It's hard to look away from when you feel like you're watching a car crash

and it has a very controlled car crash vibe. Like I'm always like, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no, but I can't look away.

Welcome to Here to Make Friends, a half-post podcast about the Bachelor franchise where we lovingly

snark on the Bachelor and Bachelor adjacent shows. Whether you love the Bachelor or love to hate it,

we're here to break down every single delicious moment with you.

I'm Emma Gray and I'm Claire Fallon.

Surprise! We're here with this special bonus episode of Here to Make Friends taped from a live

panel about feminism and dating reality TV at the Wing in Dumbo, Brooklyn. We were joined for this

panel by two very special guests. One was Ashley Spivey, a former Bachelor of Contestant and

Current, critic of the franchise. We love Ashley, she's been on the show a bunch of times,

but also a new guest, Milla Hulafield, one of the star-daters on Netflix is dating around a show

that we loved so much. Ashley and Milla joined us in diving into why we're so compelled by dating

themed reality TV in the first place, what we can fix about it, and whether fixing it is even

really possible. Claire and I started here to make friends because we watched the Bachelor franchise

like so many Americans. And we found that watching the show brought up all these questions about

feminism and the antiquated tropes that the show reinforced. And we wanted to talk about that,

and now that we've been talking about it for years and critiquing the franchise,

and watching some other dating shows that are a little more consciously progressive and feminist,

we wanted to talk about what the end game is for feminist critique of reality dating shows,

you know, where can feminism take reality dating shows in the future, and in particular,

where can it take the Bachelor, which is its biggest success as a genre?

Yeah, we got real meta during this panel. First, we chatted with Ashley and Milla about their

...