The Dating Game v. The Mating Game | The American Spectator

While recently searching YouTube for a specific 1970s TV program, I happened upon a classic show from the era: The Dating Game. Yes, many readers here remember it well. The show typically featured a solo girl seated in a chair asking romance-oriented questions to three mystery men she couldn’t see. The exchanges were often amusing. After the questioning, the girl picked a guy to have a special, all-expenses-paid date with, courtesy of the show.

To watch an episode today, over half a century later, is quite striking, if not shocking and depressing — given the degraded state of our culture today. The girl and guys were clean cut, dressed nicely, prettily, handsomely. They weren’t slobs.

The episode that I caught happened to include an unknown young man by the name of Tom Selleck, who was not a TV star at that point. Selleck and the other guys looked sharp — jackets, ties, shaven. The girl’s parents would have had no qualms about any of these gentlemen taking out their daughter. Or at least judging by appearances. (Click here to watch.)

As for the girl in this 1967 episode — named Madonna Brown and described as “vivacious and enthusiastic” — she was not just pretty but a picture of purity. Like the guys, she wasn’t drilled and stamped and dyed. No bolt through her nose or tongue (a real turn off for kissing). No tattoo of Lucifer or a Marijuana leaf on an arm so discolored that it looks like the poor creature has a repulsive skin disease. No blue hair.

And needless to say, there was no “transgender” individual tossed in to check the woke-DEI boxes to satisfy the culturally-morally insane.

Of course, what I’m describing is not merely that one episode with Tom Selleck. (By the way, Selleck lost out to Bachelor #3, a swimmer from Indiana University in Bloomington, like our own R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.) I got hooked and watched several more episodes. They were all like this. I was also struck by the fact that when the happy gal and her chosen beau smiled at the announcement of their surprise vacation trip together, The Dating Game host noted that they were to be accompanied by a chaperone. Yes, a chaperone. The network wasn’t about to send off the couple for a week-long romp in a hotel room in Tijuana.

No way, José.

The show was a wonderful walk back in time — to a better place and better world. And what particularly hit me was the contrast to an immensely popular current show called Love Island, which our Andrew Gondy wrote about at The American Spectator. Andrew said it so well that I’ll quote him at length:

In this show, a group of contestants, labeled “islanders,” are isolated on a constantly surveilled island villa. To win the show and its $100,000 prize, participants must couple with another contestant, whether for “love,” survival, or most often, promiscuity.

“Islanders” choose their partner based on first impressions, but often “re-couple” by choosing or being chosen by another contestant. The survival aspect of the show is interactive, as viewers vote on which couple seems to have the most compatibility or sexual appeal with one another.

The concept of “re-coupling” encourages contestants to swap partners…. Love Island is widely consumed by teenagers and young adults, and it sets a precedent that promiscuity, body flaunting, and surface-level attraction are not only normal but also admirable….

In the show, sex and intimacy are bargaining chips and survival tactics, with hookups being the common theme of the game show. The island theme also means that the show’s filming and production are entirely based on the sexual appeal of the contestants. Slow-motion montages of desirable features align this show more closely with softcore pornography than reality television.

Vanity, lust, and the commodification of sex are the core of Love Island, not secondary features. Contestants often share beds and are shown engaging in sexual acts, only edited or obscured to avoid the production of literal porn.

Gondy notes that this “entertainment” is offered for the “arousal of the show’s viewers, who devour the spectacle with mouths agape.”

It’s also offered for the arousal of the male contestants, who gobble up the attractive girls given to them. It’s quite a deal for the guy. He gets to try out all these hot babes, delivered to him if not on a silver platter (maybe that, too) then right into his bed, courtesy of the generous TV hosts. I suspect that Love Island is besieged with male applicants.

Man, where were girls like this when I was dating? I was born a generation too early!

When I was growing up in the 1980s, a show like this would have infuriated feminists. They would have been scowling and howling and barking about sexual exploitation. And yet, these girls today don’t seem to mind at all. They seem more than happy to be sexual playthings.

For the record, female viewers don’t seem to mind either. They’re titillated by the lurid near-nude shots. In my day, guys who stared at such stuff were shamed as peeping Toms. Now, women watch en masse with prurient interest. For them, it’s a version of what my colleague Teresa Tomeo refers to as “mommy porn.” Worse, the show is merely the latest iteration of the whole sick, depraved genre (recall The Bachelor, not to mention the egregious Temptation Island). It’s all the same sewage.

Rather than a modern version of The Dating Game, these shows are an altogether new spectacle. You might call it “The Mating Game,” though even that’s not quite right, because the couples don’t mate. Whereas dating once upon a time in America involved courting and potentially finding a spouse to marry and have children with, the goal of these modern moral monstrosities is anything but mating. The chief objective, above all others, is not to procreate. The only thing that viewers and contestants all know is that they don’t want an unexpected human life to be born from their wild sex. (RELATED: Loneliness Is the New Oil)

In fact, that prompts a thought regarding the organizers of these shows: I assume they screen the girls to make sure (at the behest of the guy, too) that they’re on birth control. Of course, birth control does fail. Does the show (and the guy) bear any responsibility for unwanted pregnancies? Do abortions result? I can’t imagine they don’t. That’s as elementary as the birds and bees.

Abortion aside, there’s an even higher risk of STDs. Sexually transmitted diseases are a plague among young people today, especially among those who behave like the contestants in these shows. They might not walk away from these shows with an unwanted baby, but they’re surely sauntering away with unwanted STDs.

Does the show screen contestants for STDs? Surely, many people watching are wondering.

These shows are trash. And they peddle their rot to a culture that apparently enjoys these voyeuristic forays to the moral dumpster.

And yes, I realize that not everything was right in the world of The Dating Game. A good-looking person dressed neatly is obviously not necessarily a good person that you want to marry. I know, I know. Blah, blah, blah. Still, I prefer the more classy, dignified time when decency was at least a shared objective.

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