I'm tired of the 'Love Is Blind' body stuff
Women’s body woes = entertainment?
When I think of the brain garbage reality shows I liked most in their heyday — Jersey Shore, America’s Next Top Model, The Real Housewives of Wherever1 — their ludicrous scenarios did not relate to my life in any meaningful way or demand much deep thought, so I could kick back and feel my frenetic brain slowing to essentials-only mode. This is what reality TV is for.
The Netflix show Love is Blind used to feel that way. (Mostly) emotionally immature people dating for the purpose of getting married within the space of a month, from within isolated, physical identity-concealing “pods”? Nick Lachey is there, because? Yes, yes, pure fantasy trash. Blissful synapse slowdown.
It’s not like that for me anymore, though. It’s feeling a little too real. Not only because I’ve realized I own this same objet d’art from Target that’s placed in all the pods…
…but also because season after season has featured protracted storylines about a woman’s body image issues and/or a man’s problems with her body. I’m exhausted by it. Of course body image issues demand examination and discussion — welcome to the point of this newsletter — but let’s be so very real: We’re not getting anything substantive or actionable on those thorny, existential subjects from a Netflix reality show that can’t pull off a live reunion without catastrophe or find a hostess who knows not to ask its subjects whether they’re having condomless sex2 while grinning like the Cheshire Cat.
Some of what we have seen over the past 7 seasons:
Season 2’s Danielle Ruhl said in the season trailer, “Growing up I was a lot heavier, it’s something I’m constantly insecure about,” and later in an interview that she gained 20 pounds while filming and was “super depressed” because producers brought up her weight “over and over.” She also said: “Every single interaction that I have with someone, I’m so scared that they’re gonna be like, ‘Oh, her arms look big here’ or ‘her stomach looks big here.’ I still always look in the mirror and see that little fat girl.”
Deepti Vempati, also from Season 2, discussed that she’d gone through a major weight loss and later said she was “terrified” to meet fiancé Shake Chatterjee, a shithead who was hung up on women’s body sizes in the pods. During their vacation in Mexico, she was nervous about wearing a bikini in front of him. Shake later belittled Deepti’s looks to other cast members, saying there was a lack of a “body connection,” and that he wasn’t physically attracted to her (in fact he said she reminded him of his aunt. Multiple times. After grabbing her ass upon meeting her and telling her he’d be getting her pregnant. Cool, and also normal).
Season 3’s Alexa Alfia introduced herself by saying “I’m curvy, I’m not for everybody,” and that she could “stand to lose some weight.” Her now-husband Brennon Lemieux never expressed any issue with her body on the show, but Alexa said in an interview that someone3 asked pre-reveal if she was nervous about how he would react to her body. “I was like, ‘No… That wasn’t a concern, but it is now.’ I didn’t really think about it until that moment,” she said.
Zanab Jaffrey and Cole Barnett of Season 3, and the infamous “Cuties Footage”: IYKYK, and you can read up on it in detail here. I remain pretty solidly on Team No One but do not see Cole as a villain. It’s clear to me that he didn’t shame Zanab — his tone is playful, he’s excited to go to dinner together, he’s eating with her in the scene, he offered her food earlier that day — but it’s also clear that Zanab has decades of body baggage built up in her psyche that clouds her perception of any conversations around eating, especially since he called another woman on the show a “10” to her “9.” He’s a dumbass, I wish her healing, the whole thing was mortifying to watch.
Hannah Jiles of Season 7 (the current season, which airs its reunion Oct. 30), discussed her weight in a talking head interview — “It’s been really hard to find a husband because people are very superficial ... You could have the prettiest face, the best personality, but if you have a couple extra pounds, they’re not into you,” she said — and told her dates in the pods about her post-COVID weight loss. The conversation around her and erstwhile fiancé Nick Dorka has focused on her dissatisfaction about his body (she seemed to want a hulking linebacker and he’s just, like, a perfectly average-sized dude despite her acting like he’s a wasting Dickensian orphan) and the potential hypocrisy or projection there.
I’m already bracing myself for how Netflix handles the Season 7 reunion if Hannah appears in her current form (I don’t know when it was filmed), because since the show aired she’s lost more weight. I predict Vanessa Lachey will say “revenge body” while snapping in a Z formation; I predict strategic cast reaction cuts and edited-in beats of silence if there are Ozempic denials; I predict Hannah will share what she eats and there will be Pop Crave tweets about The Hannah Diet the next day. The whole thing’s going to be a mess. (I also trust that esteemed LIB recapper and pop culture writing genius will be boots on the ground during the reunion to help us wade through it all.)
Despite that some of these storylines took a turn for the positive — Deepti dumped Shake’s odious ass at the altar and has become a kind of self-love influencer; Alexa and Brennon are still together and she’s made clear in interviews that he loves her because of her curvy body, not in spite of it — every time there’s a Woman’s Body Image Issue in Love is Blind lately, I find myself growing weary. Whether the women are thicker or thinner, we see too many of them following the same pattern of worrying that a man isn’t going to like them because they’re not built like Bella Hadid. That worry, in my opinion, does not spring from a clinical diagnosis of body dysmorphia4 but from the state of being a woman who has encountered constant messaging about how she should be thin to acquire social capital and love. I’m just so sad for all of us when I see this stuff. Maybe I’m in an especially sensitive frame of mind these days, but Love is Blind is starting to feel like little else than a documentary of vulnerable women’s bodily sorrow.
This show is simply not the forum in which these issues (or, you know, any issues) are likely to be explored with depth or care. We’re not reaching new conclusions here. With each passing season I feel like I’m just coldly bearing witness to scenes in which a woman can’t help but lament her body in some way, and then nothing is resolved or some guy makes it worse for her. This has been the troubling case in my real life and the real lives of every woman I know. Why watch it play out on my screen as “entertainment”?
Love Is Blind is already lacking entertainment as it is — this season was boring as hell, probably because these alleged Washington, D.C. people are actually from the Virginia suburbs; I live in Arlington, so I calls ‘em like I sees ‘em — so I fear we may have reached the nadir of this ostensible experiment.
What do you think? Does the body stuff in LIB bum you out? Is there any way the show could improve it, somehow?
Jersey being the best, natch.
Remember when Marissa and Ramses kept saying “condom sex” over and over as tensions grew between them? Harrowing!
Probably a slimy little producer.
I was watching Season 7 episodes with people who were saying Hannah had “body dysmorphia” for expressing insecurity about her weight. That’s not body dysmorphia. That’s the reality of being a bigger woman in a world that doesn’t like bigger women very much. Her insecurity is a quite appropriate and expected reaction to a kind of social ostracization.
I won't watch the show. Where is disability represented? It is not reality.
lol i had to stop watching this show because it made me sad and gave me anxiety. so!