White, Patriarchal Bullshit on Survivor

I've never hidden that I'm a Survivor fan. I love that show. It's fascinating to watch for a variety of reasons: there's heroes and villains. People eating maybe one fifth of their usual caloric count yet being physically challenged in planned challenges and also through extremes of living outdoors in tropical weather.

This season was a repeat of the three teams: Beauty, Brains and Brawn.

Interestingly, the Beauty team dominated challenges from the beginning while the Brain team did what all Brain teams have done in the past and that's squabble too damned much and the Brawn, well, they did badly.

Then a hard challenge came along that ended up evacuating a member of the Beauty team, changing the game up so they did a shuffle and brought it down to two teams. Shortly after that came the merge with people playing as individuals.

In Survivor, people make alliances to work with others while making alliances with others in secret and back stabbing here and cheating there... it's fun and complex. And some people play it really well and can truly get ahead by changing allegiances and working those around them.

Anyway, in the group were 5 men and 5 women. Three of the men, Nick, Jason and Scott (one beauty and two brawn) were very vocal about having the numbers to vote off the remaining members of the Brain tribe. They were cocky as shit. And one of their alliances was Sydney, a female body builder who rocks a bikini like I've never seen. And Sydney has been with Jason and Scott from the beginning but she was starting to give them the side-eye with the extreme cockiness they were showing.

Then we had a lovely moment of Jason, who is actually a bit of a dick, talking about his daughters and telling how his youngest is severely autistic and he loves her as she is and she's perfect. A very awwww moment.

However, the men's cockiness pissed off all the women and Nick was a beauty but not a Beauty (if you know what I mean) and his arrogance was too much and the women blind-sided the men and voted off Nick. It was a fucking beautiful moment.

Show ends and there's the preview for next week and it shows Jason and Scott walking into the forest with the tools from their campsite saying that they're going to starve the women by taking away their ability to get food as punishment for what they did.

Take that in for a moment.

In a game where the prize is a million dollars, where the theme of the game is "Outwit, Outlast, Outplay" and the men are going to punish the women for outplaying them. They're going to punish the women. Like let's see, the women are children and they need to do what the daddies say or they get no dinner?

Suddenly Jason's little sweet Daddy talk takes on a different tone. How can a man who thinks it's okay to make a woman go hungry for having her own opinion, possibly be a man who is believable as a father who loves her daughter as she is?

I was disgusted. I felt like I was watching the schism in our society where the privileged white men punish the uppity women for having their own agenda. I'm still sickened by it a day later.

I hope to see Scott and Jason get voted out quickly. What disgusting, uppity men they are.