Day 10

Davina opened my eyes to something last night during the eviction show. The first evicted housemates in all 11 seasons of Big Brother UK have been women. I’m not necessarily shocked by this but I am intrigued. What’s the root cause of this?

Rachael was the first to go last night. Despite the fact the crowd was chanting “Get Sunshine out” (which she heard and will no doubt result in a mental breakdown over the next few days) Rachael was an unsurprising evictee if you thought about it.

The first night as people were being chosen for the show Big Brother showed the housemates’ VTs to the crowd. Rachael, who referred to herself more than once as being the best looking person she knows, had the pleasure of the crowd turning on her after just 30 seconds. It was a beautiful thing to behold as a girl on the high of being chosen for the show is quickly torn back down live in front of millions watching. It’s part of what fascinates me about Big Brother and it’s part of what’s wrong with Big Brother too.

Why does everyone hate me?

I was going to try and dissect the “women out” phenomena by trying to find a connecting link between all of the first evictees. But the problem is, there really isn’t one. Other than the XX chromosome connection. So what is the real connection?

As Davina rightly pointed out during the post eviction interview, the larger portion of Big Brother voters are female. Now I could draw conclusions from this alone and resort to old theories about how women hate women and women hate beautiful women even more but I feel like it’s too obvious an answer, although I’m not ruling it out.

I think we also have to look at why women are always nominated by the housemates over men in the early stages. The public can’t vote these women out unless they’re up for eviction in the first place. The house was split evenly with seven men and seven women, so why were 3 girls on the chopping block? If we take the stereotype that women hate beautiful women, then why did Rachael not get nominated by any women in the house? She only became available for eviction when David replaced himself with her.

There has been a theory over the years that men are intimidated by intellectual women. I think we can all agree that this theory is not applicable here. Did David replace himself with her because she walked around in her knickers a lot and his predilection for christian values meant he had a problem with her?

Too cheeky for you?

The only thing I can really take from it is that whatever it is that causes this coincidence of female evictions, it’s probably what has driven John James insane for the last week. His moods and reactions to Rachael have been so extreme that it has to be a primal instinct within him to hate her. And maybe that primal reaction is within much of the public.

Am I reading too much into this? After all Rachael only got 37% of the vote so she’s obviously not a runaway loser but she was one of three women available for eviction so maybe the public was spoiled for choice.

It does however point towards a worrying trend that the 3 loudest and most opinionated women in the house were the ones in trouble this week. Is there something we’re not admitting to ourselves?

– Aaron Poole
Follow Aaron on Twitter – @AaronFever

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