Nabilla Benattia at the premiere of Jean-Paul Gauthier's Fashion Freak Show at the Folies Bergères, on the occasion of Paris Fashion Week in September 2019. -
Jean-Marc HAEDRICH / SIPA
On the occasion of the 20 years of reality TV,
20 Minutes
offers a series of articles on this phenomenon which has shaken the small screen.
Reality TV programs have been sexist for 20 years as shown in the report of the High Council for Equality published in 2020.
The reality TV candidates surf on their image and now make a career in various reality TV shows but also outside.
They become emblematic of a new type: the bimbo
girlboss.
20 years ago, France was preparing to experience an unprecedented explosion in the audiovisual landscape: the arrival of
Loft Story
, and reality TV.
To celebrate this anniversary and try to identify its challenges,
20 Minutes is
devoting a series of daily articles during the month of April.
And to name this set, we chose the title “Generation Loana”.
Why ?
Because the candidate, and winner, of the first season of
Loft Story
embodies, better than anyone, reality TV.
The young woman also marked her time and the world of reality TV by perfectly personifying the figure of the bimbo - brainless, busty, hypersexualized - a caricatural figure so dear to reality TV shows.
As mocked by the public as the object of fantasies, Loana opened the ball for a succession of candidates who also embodied this same stereotype through different programs and in different ways.
From Loana to Maeva Ghennam via Nabilla, is the image of women in reality TV always the same?
Heteronormal and sexist programs
In 2020, the High Council for Equality published a damning and final report concerning this type of program: "Reality TV is a great source of sexism: character traits and assignment to stereotypical roles and tasks, very present sexualization and guided by the search for
male gauze
and not by the assertion of the power of the body of women, processes of denigration and
clash
that are in full swing.
Often presented as stupid, weak and rivals among themselves, they are only the assertion of "dominant males".
"
Marion Oderda, rapporteur for the report in question, also underlined that if the programs were subjected to the Bechdel test (number of women in a work, dialogue or not between them, subject of conservation with or without a systematic report to a man ), it was observed that
Les Anges
or
Les Marseillais
, (and even
Koh Lanta
) which were then studied, failed 100%.
For Laëtitia Biscarrat, Lecturer in Information and Communication Sciences at the Université Côte d'Azur in Nice, specialist in the issue of gender and the media, “the proposal of this type of program is to make the apology for heterosexual encounters in a hyper traditional setting.
It is a celebration of complete heterosexuality, in a normative narrative scheme.
The object of the game in
Loft Stor
y was to form a winning couple.
And things haven't changed much since then.
For the researcher, reality TV is “an instance of gendered socialization and reiteration of hegemonic norms.
We see the mistakes, the betrayal, the conflicts, and then the couple, we take a small house - in Dubai for the glamor - we make children.
This is a pattern that we already found in the 1950s or 1960s in magazines for teenage girls ”.
Always and again bimbos!
From these gendered norms and this traditional sexism emerges, tenacious, the stereotype of the bimbo.
Indeed, as the HCE report explains, “reality TV shows value the 'hyperfemininity' of candidates” who must appear as “seductresses”, and, underlying, as objects of desire available sexually as a bonus. .
This typical figure is emblematic of traditional male erotic fantasies.
The idea of these programs not being to deconstruct fantasies and models, as unfair and sexist as they are, no candidate deviates from these initial selection criteria.
They are therefore systematically young, thin, made up, styled, dressed, sexualized and meet all the criteria to be checked to be part of the desirable women who will spice up the adventure.
It's just their job on the show.
Just as we only know the first names of the candidates, we can almost always add an adjective to them: the prudish, the boring, the funny ... The casting managers are looking for typical characters, explains Laëtitia Biscarrat: "We have to be able to identify people quickly.
So the types really have a function of operator of meaning, of operator of intelligibility, which allows immediately, in our social representations, in our social imaginaries, to locate a person ”.
