The contestant was gorgeous. Dark hair, big brown eyes, luscious lips, cool tattoos—all of it awash in slightly tired, sultry seductiveness. She seemed funny, smart, somewhat melancholy, which only added to her charm. But she had qualms. She had qualms about her size specifically, having gone through a few situations in life where her curves seemed to have been a problem for a few douches she’d gone on a date with. She called herself a “fat woman,” which didn’t sound like self-reproach but—as it often is with people who have been hounded for whatever difference they posses—what she kept bringing up to make sure we (the non-fat people) were okay with. There seemed to have been enough douches in her past that a romantic rejection became something that she kept saying she was overly familiar with.
But on the popular show Love is Blind (Brazil), the contestant, Amanda finally had a chance to meet eligible boys who had no way to judge her for her appearance. There was a wall separating the contestants and in order to make it past the elimination, people had to develop a genuine connection, long before they could let their physical preferences get in a way. Still, whenever Amanda was on-camera she would bring up her “fatness” and being stressed about having to reveal herself at the end of phase one.
As the dates went on, Amanda developed a connection with one particular Wankeroo who was also developing a connection with a slightly bonkers (and slim) Bruna. At one point, Bruna had had enough of the stupid show and she begged Wankeroo to quit the experiment and leave with her and prove his love. But Wankeroo insisted that he was the kind of a man who liked to “see things through” and that he was “not a quitter.” Despite liking Bruna more than he seemed to like Amanda, Wankeroo didn’t let himself be persuaded even when Bruna threw in the good ol’ dramatic we-knew-each-other-in-past-lives and insisted that it wouldn’t be until next time around (as in the next life) that she would give him another chance were he to give up on her now.
Wankeroo wouldn’t budge, and he said good-bye to Bruna. Besides, he had a nice thing going with Amanda, a woman who made him laugh and who made him feel calm—a woman he had felt more and more intrigued by as time went on. Whether Amanda was a back-up or a genuine thing, the fact remained that Wankeroo was determined to be in the experiment and that he claimed he had fallen in love with her.
Until he met her in person. In the show—for those of you who have been kidnapped by bears and spent the past three years in a cave—there’s always the big reveal when the people who originally meet and fall in love in “the pods,” get to see each other for the first time. By then they have already established some foundation for a romantic relationship and have gone through a marriage proposal (in order to get released from pods, you gotta get down on one knee/ say “yes.”). The physical meeting is a proverbial cherry on top, but also the one area where the adage “love is blind” is really put to the test. Can people fall in love for real without seeing each other? When the reveal happens, the contestants tend to discover—to their usually almost palatable relief—that they’re totally attracted to the object of their pod love, and then it is time to move to Phase 2 (honeymoon, the whole thing is set up backwards, ends with an actual wedding where at the altar they get to say their final I dos—or don’ts; depending on how the leading-up-to-it weeks have gone).
Amanda had her misgivings till the final reveal although she reassured the cameras that she would always be happy with how she looked regardless of what might happen, and as she stood waiting to see and be seen for the first time her very own Wankeroo, I was rooting for her.
The doors opened. Wankeroo and Amanda saw each other, finally. She wore a lovely blood-red gown, he a well-fitting suit. They walked towards each other, Wankeroo on shaky legs, Amanda shyly but more steadily than him. Once they stood right in front of each other, Wankeroo froze. He said, “Can I give you a hug?” instead of tilting her backwards for a movie-screen kiss. They hugged. He kept shaking. At first it was hard to tell if he was perhaps just overcome with love or if it was as it was, his absolute shock at seeing a woman who had lots of breasts and a lot of ass. They parted briefly but then he lunged in for a hug again, burying his froggish face in Amanda’s shoulder—Amanda who probably knew right away but who stood graciously and held that limp Jell-o of a man until he was done trying to come up with whatever lines he was going to lob at her and the viewers to explain his reaction. When interviewed on camera, he kept repeating something along the lines of not being sure if he was ready to be with such a “strong woman,” which was a reference to her independence but, of course, which was not that at all; it was bullshit. And Wankeroo who just days before stood his ground in regards to seeing the experiment through, quit on the spot. Amanda looked beautiful and dignified as she wistfully concluded that this, of course, wasn’t the first time a man reacted in a peculiar way when finally meeting her in person. She reassured the viewers again that she was okay with how she looked, and that what happened had nothing to do with her but everything to do with Wankeroo. Which was somewhat true.
The problem wasn’t Amanda’s size. But I also doubt the problem was something like simple biology, pheromones, un uncontrolled reaction of a body to a body. The problem was Wankeroo’s conditioning because Wankeroo, like most dogs in an ongoing world-wide Pavlovian experiment called current Beauty Standards, had been raised to salivate only over a specific type of a girl, an Instagram amalgamation of hips-to-waist-to-chest ratio (Kardashian for a quick reference) that does not allow for Amanda’s proportions. Naturally, the shame does not lie with Amanda but neither does it lie with Wankeroo (it’s bad enough that his parents named him that); it lies with all of us believing certain lies to the point that they become truths—so deeply ingrained in us that we are unable to tell the difference.
Body, shame & dumb tv shows
Wonderfully, thoughtfully written, Jowita. Thank you for saving me from watching this gong show (I have watched the first US based one and the one set in Japan.) Wankeroo "had been raised to salivate only over a specific type of a girl, an Instagram amalgamation of hips-to-waist-to-chest ratio (Kardashian for a quick reference) that does not allow for Amanda’s proportions" -- yes to this, so insightful and also, friggin depressing. In my own substack last week I wrote about the internal corset, which is perhaps an even more woeful state of affairs than wearing an external corset, historically.