Enough with endless bitching about the most hated man in Australia

All week we have watched a gentle, harmless man endure a mass attack from foul-mouthed schoolyard bullies who have never met him but hate his guts.

The man every woman loves to hate.

All week we have watched a gentle, harmless man endure a mass attack from foul-mouthed schoolyard bullies who have never met him but hate his guts.

Everyone with a social media account or a column or a microphone took a pot shot.

He was “Australia’s number one tosser”, “a freakin douchebag” a “knob”, a “jackass”, the nation’s “most hated man”.

At one point he was reduced to tears on national television. Why is this OK? It sure wouldn’t happen to a woman.

The man is Blake Garvey, a 6 foot 5, 31-year old real estate auctioneer from Perth, with a deep voice and a sweet smile. He is the latest star of Channel Ten’s reality TV show The Bachelor, the longest-running reality romance franchise in the world.

Now he has come to represent every man who has ever wronged a woman.

His crime is that he jilted the show’s winner, Sam Frost, a 25-year-old model, before the finale went to air last week, and has reportedly run off with the second runner up, 26-year-old events planner Louise Pillidge.

The passions inspired by such a trivial event indicate that some deeper cultural significance is attached to the love lives of complete strangers. Or maybe the two million people who tuned into The Project last week to watch Blake and Sam give their versions of the breakup just have no life

Either way, the unrestrained vilification of Blake demonstrates that we live in an era that has declared open season on men. Even the toughest alpha male has had to capitulate, which probably explains why so many men piled in on Blake, as a cheap way to burnish their feminist credentials.

Australian men have been “deballed”, in the immortal words of professional matchmaker Yvonne Allen. They are always presumed guilty while women can do no wrong.

This is the new feminism, and woe betide the apostate who points out it takes two to tango.

Forget that the entire premise of the Bachelor demeans women. Blake has to choose one woman from a harem of 30 singletons housed together in a Hunters Hill mansion, without any access to the outside world.

They have to compete for his affections, while going on a series of extravagant dates which culminate each episode with a humiliating rose presentation ceremony in which they are eliminated one by one.

Blake then gets down on bended knee and proposes to the last woman standing, in this case Sam, in an excruciatingly awkward scene no TV production magic could redeem.

Obviously there are easier ways to find a husband. The contestants are lured by fame, not love, and once on the show, are consumed by female sexual rivalry, the most intense competition on earth.

Blake could be Uriah Heep and they would still scratch each other’s eyes out for a few minutes alone with him.

He reacted to this surreal situation like a nice guy trying not to let anyone down. If anything he was too nice.

“Blake found it incredibly hard each week to send girls home,” says a production insider. “He formed strong bonds with many of them – especially in the top four where he struggled to make a decision.

“We even gave him extra time through the course of filming to contemplate and make sure he was making the right calls.”

Blake said the “chemistry changed” between him and Sam once the cameras stopped rolling. Would it be better to string her along, or even to marry her because that’s what everyone expected.

At least he did Sam the courtesy of meeting her in person to tell her it was over.

In her interview on The Project, she intimated that the relationship was never consummated. That’s the act of a gentleman.

A love rat gets what he wants and moves on.

Unlike his critics, Blake showed respect for the institution of marriage, and ultimately for the women who had volunteered for such a demeaning ritual.

Sam, who got to keep the $58,000 platinum diamond engagement ring, can hardly claim her heart was broken. She barely knew him. By her own admission they saw each other once after the finale.

In any case she has been putting her wounded ego to good use with accomplished media appearances, and lots of fetching Instagram, photos.

Last weekend she and fellow contestant Lisa Hyde posted a photo of themselves with the caption, “Sisters before misters”.

It’s the anthem of their generation but it’s no recipe for a happy marriage.

Originally published as Enough with endless bitching about the most hated man in Australia