Shallow Realities

Before we know anything, we know what we have been taught.

We know the ways in which we have been shaped to see ourselves and other people. It takes time to unpack these factory settings. Updates are slowly provided through our lived experience and personal connection. Installing modifications to our engagement with the world.

We see this most often when knowledge is once again stripped away. If we are asked to carry a heavy thing with a group of strangers, we will fall back on whatever we lessons we grew up with. Men are overwhelmingly strong, prone to act before thinking. Women are carefully clever, willing to self sacrifice. Any deviation from these expectations is to be perceived as a threat and promptly dealt with.

Our progression relies on regression to this baseline because everyone else is already there setting up camp. Knowing nothing, just what they have been taught.

That's what I'm thinking as I watch the first two episodes of latest series of The Traitors New Zealand. Paul Henry is thankfully gone now, so I am giving our country's version a go. It's got the same problems that all reality shows do though. Reflecting our shallowness back at us, showing just how far we still have to grow.

It's meant to be my escape, my something frivolous as the world burns. But here it all is again, the 'isms and 'phobias. The playground hierarchies are out in full swing. Picking up from where the latest season of Celebrity Treasure Island left off.

Every season, we suffer through the know nothing early episodes before we arrive back at the same, apparently revelatory, conclusion. Women can be strong. Men can be soft. People can be more than what we've been taught. The best alliances underline this all, pairing the unlikeliest of twosomes. Together, they form a genuine connection that bandages the parts of themselves they had to lop off to fit into their prescribed boxes.

I watch all of this and wonder, where is the intervention to steer us away from the stereotypes?

To be fair to Celebrity Treasure Island, they do offer a little counter balance to the weight of our assumptions. If there's been a lot of talk about how physically unstoppable a certain man is, you can all but guarantee the next challenge will be a puzzle or some type of balancing act.

Still, the groups will handily divide themselves down gender lines. Boys do the lifting, ladies, a puzzle please. Whether or not they are any good at either, they all take the roles they've been assigned at birth.

It will take an intentional alliance, working against these base instincts, to produce a woman winner. Even then, the first act of this 'Tiddy Committee' will be eliminating the strongest woman in the game (no, I will not forgive Portia's elimination. You would have had an all women final if you hadn't cut her loose).

The part always missing from people's reckoning is relationship building. Those too busy throwing sand around will forget to make friends. Then will be shocked that a strategic game requires strategy and will call these types of moves unsporting. Yes, I fear that is the point. If these contestants want to survive they will need some cunning to cut through the brute strength.

On Traitors these mind games are even more intense. Heaven forbid you are neurodivergent, it's very suspicious to talk that much, be overwhelmed or to name the issue. We are all supposed to dance around and ignore the fact that it's the behaviours of anyone who isn't a cliched straight, white, man, that are immediately called into question.

In the first episodes, you're grasping at straws and coming up with fistfuls of prejudice. Anyone who has watched the show even once knows this. The UKs version has famously been left answering very difficult questions around race. The case has been made for intervention to head off the worst of these presumptions. So why then do the challenges still set up the same terms of engagement?

Tell me, what do I learn about a competitors duplicity as we carry something heavy up a hill? It's all just a reinforcement that men will once again overestimate their physical abilities while the women will be expected to self sacrifice. I know it's not visually spectacular but Traitors is a parlor game. So surely we want to engage in more of those to get a better feel for our competitors.

A good ol' round of two truths and a lie, would put pressure on keeping stories straight. Truth or dare, would help stir the pot. A hot seat with anonymous questions would reveal plenty about the player and their position in the group. Basically, the show would do better to take note from The Circle, to sow seeds of drama and leave the big wooden sets on the island.

The best seasons of these reality shows are when the victors emerge, conquering our expectations. Their story challenging what we think we know about people like them. It's these wins that show we know nothing. Just what we have been taught.

With you,
Alice