Will You Accept This Job? Labor, Love, and Bachelor Nation

Limo entrances are a steadfast ritual in every first episode of The Bachelor. Each time a contestant pops her meticulously coiffed head out of the limo, the faithful chyron tells the audience the four most important things about her: name, age, hometown, and career. Jobs instantly telegraph values, intelligence, prestige, and socioeconomic status. In recent years, popular criticism has turned to the idea of separating career from identity, signifying who one is and what one does with the self as separate from a career. Just as we've witnessed a shift from the boot-cut jeans of The Bachelor Season 1, we have also seen an evolution in the meaning of a "career." The Bachelor, as a dependable, enduring, and toxic piece of mainstream television, serves as a prism to consider larger questions about labor and identity across its seasons.

We ask: how have career types changed over twenty-five seasons? How are careers used in the concept of the show? Complicating these questions is the recent development of the show as a pipeline to "Bachelor Nation," in which contestants have the opportunity to join spinoffs, podcasts, and transfer their career identity to the show itself. Careers are yet another factor in determining if the contestants are "here for the right reasons," a question that's grown more complicated over time, just as our relationship to work has.      

The culture of work is inseparable from larger economic forces. Trending cultural panics over jobs are iterative, but in 2023 it's clear that jobs are in crisis. No one wants to get their "fucking ass up and work."1 No one is hiring, no one appreciates the years of putting in time. Concerns for fair pay and treatment are not to be ignored, but the mythology created around work often takes center stage. Whenever a new, younger generation hits the workforce, the hand wringing begins. The early aughts brought in a new business alongside the Internet boom: the business of managing millennials. How were companies going to handle these new workers who seemed so unwilling to settle for a thirty-year career followed by a pension? The millennials were constantly making lateral career moves, wanting to travel frequently, and, pivotally, rating a positive working experience over pay.2 The concomitant moral panic framed these perfectly reasonable human urges as millennial entitlement. The "participation trophy" rhetoric seeped into workplace advice.3 That's not even touching on the cataclysmic worry Gen Z has spurred as they hit the office — a new generation of workers demanding greater work-life balance and making fun of Gen X's affection for the cringe-inducing "thumbs up" Emoji in Slack.4

Although relevant to most sectors, the creative industry — including reality television and digital content production — is a place where the worst hopes of labor fester. In the Creativity Hoax, authors George Morgan and Pareice Nelligan explain that the hoax of creatively satisfying work is maintained because we see ourselves as "defined by your potential — you are what you aim to become," placing success not on the social inequalities of the industry, but on individual worth. Those who are not advantaged are forced into the "violent centrifuge, the force that throws aspirants, particularly those from poor backgrounds, to the remote edges of the fields in which they wish to work, or casts them aside completely."5 Much like how early season Bachelor rejects are cast off into obscurity without the safety net of a few million new Instagram followers. Creativity is an opportunity to monetize, and once again, conflate what you love to do with work.

The monetization of creativity has in part contributed to the rebranding of the precarity of work into hustle culture, and not just online and on-screen. Hustle culture gives rise to the gig economy, with thousands of independent contractors working for Uber, Lyft, or Doordash, allowing people to work (seemingly) on their own terms. The new gig economy is often seen as a placeholder, where someone drives Uber to make ends meet while they pursue their true passions (only to monetize them later). The gig economy is sustained on the illusion that the individual self-employed is an independent contractor, or even, an entrepreneur or a businessperson.6 However, workers in the gig economy tend to only work for one company, and thus would fall under the category of dependent (rather than independent) contractor. This role rarely offers benefits and makes individual's labor interchangeable and defensible.

What's wrong with wanting to enjoy a career and identify with it, though? Now that individuals are the ones held responsible for their own success, they can become a Girlboss. Girlbosses were a post-feminist concept reconstructing masculine capitalist power with panache and a series of related signifiers: a Girlboss placard on the desk, pastel power suits, minimal offices painted millennial pink, a young woman trouncing into the office with immaculately blown out hair, red lipstick, talking on a phone and holding an extra-large cup of coffee to go, and so on. Girlbosses navigated the workplace by avoiding feminine work tropes (the secretary, the doormat, the nag, the shrew, etc.), yet they ended up framing ambition by the same standards that had already been hindering equality.7 The brief life of the Girlboss was followed by the sudden work-from-home era kicked off by the pandemic which created a new relationship to work, entertainment, and creativity.

