“Reality” television has done it again. This week, Australian Twitter ignited with outrage after My Kitchen Rules contestants Sonya and Hadil, known as “The Jordanians” on the show, were unceremoniously booted from the “dinner table” and the program, for “bullying” other contestants.

We have a contradictory relationship with “reality” television. On the one hand, we know it is highly structured, selectively edited and stringently cast. On the other, we furiously and slavishly follow the drama, and much like the contestants themselves, who seem to get so used to the camera they forget it is there, we suspend disbelief and go along for the ride, imagining we are watching real people.

Stolli2Stout (@stolli2stout) SHOUTOUT to Sonya & Hadils Parents & Partners. You must be so proud. #mkr

Sarah Miller (@saremillerr) Sonya and Hadil are siting there BAITING Jess and Emma, they are going OUT OF THEIR WAY to be CRUEL, I will honestly be DISGUSTED, if anyone but Sonya and Hadil are made to walk #MKR

Steve Webb (@PoliticaleI) I find it appalling that this behaviour is being celebrated on national tv when the rest of the country is working towards eradicating bullying and harassment #mkr

One of the first things scriptwriting students are taught is to create conflict. Without conflict there is no drama and without drama there is no story. “Happily ever after” is but one short line in a long fairy tale.

Australia, please. We are not witnessing real life. To buy into this charade only encourages producers and writers to whip up ever more dramatic and ethically dubious situations for which the participants can take the fall.

Anyone who knows me, or indeed follows my Twitter feed, would likely know my deep loathing for “reality” television shows, precisely for reasons such as this. They trade in exploitation and manipulation, setting contestants up for public disgrace on flimsy promises of fleeting fame and unlikely fortune, all while absolving the program itself of culpability because the participants use their real names.

Having missed the drama when it aired, I spent last night and this morning scouring the media for references to and clips of the show. And look, I’m not gonna say the women’s behaviour was exemplary or even acceptable. What I will say is, nothing that happens onscreen is inevitable or beyond the control of the show’s producers. Putting the word “reality” in the title does not excuse them any more than an office manager ignoring aggressive behaviour in a regular workplace excuses the office manager.

Leaving the women – and the bad guys on these shows are almost always women – to catfight it out while the program’s executives bask in the publicity and the advertising revenue is at least as, if not more, unethical than any bullying we see onscreen.

It’s theatre. It’s a stage. And yet the creators of the drama sit back, count their dollars, and leave the contestants to take all the flak. What makes this particular case even more insidious is that the “evil villains” just happened to be Arab women. What a remarkable coincidence.

Arabs have long been represented onscreen in one of two ways. As objects of fear: the aggressors, the threats that must be neutralised (see Homeland and 24), or as objects of ridicule: bumbling, uncouth fools who cannot be taken seriously (see Fat Pizza and Here Come The Habibs).

Although seemingly different, both of these representations ultimately serve the same purpose: to degrade Arabs while affirming western (yes, I mean “white”) intellectual and cultural superiority.

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In Reel Bad Arabs, the late professor Jack Sheehan conducted a comprehensive and damning study of the representation of Arabs in Hollywood. Analysing more than 1,000 depictions of Arab fictional screen characters, he found Arabs were routinely portrayed as “heartless, brutal, uncivilized, religious fanatics through common depictions of Arabs kidnapping or raping a fair maiden; expressing hatred ... and demonstrating a love for wealth and power.” Sound familiar?

Only 5% of Arab film roles – 12 characters in total – portrayed Arabs as “normal, human characters.”

Sonya and Hadil, who have apologised to the public, claim to have been “twisted and provoked” by the network. Nonetheless, regardless of the women’s personal responsibility, the willingness of viewers to heap all the blame on them again speaks to our preference for shaming and isolating individuals, rather than addressing the deeper structures of power that shape and define our society.

Did My Kitchen Rules cast these two women precisely because they seemed cocky and arrogant, making the potential for fireworks too good to pass up? Were the women directed to play up the aggression? Did the women see it as “acting”? These are questions we should ask (I have reached out to Sonya and Hadil but at time of writing have not received a reply, unsurprising given their status as Australia’s Most Hated Brown Women This Week).

No contestants have ever been booted from My Kitchen Rules in this way before but pop culture does not exist in a vacuum. When the country seems to unite in unanimous hatred and revulsion at two Arab women, even as Arabs are sorely both under-represented and misrepresented onscreen, and when Arabs are largely absent from the upper echelons of power and from the media (with one or two exceptions), then incidents like this are processed in an outsized way.



“Shoutout to Sonya and Hadil’s parents and partners. You must be proud,” one scathing tweet said, only to be met with the reply, “Pretty sure they’re the same.” Invoking and then perpetuating the well-worn stereotypes of the uncivilised Arab who must either be subdued or ejected from polite society, they again prove to be incompatible with our way of life. They are unwelcome at our dinner table.

That, perhaps, is the only thing real about this “reality” show.