A Pretty Girl With a Mental Problem is Still Pretty Enough to Marry,
or Freaks on Parade

Oh, how the simple, unassuming women of Byron's world have changed!

Seemingly overnight, the whole slew of Barbie Doll debutantes turned into a pack of scheming, slightly manic she-wolves, and much to our dismay, we were sickeningly glued to our televisions, committed and obligated to witness the moment psychosis set in for these women.

It started just like every other, slightly depressing episode that came before it. One girl was nervous, another felt a connection, and all of them were picture perfect specimens of the softer sex.

Meet Cynthia, the sweetly innocent charity director who is most famous for the crazed look she imparts on you, gentle viewer, whenever our hero deigns to reward her with a rose. She's not one to let the other women seal her fate, and our show opens with her whisking Byron off to a secluded chaise to discuss matters of their newly budding relationship under the watchful eyes of several television cameras.

“I'm not manipulative,” she declares, and we are reminded of the rule that states that the one thing we claim most loudly that we are not is most certainly the one thing we most likely are. She makes her claim, then proceeds to point out that all the other women sharing the California villa are most certainly manipulative and competitive, and the irony of this declaration strikes me like a lightning bolt.

She also insists that she is goofy, while curled up like a sleek cat in the chair, her legs wrapped under her, a somber expression on her serious face. Clearly the opposite of my earlier stated rule is also true, that which we most loudly proclaim about ourselves is cerainly the least likely to be true. Nonetheless, Byron soaks up her proclamations like a sponge, which, in this case, is a porous material that is especially absorbant, but it could almost certainly mean the other type of sponge: a spineless, simple organism lacking a brain. The third type of sponge that comes to mind is a device that is used to hinder impregnation, and weirdly, this also applies to our protagonist. Or at least one can only hope.

How to Make a Splash on Your First Date,
or If You Can Get Her Wet in the First Fifteen Minutes, You'll Be On Easy Street

But there are other adventures in store for our resident fishmonger, and he is shuttled away to Newport Beach with the felicitously charming and not-at-all standoffish Tanya, a teacher with incredibly long legs. Tanya is somewhat an anomaly in the rank of women hoping to wed and bed the dashing fisherman, her class and sophistication belying her appearance on this notorious television show.

Byron, ever the psuedo-sophisticate, vies to impress this woman who has so completely outclassed him by taking her for a drive around Newport Beach in a sporty little car. The type of car isn't important (it's a WaterCar by March), nor its aesthetics (a camaro-esque convertible in a candy-colored shade of red), nor its pricetag (which rings in at about $150,000). No, the point here is that this little red convertible is actually an amphibious car, and speeding down a launch ramp into the water is how Byron shows his date this characteristic of the vehicle. She, of course, is promptly drenched by water flowing over the windshield, but with the grace of a million Jackie O's, she smiles prettily and it's smooth sailing from there.

There comes a point when even a man of the sea (or, at least, a man incapable of holding down a job with a steady income and set hours who stumbles into the world of sports fishing and discovers the riches that can be won there) must make for land to feed his ever increasing appetite, and so he does, taking Tanya to a fancy, though desolate, waterside restaurant so that they may gorge themselves on gourmet.

We cannot forget the other hopefuls back at the villa, however, and shortly, we are shown what proves to be a rather disturbing conversation between the adversaries.

The bully women badger Andrea, the hopelessly feeble-minded dental hygenist. “Do you love him?” “Yes,” she reveals, confirming her feelings for a man she has only been on one date with, a man whom she will soon her smacking lips with another pretty blonde in the foyer of her home, in the wee hours of the morning, and amidst lustily asked “When can I see you again?” type pleas from the blundering Byron. The only other sound she can here is the solemn, mournful violin playing for her bygone mental stability.

At this moment, the very moment that Andrea evolves from a passably normal woman into an initiate in the ranks of the psychotic, Krysta takes a moment to commentate for us, the faithful viewers, on the absurdity of Andrea's declaration of new-found love. “She's not like the rest of us.” (That, dear Krysta, is largely a good thing.) “She's a little over the top.” The irony of this statement coming on the hills of one that declares Andrea's “difference” from the other girls is so present that it's almost tangible.

Rubbing Me the Wrong Way,
or What the Hell is Wrong With His Chest Hair?

Mary. Mary with the ticking biological clock. Mary with the cold stare and the emotionless discussion of her emotions. Mary who looks killer in an animal print bikini, but who has the meanest, coldest way of telling you that she's attracted to you.

