolf erotica, now coming to hunt down and flay Andy Cohen, who no one can convince me is not a Zeta Reticuli alien in an expensive skinsuit. But the misogynist tradition attacked women for their pleasures while leaving the industries that farmed those pleasures unexamined. And the defense-of-women’s-culture argument, however honorably descended from Radway and Ang, doesn’t cleanly transfer to reality TV because those scholars were defending women who consumed fiction. A Housewife is not a text, no matter how fake you think the show may be. When reality TV is protected as “women’s culture,” the only party that wins is the exploitation industry, which gets its dehumanizing supply chain reclassified as girlhood and placed under a glass cloche. It is quite literally the oldest trick in the book, and we shouldn’t fall for it.

I write all of this not to shame you for watching reality TV, though it is of course abhorrent, nasty, harmful slop. In truth, we all should take some time to pause and analyze our media consumption habits: they absolutely shape our society and affect us all, no matter how loudly we may protest “not I, not I!”

I’ll be the first to admit I’d like to consume less media in general. While not all content is created equally, at the end of the day screen time is still screen time regardless of whether it’s Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (1975) or “Vines That Cared for Me When No One Else Did.” In truth, I’m pretty pessimistic about all visual media right now—both the garbage quality and how it’s being constantly shat out at us like diarrhea-on-demand. All of this junk has displaced religion as the new opiate of the masses, a baby’s pacifier to shut us up about the state of the world, and everyone feels low-key aware of it. At this point, if you were to present me with a button that would destroy every TikTok reel, YouTube short, reality show, and Netflix Docuslop even at the expense of critically acclaimed films, I would pound that motherfucking button like a coach on The Voice without hesitation. I would then immediately join you all in the town square for a delightful Punch and Judy show.

When I was young there was no layperson discourse about things like plastic surgery, pornography, social media, or reality TV—these topics were reserved for high-level academia. Teenage me consumed Cosmo Magazine, while my 20s belonged to xoJane: both desperately tried to teach me how to give an amazing blowjob, slim down for summer, and master a “glam” make-up look—none of which I have mastered by the ripe age of 39 by the way. My family watched COPS as a bonding activity; we gleefully cheered at things which I would now easily identify as police brutality, entrapment, and bigoted harassment. For a long time, I was convinced that pornography was simply a man’s private “guilty pleasure.” I never questioned these things. I didn’t even begin thinking critically about media consumption habits until well into my 30s because, frankly, no one suggested that I should. So many young women who use this platform have a massive leg-up over those of us who are a bit longer in the tooth. That is because for as much as I kvetch about Substack.dot.com and its social media-ness (boo), when used appropriately it arguably does something no other online platform has done: provide easy access to a vast spectrum of long-form analysis from writers with different viewpoints.

Thank you for reading. I will now be entering federal witness protection.