224. (Naked) Attraction without distraction
This is my review of Naked Attraction. I binged a couple of episodes to quell my hyperfixation during lunch.
I was on the phone with a friend from Bath. We were both in a slump - stressed and vaguely disassociating from our own lives. We weren’t in the mood for anything profound, just catching up and chatting about life, but somehow we landed on Naked Attraction as a cultural artifact worthy of at least half a brain cell. Neither of us had the energy for comfort in the usual formats. We’d just seen enough on our own to compare notes. I discovered the show a while ago, but I like to mention it to every British person I befriend because I think it's funny to watch them squirm about their reality tv because they always have comments about American ones. I had forgotten that the show, after 12 seasons, cancelled just last year.
In my opinion, I found it bleakly comforting because at least now I know people’s standards are all super different. In the way that only morose transcontinental friendship phone calls can be, we both agreed that seeing so many naked bodies in such an antiseptic, clinical context made us oddly aware of our own, but not in a self-conscious way, but in a zoomed-out, “ah, so we’re all just meat machines with preferences” kind of way.
I immediately watched three episodes of it after we hung up. I'm weirdly fascinated about this show, but this is just one of my half-day hyperfixations, which will go away once I indulge a bit.
The format of Naked Attraction is brutally simple: one fully clothed person walks into a black room with a cheerful lady (the host) and stands in front of six colored pods containing naked strangers, who are revealed in stages - genitals first, then torsos, then faces, then voices. One by one, people get eliminated until we’re down to a final two, at which point the chooser has to strip too, in a half-hearted gesture toward equality.
The lineup spans across orientations- bi, gay, straight, trans- and refreshingly doesn’t lean too hard into stereotypes, which I appreciated. The host, Anna Richardson, notably stays dressed, which is probably for the best, since it keeps the focus on the contestants. Between rounds, she drops bizarre statistics about attraction that feel like they came from a Cosmopolitan article.
Naked Attraction is built around the delusion that you can sense "kindness" in a weiner. I think we as humans are allergic to admitting that we're just a little shallow. The show didn't make me jaded so much as painfully aware of how absurd it is that we ever try to codify desire into modern dating's version of courtship, which most of it comes down to profiles and bios, and being at the right time and right place. Watching someone get eliminated because they look a just a little bit "unconfident" (they are on public tv with no clothes on, that's the most confident person in their neighborhood rn) made me retroactively spiral about whether I’ve been ghosted for less.
Naked Attraction didn’t destroy my faith in romance or anything like that. It just made me realize how often we mistake preference for principle. It’s not just that we’re just a bit shallow, it’s that we’re deeply uncomfortable admitting how random and instinctive most attraction really is. To be honest, once you’ve sat through six slow pans of genitals and watched a contestant justify their rejection, you begin to see the uncanny overlap between job applications and dating profiles: just enough information to pretend we’re making informed decisions, not nearly enough to justify them.
Some of the things I was thinking about while watching this was that I think I've been so bamboozled by unrealistic body standards because everyone looks pretty normal to me and they look quite attractive. Maybe it's the confidence on going on tv in their birthday suits that make them attractive? Also it's cool that there were a lot of international people on this show. Some Canadians, Americans, Australians, New Zealanders, and other Europeans were some of the "pod" contestants.
Anyway, I wouldn’t call Naked Attraction “important” television (although, I was somewhat entertained and that's the objective right?). But it did, unintentionally, make me confront the illusion of control. Over dating, over work, over how we present ourselves and how others perceive us. I think being attracted to someone and choosing who the date is one of the only times in our lives that we should be completely selective and picky. And if I came away with anything, it’s that maybe there’s a kind of liberation in admitting how much of life is just vibes.
(When I was watching Naked Attraction, the thing that gets me every time is that when the person gets eliminated, they step down from the pods and they usually give the hopeful single a hug before they put on their clothes. It makes laugh every time because one of them is completely naked and they're about a foot away, trying to not touch the person with their genitals.)
~ naked and somewhat afraid,
<3 K