It was a Sunday night, and my friends and I gathered to binge watch the reality show “90 Day Fiancé.” During one of the commercial breaks, a teaser came on for a new show called “Hot & Heavy.”
Turns out, the show is about plus size women dating “hot” men. The trailer started and it’s three plus size women getting in a hot tub with the water overflowing. As a plus size women myself, I found this very offensive and was taken aback by the idea of the show and how it could even get approved.
Reality series come and go, but some of the most popular ones are about finding love, and showing people who are not average finding love as well.
One such show is “Little Women: LA.” The “Little Women” franchise follows little people around in their daily lives, from finding love to having children to building friendships.
It started in 2014 with “Little Women: LA.” The show was so successful that it led to a few spin-offs in different cities such has Atlanta, New York, and Dallas. It is one of Lifetime’s longest and most successful reality shows to date.
The success of the “Little Women” franchise, and other similar shows, makes me wonder “Why are we curious about other people who look different than us finding love?”
Dr. Mary Andres, a psychologist and co-director of the marriage and family therapy program at the University of Southern California, compares our curiosity about different couples to our taste in food.
“Sometimes we are drawn because we can't make sense of it,” she says. “It's not part of our own template. It's like you might like to eat something that I think looks awful and I can't imagine how you're eating that— that's a kind of othering.”
“Othering” is to view or treat a person or group of people as intrinsically different from oneself. Shows like “Hot & Heavy” and “Little Women” are based off of othering.
Andres also says reality shows walk a thin line between being open and being exploitive. “It depends on who the audiences is,” she says. “If you have somebody who's looking at it and laughing at it and making fun and shaming people, then that feels exploitative.”
Eric Hoberman, vice president of development at ITV, pitches reality shows for a living and says the reason these shows work is because they normalize other cultures that society is not used to.
“You’re exposing a subculture. It's people that are doing the same stuff that we do every day,” he says. “The lens of these normal everyday things through a different perspective is what makes it really fascinating.”
I talked to two different couples and one single woman who fit the profile of people on these shows.
One couple— a plus size woman and an average size man— who are living “Hot & Heavy” without the cameras.
Another couple fell in love even though they are from two different countries— and were born 15 years apart.
The single woman, a little person, still hasn’t found love and shared just how hard the search has been.