Watch Out
by Ilana Masad
In recent weeks, the cultural discourse on my feeds has been focused on the romantic relationships of two white women who became famous for telling all: Lindy West, author of a new memoir, Adult Braces, which is largely about her marriage and its expansion into a throuple, and influencer-turned-reality-TV-star Taylor Frankie Paul, whose already-taped season of The Bachelorette was pulled by ABC on the eve of its premiere, after a 2023 video appeared online showing Paul physically attacking her ex-boyfriend and throwing bar stools at him. Both women became the subjects of fierce debates regarding their respective agency within the commercialized worlds of their real-life dramas.
I find the money aspect of these stories especially interesting. West has spoken in public about how she needs her memoir to do well in order to financially support her two partners. No matter how much she and her partners complain that their triad was misrepresented in the media, the attention was good for her book—at my public library, there is, as of this writing, a 19-week wait for both the ebook and audiobook versions of Adult Braces. Paul, meanwhile, gained more than 80,000 followers after allegations of domestic abuse arose between her and her ex (according to Suzana Somers, who has spent years tracking such trends among pop culture figures). And after ABC announced it wasn’t going to air her season of The Bachelorette, Paul’s follower count on Instagram and TikTok rose higher still.
The themes of performance, performativity, and their potential economic fallout have been haunting my reading (and writing) over the last few years. The relationship between reality TV and what it means to live in public has soaked right through the culture at large.
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