In the era of welfare, and aftercare, and intimacy co-ordinators, and every other regulatory safeguard against the exploitation of the first two decades of reality TV, a lot of us choose to believe it must be okay now.
Every participant has to go through rigorous vetting, and gets so much psychological support, that whatever we end up watching on screen must be kosher and no longer throws up any ethical quandaries at all. The industry has learnt its lessons and done the work, permitting us to binge the trash with impunity, safe in the knowledge that everyone involved must have come out of it tippity-top or it wouldn’t get broadcast.
Well, shocker, not quite. The latest – especially grim – reality TV scandal is that multiple women have accused their on-screen “husbands” of sexual misconduct during production of Married at First Sight UK. A Panorama investigation broadcast on Monday night revealed the allegations of three women, two speaking under anonymity, of coercive control, violence, and rape. It describes a culture in which the partners misunderstand consent within the constructed “marriages” (they are not legally binding), believing that label entitles them to sex.
There are reports of a man punishing his partner for “making him feel like a rapist” after he’d crossed the line and she was distressed. Of a woman resisting sex after it had grown violent, and her partner accusing her of not taking the marriage seriously – “you can’t say no, you’re my wife”. He threatened her with an acid attack if she told the production staff. She did, they continued filming. All the men deny the allegations and the programme-makers, CPL Productions, insist they adhere to the gold standard of welfare and that all participants had passed rigorous checks – but all episodes of MAFS have been removed from Channel 4’s website and this crisis surely spells the end of a series whose conceit was always too extreme to be safe.
As usual, everyone is horrified by the news and as usual, no-one is especially surprised. When awful things happen on reality TV we all suddenly “come to” and declare that tragedies and transgressions are “inevitable” and so is the case with MAFS. This is a programme that matches up strangers, ask them to live together cut off from their routines and loved ones, puts them in situations in which intimacy is expected, encourages drama and conflict and then observes as the consequences play out.
Let’s get one thing out of the way: rape is never inevitable. There are no circumstances anyone can engineer in which a violation like rape just happens. To imply otherwise does not accord the perpetrators sufficient blame. It offers them mitigating circumstances – defences they do not deserve.
What is true, though, is that reality and dating shows are constructed around the understanding that intimacy between strangers is reasonable, which can make it very difficult for those taking part to feel able to communicate discomfort or boundaries.
In the real world, there is no situation in which you are expected to share a bed with someone you don’t know, yet on television it is completely normalised – it is a key device to accelerate sex, and more importantly: drama.
Tommy Fury and Mollie-Mae Hague had sex on Love Island – but at least the cameras were rolling (Photo: ITV)On the very first night of Love Island, initial couples are partnered up and share beds in a communal bedroom. We don’t bat an eyelid, even though we’d never be caught dead. On MAFS, if one half of a partnership decides not to sleep in the “marital” bed hours after meeting it is usually presented as a rejection, rather than a normal boundary. It’s a baseline in the format of all sorts of dating shows like Stranded on Honeymoon Island, Perfect Match, The Ultimatum, Temptation Island. In fact, it’s the least extreme part of most of them, and yet immediately puts participants in a position where intimacy isn’t just more likely, but an expectation, whether or not they are ready for it.
Obviously most sex on TV, however ill-advised or reputationally damaging or exposing, is usually between two consenting adults and is a normal part of a developing relationship – as was the case on several series of Love Island. One upside of it being caught on camera at least is that there is evidence of what happened, and producers can exercise a duty of care to prevent bad things from happening. That doesn’t exist on a show like MAFS where the intimacy is behind closed doors.
Reality TV, whose concepts have grown more and more extreme, has also normalised the idea that relationships do not need time for trust to build. MAFS asks if strangers can be married and puts them in a suffocatingly intense environment in order to try it. Love Is Blind asks people to fall in love and get engaged, without either party knowing what the other looks like. Then it packs them off on a honeymoon in which again, sex is expected. Age of Attraction asks people to commit to each other based on chemistry, only revealing true ages after they have “fallen in love”. And when everyone is encouraged to declare they’ve fallen in love within mere days, the idea of love itself – and all the trust and intimacy that comes with it – becomes warped.
We have accepted the idea that it is reasonable to withhold key tenets of relationships – time to develop, physical attraction, the knowledge of vital details about each other’s lives – and still expect intimacy to follow.
And when it happens, for the viewer, it’s a thrill. I’m not Mary Whitehouse – this water-cooler stuff is what reality TV fans live for and I’ve screeched my head off delighting in the drama a thousand times. The problem is, when these programmes treat sex like a prize or a plot point, they send the message that normal and nuanced conversations about it don’t matter.
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