In 2020, the focus became the work from home model, which exposed that many people are more productive when not at the office. The years of examining open floor plans and the start-up stereotype of having a foosball table and free snacks enticing people to be in the office collapsed. New buzzwords for not so new concepts, such as "The Great Resignation," were traded by white collar workers on Twitter as they waited for their Postmates delivery lunches from overworked and under-compensated essential workers. This mass quitting was supposedly a backlash to not finding enjoyment in work and not getting paid enough for jobs. However, Gallup polls show that people indeed are quitting their jobs at higher rates, but this number has been on a steady, decades-long trajectory.8 Then there's the idea of quiet quitting, which is the action of only doing the bare minimum at a job to voice dissatisfaction before eventually leaving. Whereas people born before 1990 call this concept of quiet quitting, "work," it highlights the impact of hustle culture and ambition as the default.

So, as we all settled in to watch season 25 of The Bachelor during the year of quarantine in our tie-dyed sweatsuits, it's undeniable that things had certainly changed.

Because The Bachelor began in 2002, it became a cultural phenomenon around the time people were fallaciously lamenting that "everyone gets a trophy." It has lived through the era of the Girlboss and now the new landscape of remote work. Female contestants, as soon as they step out of the limo are still introduced with their name, age, and their career. They might never discuss their jobs again, but the audience has already made up their mind about what kind of person she is. A banker? Too ambitious. A teacher? A natural caregiver. A former NFL cheerleader? Hot.

The job-as-identity is also crucial to the series' portrayal of the Bachelor himself. Season eight's (2016) Bachelor, Travis Stork, was a medical doctor. The prize was not just to win Stork's heart, but to become a doctor's wife. In Season 14 (2010), Jake Pavelka's pilot career gave The Bachelor another subtitle: "On the Wings of Love." The contestants' jobs were to get out of the way of the Bachelor's career. After all, the winner was expected to move to where the Bachelor was. This expectation became tricky in season nineteen (2015) when the series cast a farmer, Chris Soles, as its leading man. The hunky farm fantasy soured once the three finalists had to convince him of their excitement at the prospect of moving to a farm to be with him. There are fairly limited career options in rural towns, and possibly even fewer chances for hustle culture gigs for aspiring influencers who seek to develop brands focused on beauty, travel, and luxury lifestyle content."

For female contestants, jobs have long been used as a shorthand for evaluating desirability and femininity. Allie Garcia-Serra, one of the first medical doctor contestants, was eliminated on night one of season eight. Rather than shuffle into the loser SUV, she confronted Travis Stork about his choice. He mumbled a noncommittal answer. In her ITM (In The Moment) interview, Allie says "I dedicated my life towards my career, and he doesn't choose that. Just like every other man that I know. It's a double-edged sword ...Travis is intimidated by a professional woman. Maybe I just won't date anymore."9 Although in 2006 it was acceptable to write her off as "crazy," here's truth in her statement. A profession itself is not an asset to the Bachelor; rather, the prized asset is a contestant's willingness to change or leave her career to be with the Bachelor. In the short walk from the limo to the mansion, her credibility as an oncologist had become a liability.10 Perhaps reaction to this statement would be different in the current landscape; RIP Allie, another Girlboss gone too soon.

Nearly two decades later, appearing on the show has itself become a job. Appearing on The Bachelor is an entry into the Bachelor Nation. It can lead to spots on Bachelor in Paradise and other spinoffs, and podcast hosting, influencer, and potential media gigs. In spinoffs, chyrons that on the original show indicate name age and profession, now identify the contestant by name, age, and the Bachelor/Bachelorette season where contestants first appear. Thus, an induction to their new identity within and through Bachelor Nation is born, overwriting their original identifying occupation. Those who return to their day jobs are often never heard of again. This complicates the idea of "being here for the right reasons." There may be one final rose, but if you put on a good performance, you might gain acceptance into Bachelor Nation, which, for most, is a more attractive (and lucrative) option.

