In both darker and lighter versions of fairy tales, a woman’s suffering is demanded in exchange for true love and happily ever after. She must be trapped in a tower or poisoned by an apple or forced to spin straw into gold. She must wait for the hand of a man who is fooled not once but twice before he finds her. Throughout any given season of “The Bachelor,” the women exclaim that the experience is like a fairy tale. They suffer the machinations of reality television, pursuing — along with several other women, often inebriated — the promise of happily ever after. Instead of bleeding from the foot to fit a golden slipper, they bleed their dignity, one episode at a time.
In this past weekend’s New York Times Sunday Review, Rumpus Essays Editor Roxane Gay writes about sentimental relationships, fairy tales, and the search for happily ever after in an piece on the reality show, “The Bachelor.”
