Earlier this month Big Brother UK came to the end of its 11th and final year on television station Channel 4. I for one will mourn its passing. As a sociologist the chance to observe people talking, cooking, eating, sleeping, drinking and playing games together, making friends and falling out, was compelling.
Gender got talked about as rent-a-psychologists asked who was the alpha male in each group of housemates and as public and housemates alike commented on how the women regularly got voted out before the men. And yet, surveying the years, it seems that women have been rather more successful in their post-house careers than men. In large part this is because they have an immediate pathway to money and a certain sort of celebrity: posing semi-clad in the so-called lads magazines, which purvey stigma-free pornography, with the option for many to move on to a career in glamour modelling. This is a rather ambivalent female advantage from a feminist perspective.
However, even some of those who have not taken this route have been able to use the show as a stepping stone into media work. Several of the male winners have also been able to do this but it is notable that this applies to many women who did not win and even some who got voted out very early by the public such as Alison Hammond who is now a successful television presenter.
My impression is that Big Brother UK has been a better route into celebrity than reality shows based on ‘talent’ such as X Factor and Popstars, several of whose winners have disappeared without trace after one or two singles. And here too it is the women who’ve achieved more lasting success – we still hear about the girl group Girls Aloud but not their male competitors One True Voice, for example.
However, for many Big Brother women, their celebrity has brought with it a downside that men are rarely subject to – with intense scrutiny and occasional vilification in the media. Jade Goody is the most obvious example of this. Although she finished only fourth in series three, she was not most financially successful of all UK Big Brother housemates. However, she was reviled as a ‘pig’ by the media both inside and outside of the house and many websites recorded celebratory comments about her diagnosis and then death from cervical cancer.
Women’s relationship with Big Brother is thus a difficult one – bringing opportunities and costs. It also appears, that while the programme has brought new stories of women into the mainstream, these remain constrained by dominant stereotypes. Why, for example, have all of the female Big Brother UK winners (Kate Lawler, Chantelle Houghton, Ulrika Johnson, Sophie Reade, Josie Gibson (pictured)) – with the exception of transgender Nadia Almeida and dismissed-as-dull Rachel Rice – been blonde?
Heather Mendick, Goldsmiths, University of London
Really interesting article. As a fellow BB fan, I also find the in-show gender relations fascinating, particularly as relationships develop within the house and gender performances are played out. Something else I’ve noticed about several of the female winners is that they are all (impossibly?) nice and tolerant. Chantelle Houghton and Josie Gibson come to mind, often bending over backwards to accommodate badly behaved housemates and seeming to risk exclusion should they reveal any kind of aggression.
One of the most memorable moments of this series was John James shouting at Rachael and Corinne for ‘brazenly’ discussing their plans to do a topless Nuts magazine shoot after the show. He accused them of only being on BB for fame and an easy route to becoming WAGs and glamour models. While these new highly gendered pathways to fame for female housemates are problematic, as Heather notes, the irony is the John James went on to pose in semi-naked photo shoots for celeb magazines after he left the house. This not only reveals his own hypocrisy but highlights the double standards that operate around new forms of celebrity via reality TV.
Yes, the men who do the photoshoots don’t get nearly as much criticism as the women who do them. I think that it was good that Rachael and Corin were honest about themselves. John James and Josie both made a big thing about not doing magazine deals and they seem to be everywhere now.
There’s also class and race issues on BB that I didn’t go into in the post but if you click on Jade Goody above then it’ll take you to another thing that I wrote with Rosalyn George about this.