Cynthia is upset that Byron asks Mary to join him for a massage. She is convinced that Byron likes brunette women with small boobs. Ah. So there it is. Most men who aren't particularly drawn to blonde women with ample bosoms (no matter how psychotic they look when he offers them a rose) clearly must only like small-breasted brunette women. Though Mary isn't really that small-breasted, Cynthia is certainly one of the more busty women in the house, and is likely not used to men being attracted to other aspects that women have to offer, like intellect, sex appeal, overall appearance and proportion, wit, and kindness. The men who've come before Byron have all been of a single mind, or young Cynthia attributes any success she's had with men to her particularly large breasts. Let's hear it for self-esteem.

During the massage, Mary notes that when our bachelor removed his shirt, not only did she notice, but she was also impressed. The viewers, of course, saw the same chest, and while he has a handsome enough shape, I suppose, he certainly has a very odd and suspect swatch of hair in a perfect triangle, dead center on his otherwise naked chest. Theories may abound about this unique formation, but I tend to favor those which claim he's wearing a chest-hair toupee or those which try to prove that excess hair has been removed in an effort to streamline his otherwise normally hairy torso. In either case, or if it turns out to be one of a myriad of other possibilities, I am a little bewildered by this arrangement of hair, and while I will admit to being intrigued, I would never automatically associate intrigue with attraction.

Regardless, Mary is won over by this odd display, and proceeds to share some very intimate, and, for most people I would assume, private thoughts about the chemistry between herself and the oddly-haired Byron in front of two massage therapists. Throwing convention out the window, our Mary refuses to be fit to a mold that says when on your first date with a man, which happens to be a couples massage, just make happy noises and sexy little sounds while you get your massage, but don't share the stark, private details of your feelings with the masseuse.

The cold, robotic tone Mary employs to further the message she is trying to send Byron - her hopes for her partner, her attraction to him – makes it sound almost that she is insincere, or that she is, in fact, really a robot. Needless to say, Byron's found his gumption, and his gumption dictates that he make out with her and every other woman who dares to find herself alone with him. Make out he does, on the very same spot where he sat with goofy Cynthia and her ample breasts just a day or so before.

Effing Hell, Just Kill Me Now,
or My Date With Elizabeth

In a move almost worthy of “Heather from Texas,” Elizabeth decides to scare the bachelor away. Byron takes her to an aquarium, and they do what all non-marine biologists do at an aquarium, half-heartedly look at fish, and hope and pray that the one they're with will be the first to say, “Wow, that was great, ready to go?” so as not to seem uncultured or unintelligent. I call it the Emporer's New Clothes Personality for browsing boring Modern Art displays and any aquarium other than the one in Baltimore. No one wants to admit that it's a horribly boring way to spend the day.

But Elizabeth isn't one to let this boring date be her demise. She opts instead to shoot herself in the foot by conducting what Byron dubs a “husband interview.”

“What are you like when you're angry?”
“How many children do you want?”
“What is our song?”
“I love you, do you love me?”

A lackluster first date to the aquarium in the middle of the afternoon with a woman bent on getting answers to the sorts of things you normally date someone to find out about, who also apparently forgot that she was still wearing her nighty over her jeans... well, it's safe to say that this pageant-ready debutante from Chicago didn't get anything like the liplocks bestowed upon Tanya at the end of her date.

It's My Party and I'll Cry If I Want To,
or How to Set the Women's Movement Back a Couple Decades

Mary, Mary quite contrary. Contrary to everything women have been fighting for for years, that is. At Byron's ill-planned slumber party, things get a little out of hand, and Mary decides to lay out the pouty face and manipulate our hero into offering her his undivided attention.

What caused this juvenile display, you ask? Simple really. All ill-planned slumber parties must have one ill-fated game that invariably singles one poor girl for abject humiliation. For me, it was the weekend of Linda Trimble's 14th birthday party in Big Bear, where four boys and four girls, of which I was one, all gathered in the middle of a blizzardy winter. We played Truth or Dare, and the boy I liked discovered my secret crush, and was not as pleased as I had imagined he would be. The other girls thought it would be fun to tease me endlessly by freezing my bra in the snow on the windowsill then leaving it on his pillow. At my 14th birthday/slumber party, we teased Melissa Sims and didn't invite her to come with us to toilet paper houses, so she took off in tears and tipped my mother off to our conspiracy to sneak out after all the grownups fell asleep.

