The chaos lesbians of The Ultimatum
An unhinged reality dating show reveals the ways queers can be horrible people too
God, I love lesbians. Both the finale and reunion episodes of The Ultimatum: Queer Love, which aired on Netflix yesterday, made for genuinely thrilling television (despite being extremely low-budget, nonsensically structured, and overall quite poorly made). As much as I want to stop subjecting myself to these exploitative, torturous dating shows — I don’t think they’re, like, Good for society — I can’t help but be totally fascinated by them, and by what they do and don’t have to say about the search for love and connection in our increasingly dystopian times.
All of the couples featured on The Ultimatum are at a crossroads: one wants to get married, while the other’s on the fence. So they temporarily break up, date a bunch of other people in the same situation, and enter into a “trial marriage” for three weeks with someone new.
“The goal, seemingly, is for every person to emerge from the experiment knowing whether they really want to marry their original partner,” I wrote about the show’s first (all straight) season last year. “But far from promoting the development of strong and loving partnerships, The Ultimatum, like its predecessor Love is Blind, encourages and exacerbates its cast members’ scarcity mindsets about love, monogamy, and their own self-worth. By glorifying marriage as the only truly worthwhile and meaningful relationship in someone’s romantic life, these sorts of reality dating shows convince their contestants to value the social signifiers of marriage — of being able to claim, as one of the guys on The Ultimatum puts it, that ‘this is my girl’ — to such an extent that they’ll do just about anything to put a ring on somebody, anybody’s finger.”
The lesbian and nonbinary season of the show promotes the same sort of scarcity mindset thinking: you either marry the person you came into the “experiment” with, fall in love with someone else’s ex, or go back out into the real world all alone. It’s interesting to remember how much the straight people on their season wanted to be able to signal to others that they’ve “got the girl,” while a lot of the queers this time around talk about wanting to be “chosen,” to be told “I have to have you.” Attachment and abandonment issues abound!
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