The programs therefore produce Loana "the easy girl", Nabilla as sexy as she is stupid, or Maeva Ghenamm the capricious bitch ...
Beyond these stereotypes and this sexism, Marion Oderda and Laëtitia Biscarrat underline another dimension, perhaps even more problematic: the question of sexuality and consent.
Omnipresent although it is not filmed, the sexuality, the erotic dimension and the sexual availability lent to women in these reality TV programs are omnipresent.
Laëtitia Biscarrat observes in this regard that "the promotion of the culture of rape appears at a rather incredible level in these programs, with a culture of appropriation of the body of women where consent is a logic that does not exist".
"They understood the codes"
Defenders of reality TV, seeking to deny the sexism of these shows, have often claimed that the candidates of these programs succeeded, for some of them, in making a name for themselves.
They become famous and surf on the image they have built for themselves.
They have understood the codes, and they are using them to their advantage.
Laëtitia Biscarrat remarks that these success paths often pass through the body: “Cosmetic surgery is almost always denounced as the submission of women to heterosexist gender norms and to capitalism.
But the candidates of reality TV who manufacture a body which will correspond to standards of completely fantasized femininity, also make a strategic use of their body in a professional trajectory ”.
Becoming a bimbo becomes a calculated professional investment.
What is more, in 2021, reality TV and the celebrity press have somehow become institutionalized to the point of now offering careers to the most outstanding (and profitable) candidates.
Reality TV contestants are considered to have done a job since 2009. If Loana could not benefit from the experience of women before them or take full advantage of the fact that one can make a career in reality TV, she serves as an example. and inspiration to the following.
"There are women who participate in these shows because they want to launch their careers, they want to undertake, to create things and to take advantage of this media window to be able to succeed" explains Marion Oderda.
Nabilla Vergara, for example, has an impressive CV with, among others, several reality TV shows, a column in the program
Touche Pas à Mon Poste
some time, modeling contracts, cosmetic brands… The young woman is emblematic of this trajectory à la Kim Kardashian.
From a simple bimbo, we have passed into the era of the bimbo-
girlboss
.
Empowered
bimbos
?
In 2021, the candidates are at the center of the programs and one has the impression that some "wear the panties", in the couple or the group, rather than they are subjected to their male counterparts.
These new-generation bimbos have a way of taking responsibility, of claiming, of using stereotypes even to achieve their ends.
They play from the rules that are given to them, aware of the codes, of the system and determined to take their side.
Laëtitia Biscarrat wonders about the case of Maeva Ghennam (
Les Marseillais
): "Certainly at the start she will tick all the boxes of gender stereotypes in the sense of hypersexualization, the exhibition of her body, she is always shown as stupid, superficial - there is this regime of demonstration which is very closed - but at the same time, she has a self-promoting discourse of herself, a way of fully assuming herself.
[…] She claimed a lot about “her plastic body” […] we can read it a little more nuanced by saying to ourselves that somewhere is that a choice?
".
For the specialist, these women of reality TV are at the heart of the questions of a neo-feminism or a pop-feminism populated by its ambivalent icons like Beyonce, the Spice Girls and many others… hypersexualized and yet emancipated.
In the HCE report, it was also a question of "this important reference to pop-culture [which does not exclude] that the analysis must be refined and that the hypersexualization of female characters is not always the translation of an enslavement to the codes of male domination but experienced as a form of empowerment of women, using their bodies as a weapon of self-assertion ”.
If this dimension remains to be explored, Laëtitia Biscarrat observes that the successes and individual trajectories of these women, moreover "do not deconstruct anything of the standards that are conveyed [...] they remain within a system that exploits women, the women's bodies and their representations ”.
If some reality TV candidates shift the stereotype of the bimbo towards that of a pragmatic bimbo, a bit of a businesswoman, far from being totally stupid and unconscious, the reality TV programs of confinement, them, remain in the same patterns and reproduce the same types.
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Feminism
Sexism
Reality show
Nabilla
Culture
Television
Discrimination
Loana