But this slumber party... this one takes the cake. Byron, the same Byron once romantically linked to a stripper, was caught unawares by a strip-tease mandated by a game of Truth or Dare. After carying out her obligation to abide by the sacred rules of Truth or Dare, Andrea was crushed by Byron's lackluster response to her performance. Forced into a naughty lap dance that she couldn't in good conscience decline, as the rules clearly stipulate, and then rejected by the somewhat aghast and extremely uncomfortable Byron, must certainly not have aided poor Andrea in her quest for a little more sanity after the kissing debacle of the previous evening.

For the women a little slow on the uptake, Byron loved the strip tease. Any man who says he doesn't is a big, fat liar. They may not like other people knowing that they enjoy a good lap dance, or they may not find it exceptionally stimulating, but they still enjoy a good show and a little bare flesh. Let's be honest here. He was only acting chaste as it was much more effective to feign shock than to pad Andrea's ego by smiling and saying, “Thanks, Andrea,” if your goal is to get into the pants of more than one of the women at said strip tease. Andrea becomes the sacrificial lamb in this instance. Jayne dared her, and I dare Jayne to say she didn't know exactly what the effect would be.

As an aside, a real pajama party with real women never has silly string, pillow fights, or games that make you perform a strip tease. That is, unless you are filming a movie called “Slumber Party VIV, Four NonStop Hours of Girl-on-Girl Action!”

The forced, obviously producer-driven fun ends when Byron spots Little Miss Mary and her big sad puppy dog eyes. Being ever the gentleman, he pulls her outside, away from the other girls and seeks to find out what is troubling this cold, mean little robot of a woman. She is bothered, she confesses, because the party is reminiscent of some of the classless things she did to earn Bob's favor, only to be rejected by him even after she started monitoring her ovulation cycle. Byron commiserates with her, even telling her that she is cute “especially when she is upset,” thereby encouraging her to continue her self-serving, manipulative ways in the future by providing a little positive reinforcement.

When Byron returns, he is forced to deal with a room full of angry women, who are all upset that they didn't think of Mary's stunt first. Jayne, in particular - the delicate, shy, nearly 40-year-old woman with a rack any 20-year-old would kill for – is aggravated. She lays into Byron, slinging swear words around like a seasoned sailor. Though shy in front of the other girls, in front of the camera, or on a date with Byron, she morphs into my mother, also a beautiful, older woman with a rack many 20-year-old women would kill for, but with a mouth and an attitude on her the size of Cynthia's ample breasts.

She's angry, she explains, because bleeping Byron should have bleeping known that the the bleep-bleep party would bleeping die when he bleeping left with that bleeping Mary. No simple, “Byron, it hurt when you left us all here,” will suffice for this woman who rather seems to prefer the slew of garbage she can continuously spew from her pretty little mouth.

Her barrage continues even well after the party has broken up and Byron has decided to return to his quarters rather than screw everything up a little more. Krysta, not one to miss an opportunity when she spies it, decides to approach his room with champagne for two, only to be spotted by Jayne from across the property. In an exciting display of will, Jayne vaults across to Byron's room like a gazzelle and enters before Krysta can get her grubby little mitts on the man she wants to cuss at a little while longer.

True to his spongy description, Byron slinks out with Jayne to join the rest of the women at the hot-tub, chastising Krysta for her forwardness, and caving entirely to Jayne's demand that he avail himself to all of the ladies.

This sad and pathetic evening finally draws to a close, but only after Jayne has disgraced herself completely. The next time Byron sees the ladies, it's time to hand out roses, and in spite of Mary's manipulation, Jayne's outlandish explosion, Andrea's embarrassing lap dance, Cynthia's stalker-esque stares, and Cheresse's persistent absence, he gives them all roses and asks them to stay. He also asks Tanya to stay, the amazingly classy, but clearly too-good-for-him-that-she's-certain-to-leave-him-if-he-picks-her Tanya. Krysta, the mean little blondie with two chins (even though she's tiny) and exceptionally pretty (but also exceptionally in need of a dating manual) Elizabeth are sent home.

Next time on The Bachelor: Find out once and for all that no one in the world would call Byron a “friend,” as evidenced by the lack of an episode where the pals of the Bachelor come to sort the women out.

Femme
"Shock me, shock me, shock me with your deviant behavior."