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When looking for visionary ideas, I wouldn't normally think about our entertainment industry ... but when it comes to sex and sexuality, they're always on the frontier, so it shouldn't be a shock that MTV almost brought us a glimpse of a new vision for sex and sexuality.
OK, I understand that I'm revealing a guilty pleasure, but I was oddly fascinated by Tila Tequila's "reality" show -- A Shot at Love -- on MTV. What made this spectacle of drunken fights, inane drama and half-naked pseudocelebrity interesting was that Tila -- "the least lonely girl on the Internet" -- outed herself as "a bisexual" in the first episode and went on to be wooed by both dudes (I use the term "dude" to differentiate the men on the show from straight men in general) and women over the run of the show.
Despite my hopes, there were many ways in which the show fell short and disappointed. First, the show completely ignored sexual options for men outside of the heterosexual norm and reinforced the gay/straight binary: all of the male contestants had to be straight, and all of the female contestants had to be exclusively gay, but with eyes for Tila alone, of course (rumors that a female contestant had "hooked up" with a male contestant and kissed another female contestant got her sent home).
Furthermore, the racial politics of Tila's choices were troubling. Tila, who is of Vietnamese heritage (she mentioned this at various times during the show, seemingly to emphasize her "exotic" appeal), eliminated the people of color very early on in the show. From an original pool of 32 contestants that was roughly 70 percent white, Tila had whittled it down to only six women and six men by the third episode -- only one of those people left standing was not white (that's a 92 percent qhite dating pool).
Lastly, the show's elimination-style competition between contestants for Tila's affections enforced monogamy as the only option, forcing Tila to choose Bobby (one of the dudes) over Dani (the kinda-butch female firefighter who was my personal favorite) even though she claimed to love them both.
So Tila Tequila's "A Shot at Love" ultimately squandered the possibility of offering a radically different vision of sex and sexuality. Instead, it reinforced the racism embedded in our society's hierarchy of desire, where Asian women are sexually desirable but Asian men are invisible and interracial relationships must always involve a white partner. And the show's treatment of female bisexuality largely pandered to the voyeuristic fascination of straight dudes, featuring Tila making out with other bikini-clad women. Finally, Tila's ultimate choice of a dude reinforced the reassuring idea for straights and paranoid fear for queers that bisexuals ultimately choose heterosexual partnerships.
(Un)Fortunately, the show was a huge success. It was MTV's biggest hit in over two years, garnering roughly 6 million viewers and making it the network's top-rated series among viewers 12-34 in 2007. That huge viewership could have been boosted by the controversy that one would expect a bisexual dating show to generate, with supporters on the left and detractors on the right.
As big media will always do, MTV is following the money, and the network is giving Tila another "Shot at Love"(that Tila's relationship with Bobby didn't last shocked no one and helps remind us just how unreal and scripted "reality" TV is). So what can Tila and her handlers do the second time around to air a show with a new vision for sex and sexuality in the 21st century?
See more stories tagged with: mtv, bisexual, polyamory, a shot at love, tila tequila
Sean Thomas-Breitfeld is the deputy director of the Taproots Project at the Center for Community Change.
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