Today, Explained - The Golden Bachelor was actually good
Episode Date: December 1, 202372-year-old Gerry Turner has handed out his final rose on ABC’s The Golden Bachelor. In a season full of gendered tropes about love and marriage (like most of the Bachelor franchise), it also brough...t the audience a new and earnest appreciation for love after 60. This episode was produced by Haleema Shah, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Matt Collette, engineered by David Herman, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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This morning, I had about a million different emotions going through my head.
I'm thinking, how did a guy from nowhere Indiana wind up in Costa Rica?
The Bachelor Bachelor, Gary Turner, made his pick last night, no spoilers, using time-honored reality TV tricks.
I came to the realization that you're not the right person for me to live with.
You're the person that I can't live without.
The Bachelor pivoted to golden oldies this season with Gary and a crop of age-appropriate
dates.
And to the shock and delight of many, the energetic, funny Randy Seniors revived a tired franchise and offered an image of aging that honestly looked kind of cool.
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It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Emma Gray is a journalist and host of the podcast.
Love to see it with Emma and Claire. She co-authors the Rich Text sub stack. She's also a big fan of The Bachelor. And of course, every fan is deep down a critic. I think that The Bachelor proper, it is fundamentally
a heterosexual, white, Christian marriage show. So I think that, you know, it's probably pretty
easy to guess that there are some conservative values embedded in that prize being held up as the number one thing that a woman, and specifically
women, because this show did start with The Bachelor, not The Bachelorette, that a woman
would want and thus be valued for. I can have this stringent critique of kind of the basis for the show.
And at the same time, it hits something very fundamental and soft inside of me,
which is that I love to see a good love story.
I want to spend the rest of my life telling you I love you.
And also, I think the show presents something very comforting,
which is this idea that if you are searching for love,
there is a formula by which you could be guaranteed to find it.
I do believe Brian when he tells me he's falling in love with me.
100%.
And even if we know that that's not true,
there's something narratively satisfying about watching this person
go through this process with this limited group of people
and knowing that at least in a limited way,
by the end, you will have yourself a quote-unquote happy ending.
You've shown me that a good thing can't really just be a good thing.
The love that we have is perfect.
I had never watched The Bachelor before Thanksgiving weekend when I watched The Golden Bachelor with my 72-year-old mom,
who at the moment is refusing to date even though she is widowed.
And I was very taken by
The Bachelor himself, Gary. Tell us about this man and why you think the producers of The Bachelor
looked at him and said, oh, he's a good lead. Oh, man. Gary Turner is the platonic ideal of
what they would want in a golden bachelor. I mean, first of all, this man is almost like an AI-created,
aged-up version with greater emotional depth and intelligence of, like, all of the bachelors that
came before him. This is a Midwestern white man. I married my high school sweetheart, Tony, in 1972.
We had 43 wonderful years together.
He has a very, very genuinely compelling, sad backstory.
I took my wife to the emergency room on July 7th.
She passed away on July 15th.
He's also very good at the job of being the lead of a reality show, which is a really hard job.
Like, we don't think about it as labor, but it's genuine labor, and it's hard to carry one of these shows. intelligence to really engage in relationships with a bunch of different women and also explain
his emotions to the camera in a way that we can receive them and empathize with him.
Let's talk about the contestants next. I don't know, this is going to sound silly,
but overwhelmingly, I found myself really liking them. Tell us about the contestants and tell us whether they are different from the typical contestant on these shows.
So I think a lot of us, when they announced that Golden Bachelor was going to be happening,
we were all thinking, are these women going to be like 45? Like, you know, like, are we going to,
are they going to do something really annoying where there's like two women in their 60s and the rest are 20 years younger than him? And I was so
pleasantly surprised that all of the women are between the ages of 60 and 75. These women are extremely vibrant, and I will say they are overwhelmingly conventionally
beautiful.
They are overwhelmingly thin.
The majority of them, I believe, are white, although there are some notable non-white
cast members.
But I don't know how to put this. They don't all look like
they had the same doctor. I'll put it that way. No. No. Yeah. Yeah. These women, you can see
the life lived on their faces. And you can see, I think, a variety of approaches to the aging process
and how they kind of physically chose to engage with their age.
We had the initial connection of, like, that we both lost our spouses.
And, like, I can see a glimmer of, like, what a life would look like with them.
So we have Joan, who was another widow who I think could have gone really far, but she unfortunately had to leave the show because her daughter was experiencing postpartum depression.
Kathy was our resident dramatic one.
I think that's the kind of stuff that sounds possessive, territorial, and get the
hell out of my way, he's mine. Which is kind of incredible because to give you an idea of the
level of drama and conflict that occurred on this show, Kathy told Teresa, I don't want to take the
gloves off. I don't want to be mean, but sip your lip. That was about as heavy as the antagonism got.
And another standout, other standouts for me included Sandra, who was our resident 75-year-old, who I cannot believe is 75.
Because she looks 50.
Sandra! Sandra! Sandra! I cannot believe is 75. Because she looks 50.
