Gross Reality TV Show Has Contestants Guess if a Woman Is Fat or Pregnant
Just when you thought reality TV programming couldn’t get any worse after stunts like giving away babies as prizes or telling a teenage girl they’d found her long-lost mother and then pranking her with a man in a wig and no mother at all, a gross new reality TV contest has decided to combine misogyny, body-shaming, and the worst parts of pregnancy into a program that asks contestants one important question: “Fat or pregnant?”
Seriously, this is a TV show. According to Cosmopolitan, the Dutch TV show called Bring Your Bathing Suit brought women out to stand in front of a panel of four men, who then assessed the various elements of her body in order to ascertain if she was pregnant, or “just fat.”
Audiences were appalled by this televised game of Fat or Pregnant.
A petition against the show has so far gathered more than 2,000 signatures in the two days since the segment aired. And it turns out the show has a long history of gross challenges like this one. Previous episodes have had the man panel try to guess if women’s breasts were real or fake, and another one where they played “Chinese or Japanese?” with a series of different Asian people.
The show is acting all surprised and wounded by the controversy. They gave the classic, “It’s satire!” defense, and are now insisting that this grotesquery is actually a public service, because they’re demonstrating to the audience why making snap judgments about people based on appearances is wrong. How they are doing that by making people make snap judgments about people’s appearances is unclear, and even the producers haven’t expanded on the idea.
Of course, the show says it’s “just satire.”
“In this round, there are different prejudices like: Is he a criminal or business man? Is he Dutch or a German, etc. Through these satirical settings, we laugh off all forms of prejudices,” the producers said in a statement.
Besides the fact that criminal and business man are not mutually exclusive qualities, none of this is actually doing anything to drive home the actually useful lesson of “Mine your own business.” It’s encouraging people to judge others based on appearances, and it implies that other people’s bodies are fair game for judging by busybodies, passersby, and panels of strange men. It’s gross and weird and also not actually entertaining. Seriously, why would people watch this? Is there nothing else on over there? Do the Dutch need more TV? I have a Friends DVD box set I could send over, if that would help.