So, what does a range of twenty-five seasons of jobs reveal? Based on the changing meaning of jobs, and the changing nature of the franchise, we expected there to be some patterns in the changing nature, frequency, or types of jobs — a possible shift toward careers in which appearing on the show would be a stepping-stone to new professional opportunities.

To answer this query, we constructed a data sample by selecting five seasons from the onset into the present, five years apart — every fifth season of The Bachelor, in other words. Some of the given position names were changed to standardize similar jobs for the sake of analysis, but otherwise titles were kept as they appeared. Our expectation was that one, as time went on, more positions would lean toward internet labor (content creator, digital marketing) — that is, code for influencer, influencer-adjacent, or aspiring influencers. We also predicted the decrease of specialized, professional career such as doctor, lawyer, director, CEO, etc. After all, why would someone leave those roles to be on The Bachelor? If the prize is no longer a guarantee of true love, something questionable at best even in early seasons, what oncologist is willing to give up time away from a job for a chance to promote sponcon on their Tik Tok account?

Contrary to our hypothesis, however, there is no clear outlier of a leading position. Still, the data illuminates interesting speculations about the changing relationship of the contestants to their jobs. See Figure 1 to view the spread of jobs over these five sample points:

Some job titles are more prevalent than others. As seen in Figure 2, three prevailing types of careers emerge: Student, Manager, Retail Manager/Assistant, and Teacher. In fact, the latest season had four managers. Manager is a title that can mean many things, and often, can mean absolutely nothing at all. In fact, it is a title that does not necessarily mean someone is managing people or projects, but it is a stand in that connotes a status as part of the professional working class.

The first explanation is that these positions are broad enough to include more people, but, in fact, their applicability tells us something about their generalization. One thing that stands out is that the careers in 2001 were easier to categorize, such as bartender, attorney, and real estate agent. This specialization perhaps reveals that the early iterations of the show imagined The Bachelor as a season-bound competition. The proliferation of opportunities has expanded in subsequent seasons, yet so has the generalization of job titles. Indeed, the idea of being a "little entrepreneur" may also allow people to shape their own positions even as titles have grown more generic over time. Although one specific position does not stand out, a consideration of the types of jobs may be significant.

Recently, being a player in the Bachelor Universe is itself a viable career path. Some of the newer contestants have even more general, non-specific titles, such as consultant, recruiter, digital sales, account executive, or coordinator. This trend could be the result of the ever-expanding category of middle management bullshit jobs, or could be tied to the fact that these types of jobs allow contestants six weeks' time off to film.11

We call this a "banalization" of careers. In other words, the careers are general enough that a contestant could theoretically find other jobs in their field if they moved to the Bachelor's home city. Furthermore, these positions are expendable in the case of finding love or the possibility of joining Bachelor Nation. They are also likely to find other positions in this field in their post-Bachelor lives. Contestants' careers have increasingly become more generic and interchangeable, described through terms like associate, sales, and technology that could cover a wide range of positions in today's information-driven, new media economy. The growth of the contestant pool and the banal diversity of middle-management jobs is visible in our second data visualization, illustrating the shifting composition of careers by season.

We also see that a specialized, unique job is a rare exception, and especially that few contestants with these jobs are winners. This is for practical reasons: it is easier to relocate with a less specialized job. Contestant tends to be a "little entrepreneur" who may hold their current career but is always looking to upsize and hustle. A specialized job may make contestants quirky, but never marriage material or a viable option to come on Bachelor in Paradise, largely because their jobs are not easily upsized or transformed. We can see the recent excoriation of Salley in Bachelor in Paradise by producers, whose specialized job operating a surgical robot prevented her from appearing at her scheduled filming date. A work emergency taking precedence over finding love and frolicking in Playa Escondida? Cue accusations of being here for the wrong reasons, and add to the mix a potentially planted vibrator (fans and notorious Bachelor commentator Reality Steve speculate it was placed in her luggage by Bachelor producers to humiliate her), all of it precluding her ability to join Bachelor Nation. This creative producing and editing suggests that not only was Salley overly-invested in her career instead of finding love, but worse, that she was a woman taking charge of her own sexual fulfillment. Certainly not wifey material!