I need her to explain to me how with like knee replacements, she's diving into the crowd during a game of pickleball.
You're not going to stop me on a pickleball court.
The athletic prowess is very, very impressive.
She won it!
Let's talk about another form of athleticism.
How does this season of The Bachelor talk about sex?
Yeah, I was actually pleasantly surprised that the show didn't try to neuter its cast members.
And I think on the whole, the show did a pretty good job of showing conversations between Gary and Leslie, for example, where Leslie asks him point blank.
Okay, I have a question for you.
When's the last time you had sex?
We even get a great conversation between the host, Jesse Palmer, and Gary, where Jesse kind of seems uncomfortable talking about sex with Gary and Gary
pushes him. He's like, okay
Jesse. Your parents
are you still feeling like
mom and dad come down the stairs
with a little extra spring in their step?
TMI. TMI Gary.
The suggestion that they should
feel some sort of
shame about
having sexual desires, being sexual beings. And sure, they
might make a joke or two about how their grandkids are watching, but they're not going to shy away
from making out on camera. And truly, if they didn't, it would not be a real bachelor experience.
You know, we can't always expect reality TV to be saying something,
but sometimes it does. You know, that's why I think a lot of people keep going. Do you think
this season managed to say something unique or something authentic by focusing on people over 60?
I do. I think it might sound a bit silly, but I think that there is just a fundamental value in seeing, especially women who are over the age of 60, presented as legitimate objects of desire. full humans worthy of being looked at and listened to and seen and heard and thought of as people
with bright years ahead of them. So often, I mean, I feel this even as a 36-year-old woman who is,
you know, entering into my middle age years and thinking about what the future holds and seeing this
narrative that tells women that when we reach a certain age, we should retreat into the bushes,
we should disappear. We have passed our prime, our years of being worthy of being looked at because that is where our value lies.
And that's a really depressing way to view aging as a woman. And so I think there is something
kind of subversive about seeing these women's stories front and center on network television and being framed in a way that,
yeah, feels like sexy and inviting. And we're seeing them form new friendships and be silly
and also talk in really beautiful, wise ways about their lived experiences.
Neither one of us thought this was going to happen. We thought we were going to live
with our spouses
for the rest of our lives.
Yeah.
Do you think there will be a golden Bachelorette?
What are your spidey senses and your sources?
Oh, yes.
Yes.
Say more.
I feel almost certain that there will be,
and I think it will be Leslie.
That's my...
Oh my God. I literally... Sometimes I pretend to be shocked in interviews. I'm literally shocked. I'm shocked.
That is what I think. That is what I think. She would be perfect. She would be so perfect.
Journalist Emma Gray. Coming up,
what about real life, though? An 81-year-old
academic on why the numbers are stacked
against women, what sex
after 70 is like, it's amazing,
and how to live with the ghost
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Ladies, Gary, it's the final rose tonight. Are you ready?
Will you accept this? Today explained. Nan Bauer Maglin is a retired professor at City University in New York and a prolific editor of books about the human experience,
death and dying, parenting, and et cetera.
Her latest book?
It's called Grey Love, Stories About Dating and New Relationships After 60.
Ah, perfect for what we're doing here.
Yes, very much perfect.
My husband of 36 years died when I was approaching about 75 or a little bit younger.
And after about a year and a half or so, I felt lonely. And I decided I would try to date online.
And I did. I went on first on OkCupid because that's free, and then I went on Match,
and I picked Match because I just heard about it, and also I figured more people are on Match
than anywhere else, although there are thousands of sites now, and I dated about nine different men, and I met a man. And we've been dating for five years now. And I liked
him. He was an academic like me, and I was doing a book on widows then. And I was having trouble
with the footnotes and everything. And I asked him to help me. It was only after like our third
date or so, I asked if he would help me. And he came over and he helped me with the footnotes and everything. And I asked him to help me. It was only after like our third date or so,
I asked if he would help me. And he came over and he helped me with the footnotes. And I liked the
way he worked. And then I asked him a few weeks later when I decided I want to do something on
gray love and about dating over 60. I asked him if he would be my co-editor. And so we became
editors together and we've been dating ever since.
What was it like starting to date again in your 70s after 30 odd years of being married?
It's hard. I mean, first of all, it's hard to use online dating, especially if the last time you dated, you were in your 20s or something and you don't know how to do online dating. But
everyone's moving to online dating because especially if you're older, you don't know how to do online dating, but everyone's moving to online dating
because especially if you're older, you don't meet somebody in a bar, and you're not working,
so you don't meet somebody at work. And when you ask your friends, do they have somebody
to suggest for you? Men who lose their wives are taken up pretty quickly. It's very hard to find an eligible man, and it's very
hard to find someone like Gary, who's handsome, in good shape. He's sensitive. He cries. He listens
to women. I have some criticism of him, which I can share later, but it's very hard to find a man who you even are attracted to
or interested in when you go online. And for me, it was very hard. I knew I wanted somebody who at
least reads books. And some of the men online haven't read a book since high school. And I
knew I wanted a widow,
and I would prefer a man who had been married for a long time, and I would prefer a man who
had children, and also was nearby. So it's important to know what you want.
