Women on reality TV shows have been pilloried for being outspoken, overweight or over 50 - increasingly they are expected to take abuse if they fail to conform, writes Natasha Walter.
Whoever came up with the concept of Ladette to Lady, a show due to be screened autumn, must have felt that they had mined one of the last nuggets of ore from the almost exhausted quarry of reality television. In it, the producers take "five weeks to reform 10 loudmouthed ladettes in a finishing school of etiquette, manners and social graces".
So this ITV show promises to combine, in one neat package, the appeal of creating a closed, controlled society (as with the granddaddy of reality television, Big Brother), the charm of recreating aspects of the past (remember That'll Teach 'Em, about the 1950s school, and The 1900 House?), and the competitive element of a series of hurdles that the participants must jump (a constant theme in these programmes). But, above all, it is surely the suggestion that it will put intense focus on women's sexual, social and sartorial manners that is likely to draw in viewers. Because the most popular examples of reality television draw so much of their attraction from policing women's behaviour.
As the producer of Ladette to Lady, Rod Williams, said: "I couldn't really envisage doing this show with men."
Indeed. What would have been the fun of watching a group of loud-mouthed men being taught how to behave? Across the board, whether you look at the classic reality shows, from Big Brother to I'm a Celebrity, or the changeovers, such as Wife Swap and Poor Little Rich Girls, or the historical recreations, or the makeover shows, such as Ten Years Younger or What Not to Wear, there is an obsession within reality television with finding the appropriate limits for women's behaviour. You don't have to be a regular watcher to feel the fallout from this, since it seeps into tabloid and broadsheet newspapers as well as the chat that surrounds us.
Take the way that Kitten was evicted from the Big Brother house. Whether or not you had watched her yourself, and formed an opinion on her strange mixture of rebelliousness and conformism (what could have been less rebellious than wanting to be remembered for your appearance on Big Brother, even if you spent some of the time there talking about squatters and fair trade?), you might have noted the tabloid glee when she was punished for her naughtiness. The "loudmouth lesbian", the "anarchist whinger", the "attention-seeking brat", "hell's kitten", the "sinner", "staggeringly thick Kitten" was only forced out of the house after the producers began to drop the prize money on offer by £1,000 for every minute that she remained in it. Being too talkative and too stroppy seems to make a woman who enters these shows an easy target for extraordinary levels of abuse.
If being too argumentative is a surefire ticket to being loathed, that's not the only crime. What about if you're too old? Edwina Currie had evoked little sympathy in general until Gordon Ramsay, on Hell's Kitchen, said that she was "the old lady who refuses to die", just as few had warmed to Jennie Bond until she was called an "old slag" on I'm a Celebrity, and Lord Brocket said he wanted to strangle her. There is a level of personal vitriol being passed out to women aged more than 50 which is rarely levelled at the men in such programmes.
It's easy to dismiss all these programmes as passing like smoke through a keyhole, and disappearing as quickly as they came. But you can't help feeling that a cumulative effect is building from this constant abuse of women for being too loud or too old - or too big, of course. Some of the women who have drawn the most caustic words from commentators have been fleshy. Although Michelle McManus got her moment in the sun through Pop Idol, the jibes about her weight took some of the shine away, as commentators deplored her for being "grossly overweight" with a "penchant for third helpings". Even those commentators who saw her weight as a positive attribute tended to focus on it obsessively, as if it were the only thing about her that could interest them. Other big women may find a passing fame through reality television, but at the cost of fielding a barrage of abuse. Jade Goody bought her fame by being known as the "oinker", whose nickname "pig" was deemed by one commentator to be "insulting to pigs".
Even those women who buy into the tabloid package by trying to appeal to viewers solely through their sexual attractiveness cannot sidestep this obsessive judgmentalism. It is a fine line between having your looks celebrated and being denigrated as a slut, as women such as Jordan and Abi Titmuss have learned. The tabloids are constantly egging on the women in these shows to behave with ever more sexual abandon - and are then quick to turn on them for being slappers as soon as they do so.
"That was no lady . . . that was Geordie scrubber Michelle," commented the Mirror about a Big Brother participant who has got into bed with one of the men, while the Sun went straight to Michelle's grandmother for the comment that she had "spoilt" herself by saying that she has had sex with a woman.
It seems that the only sort of woman who gets positive reinforcement out of participating in reality television is one who pulls off the trick of being both sexy and demure. The woman who won Hell's Kitchen, soap actress Jennifer Ellison, was celebrated in the Daily Mail for being "perky" and "cheery" and "industrious", which - along with her "Barbie doll figure" - apparently "endeared her" to the public. The persona Ellison projected was rather like that of the ex-Atomic Kitten, Kerry McFadden, who won I'm a Celebrity, to tabloid approval, for behaving, as the Mirror put it, "like a trouper", with her "bravery" and "cheeky smile", and for being a sweet blonde in a bikini.
In this trend towards denigrating women who step out of line, and rewarding those who play by such narrow rules, perhaps the most insidious shows are the makeover programmes.
These seem positively benign and frivolous, but because Trinny and Susannah bring the cameras away from a self-selected few and into women's homes, at the invitation of their friends, there is a surreptitious suggestion that the surveillance endemic to reality TV can be just part of everyday life. And the box that Trinny and Susannah (of What Not to Wear) try to fit women into is such a bizarrely narrow one - all their subjects end up looking much the same, in their mauve cardigans and burgundy bootleg trousers and highlighted shoulder-length hair. Is this really the box that we now long to fit into?
All these shows also deal with the boys, of course; even Trinny and Susannah have made over a few men. And the talent shows do try to equalise the attention between the girls and boys - indeed, where talent is an issue, the intense scrutiny of women's behaviour tends to be less important.
But it isn't too much to say that reality television's trend towards pushing women into a certain mould is part of a wider struggle throughout society over how women should behave.
However bizarre and exaggerated these shows seem to be getting, they still reflect the world from which they draw their subjects and to which they speak.
The worrying thing is that they reflect only fragments of that world - and that those fragments can make women feel self-conscious in a particularly restrictive way. Why is the idea of watching ladettes learning deportment so intriguing? Rod Williams says that some of his subjects, who no longer felt "the constraints of femininity", did have the feeling that their lives had gone "awry". It is telling that reality television's answer is to give such women the chance to learn how to set up a dinner party.
Because while women of this generation can enjoy freedoms and power that their mothers and grandmothers didn't have, we live in a muddled society that both celebrates and fears those freedoms. The most intriguing reality shows examine this muddle, pushing contention over women's behaviour into the foregroundand making the discussion of it part of the show. Wife Swap made hypnotic viewing for just this reason, because it opened out the debates over how women should behave; not just about how much washing up they should do, but also about whether they should be more assertive at home.
And this is one programme where the reverberations of the debate started to affect the men. On the Wife Swap website it is suggested that the man in one of the couples, Nicola and Jason, had learned from having to confront his wife's anger at his refusal to do anything with his children or in the home. Nicola is quoted as saying: "Jase realised that he needs to help me - and he is better."
But this is a rare example of any positive change getting on to the agenda. Throughout so much of reality television what we see being celebrated are only the most hidebound roles of the past and only the most restrictive roles of the present. There is something truly frightening about the way reality television reflects us, but only at a fraction of our real size.
- Guardian service