Although banalized careers are the norm, by Season 10, we begin to see the rise of "quirky jobs." Where we once had doctors and real estate agents, we now have biographies describing chicken lovers, free spirits, and a Queen. The names — perhaps job titles, certainly tongue-in-cheek — come from producers who pull from innocuous questions from the 300-page contestant questionnaire.12 While the quirky jobs bring some much-needed levity, the quirky job also devalues the contestant by leaning into the absurdity The Bachelor as a personality contest as much as it is a dating reality show, boiling each of them down to a silly joke in the process. Most often, this is a surefire way to telegraph to the audience that she will not win, much less be a finalist, but still we watch for fun and the fantasy.

The Bachelor, as a media product, has always sold a dream: a white-washed, middle-class form of heterosexual marriage that is both fulfilling and secure. Contestants and leads, if they are here for the right reasons, are here to get love right, to find that last piece of the puzzle. But to even aspire to this fantasy as a contestant is to be of a particular economic class — a woman with enough financial security to take weeks off from her job as a corporate recruiter or the security to know that she'll land another role. The closest we see to the grind of minimum wage is the sexy waitress or bartender — and, tellingly, never a childcare worker, Amazon warehouse employee, or Kroger cashier. Since its inception, The Bachelor has sold a sexual-romantic fantasy. As it has continued on the airwaves, the show has gradually furthered its generally unfeasible fantasy about marriage in the United States: namely, that one can enter into matrimony while finding economic security in a single earning household. If going on The Bachelor now signals a contestant's attempt to pivot towards a new career in influencing, as audiences we're revealed as suckers for buying into the fiction of the marriage contract on display.

The antiquated ways The Bachelor still returns to the question "what do you do?" as a shorthand for one's identity increasingly shows cracks in the production of the show: it's not so much a love story as it is an extended, competitive exercise in self-pitching. The nature of being absorbed into the political economy of Bachelor Nation has illustrated how job identities have changed within its mediaverse. Still, both mainstream audiences and show producers insist on keeping up the kayfabe of the show being about love instead of labor. Hopefully some recent failures of the show may give way to a new format. What would a more honest show look like? Instead of jobs, what should grace the chyron? Social media followers? Personal brand? SEO phrases? As the show continues with no end in sight, perhaps contestants should begin negotiating compensation packages along with their roses.

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Robin Hershkowitz (she/her/hers) (@bravo_scholar) holds a Ph.D. in American Culture Studies and an M.A. in Popular Culture from Bowling Green State University. She is a book coach for nonfiction authors. Her research interests include comedy roast rituals, camp performance, and the history of television situation comedy. Her work has appeared in The Journal of American Culture and Digital Humanities Quarterly. Robin has watched at least one episode from every season of The Bachelor at its time of airing. Learn more at https://robinhershkowitz.com.

Emily Lynell Edwards, Ph.D., (she/her) (@emilylynell , @emilylynell.bsky.social) is an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities and Educational Technologist at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, NY. She currently serves as co-director of the grant Digital Humanities Across the Curriculum (DHAC), funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). She is also a General Editor at Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ). Her research focuses on the intersection of digital media, technologies, and platforms, and race, gender, and politics in global contexts. Her work has appeared in journals such as New Media + Society, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and Glocalism: Journal of culture, politics and innovation. In another life, when she was living in New Orleans and working as a crêpist, she served a crêpe to Bachelor contestant Jaimi King, New Orleans native and chef, from season 21 of The Bachelor (Nick Viall's season). Learn more at http://www.emilylynelledwards.com.

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