The other thing is not to be too rigid. You know, if you're too rigid, then nobody fits
what you want. What did you think of
The Golden Bachelor? What did you think of this season? I was pleased that it showed women,
older women, as exciting, not invisible, but it showed them as people.
Never have I ever had sex in a workplace. Sandra. My husband and I did it
everywhere. Good for you. It does show in the beginning. I think it's the second episode,
you know, when they're shown where they're going to sleep.
Oh my, I guess I get to bump it.
We're too old for that.
And also, I pee at night.
How many of you have to get up in the middle of the night to pee?
I won't do it.
I won't get out of bed.
Oh, I won't.
I have to.
Otherwise, it's going to be an accident.
And we did learn, the other thing that was serious is we did learn that people had losses.
That they come to it having lost a
partner or being divorced. Often you're told when you're dating as an older person, and this is in
my book, that don't talk about your earlier relationships. Don't talk about your wife or
your husband who died. But the man I met had lost his wife after 44 years. And I wrote a piece
called The Ghosts in the Bed. And whenever we were together in bed, there was also his,
and this is not literal, his wife and my husband in bed too. And that's not something to be
suppressed. One of the nice things about coming as an older person is that you had a full life.
Older people, and I'm generalizing, but I think it's very true in my book and often in life,
we don't want to live with somebody else.
If you've lived with yourself, someone, you know, your husband or wife for 40 years,
you don't particularly want to live with somebody else. And you also have to realize that when you date, when you're older, that person is not going to change. You're not going to influence that person
to have different habits. For instance, the guy that I'm dating, he's much more messy than I,
and I don't want to live with him. I don't want to give up my apartment and share everything with
him. And the golden bachelor only discusses, well, where should we live? Who
will live with whom? And they never raise the fact that older people don't necessarily want
to live together. So I just think, you know, I understand it's a reality show, but it's not
realistic in many ways. And I guess you can't expect it to be about older people.
One of the ways in which it was realistic, or at least it got a lot of credit for being realistic, was how it treated sex. The people
on this show wanted to have sex. They weren't like craven or weird about it, but it was obvious that
sex was important to many of them. Do you give the show any credit for that? How did you feel about
how it handled sex?
Yes, I do, of course.
And one of the things that in my book, but also outside of my book,
older people have told me that sex is great.
And we don't think of older people as having great sex. But I think that they do, partially because they have time
and they don't have little children running around
and they don't have to worry about their career.
So you can actually enjoy each other's bodies in a way that you've never done before.
And so that, I think, is very positive.
We don't really see that on Golden Bachelor,
but we know that the women are attracted to Gary and he's attracted to them.
I thought he was kissing them too early.
My mom said the same thing.
She was so grossed out by that.
It was.
And partially because he's seducing them and then letting them down.
And, you know, I don't think love is so easy.
But let me get back to sex. One of the problems or issues about aging is that your body
isn't the, you know, spry, beautiful body that you once had. And for instance, Martha Stewart on
Sports Illustrated bathing suit cover, she doesn't look 80. She looks 40. And a lot of the women on Golden Bachelor seem to me to be a little bit unrepresentative of aging women.
And one thing that I think is really important that you do not see on the Golden Bachelor, that when you date, when you're older, you know that there's an end. Even if you find somebody, you know there's an
end. And that end is that person or you are going to get sick, going to have a major disability,
it's hard to talk about, and are going to die. And so there's something very
touching but sad about older people dating because you see the end.
Closing thoughts for our listeners. Closing thoughts about how you reacted to the show,
what advice you might have for them, anything we haven't asked you about.
It is good to see women who are hardy and will risk things. And one of the things in
the book that many people who went online and did not find anybody, they had a very good attitude.
I think it's how you have your attitude towards online dating and dating when you're older.
I don't know if I could have that attitude. One woman went on 39 different dates,
and she said she learned a lot from each date.
She learned how to tango.
She learned how to adopt a cat.
So I think if you're over 60 and you date,
that if you could have an attitude that this is an adventure
and you might not find the man of your dreams
and the love of your life,
but you might find interest,
you might make friends,
and you might find someone you like somewhat.
I think the finding, as Gary kept saying,
he wanted to find his second true love,
I think that's the wrong attitude.
I think you should find somebody that you care about and could maybe be a companion.
Nan Bauer Maglin, Magnificent at 81.
Today's episode was produced by Halima Shah and edited by Amina El-Sadi.
It was fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Matthew Collette.
And David Herman is our engineer.
The rest of our team includes Siona Petros,
Hadi Mouagdi, Victoria Chamberlain,
Avishai Arcee, Amanda Llewellyn, and Isabel Angel.
Our EP is Miranda Kennedy.
My co-host is Sean Ramos-Verm.
We're distributed to public radio stations
by WNYC in New York.
And Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.