Patti Stanger, the Millionaire Matchmaker, makes me angry. Like really, really angry. Like sitting-in-bed-in-my-underwear-watching-TV-and-screaming-to-absolutely-no one angry. And I’m sure I’m not the only one.
The premise of The Millionaire Matchmaker is that Stanger sets up filthy rich men who lack social graces with whatever woman they want. If the client wants a 5’7 blonde with 34″-26″-34″ measurements that likes to bake brownies naked, then that’s what he gets. And he gets more than one of them to choose from.
That’s kind of gross, but everyone deserves love. The problem is how Stanger goes about selecting the women for the millionaire men. Her assistants find women and they come in for Stanger’s approval. They line up in front of Stanger while she reads from an info sheet and sizes them up, judging whether or not they are “good enough” for her millionaires.
Finally Stanger moves on to criticizing their appearances, and she doesn’t sugar coat. In one instance, she told a curly-haired woman that she needed to get her hair straightened or she would never find love.
“Curly hair is like redheads—they just don’t get a lot of play… I don’t know why. I just know that to be a dream girl you need straight, long, silky, humidity-resistant hair,” Stanger said. “Also, I think curly hair reminds them of—well, let’s be polite here. Let’s just say a pterodactyl nest.”
Yes, a pterodactyl nest.
It doesn’t end there, either. She once kicked a woman out of casting, calling her too fat, and told her not to come back until she lost some weight. The woman was absolutely humiliated, and who wouldn’t be? On occasion, Stanger also helps female millionaires. Often, the relationship doesn’t go well. Stanger dealt with a curvy client whom she repeatedly called “plumpty dumpty.” She also said that the millionairess didn’t deserve the Matthew McConaughey type for which she was looking. Stanger refused to set up her client with her desired man, saying that the type of person the wealthy woman deserved was more like a 5 on a scale of 1-10. Stanger rarely refuses a man millionaire his wishes.
Stanger also repeatedly asks women to change their hair color to suit men’s tastes, to wear different makeup, wear a certain kind of clothing and move across the country.
The matchmaker gives no regard to the women’s personal lives nor does she respect their autonomy. She expects the women to change for a man they don’t even know. Furthermore, she tells women not to be “too aggressive,” talk about their careers or have any type of opinion, really. These things, after all, may scare the man away! She suggests that for a man to love a woman, the woman must be his puppet.
In my view, Stanger shamelessly promotes hegemonic masculinity, which automatically opresses women and makes them the subjects of a male society.
It would be one thing if Stanger treated the men on her show the same way she treats women, but instead she caters to their every whim. The only change she asks of them is to wear “cooler” clothes. What a hardship.
