Netflix’s 'Let’s Marry Harry' drags us back to the 2010s depths of degrading women for the sake of reality TV - and letting men get away with it

For anyone who’s missed it, the premise is simple: Harry Jowsey - the already problematic Aussie reality TV ‘star’ who’s done the rounds on Too Hot To Handle and Perfect Match - is “ready to settle down.”

Twenty women move into a house to compete for his attention, and his three confidants (his abrasive best mate, his ex, and… Amanda Kloots) decide who stays and who goes on his behalf. By the finale, he’s meant to propose to one of them.

One egotistical man, twenty women vying for his attention, and cameras everywhere. Yuck.

I immediately felt icky as soon as it was revealed they’d all be staying in a house together, with Harry in a suite upstairs and the girls in bunkbeds downstairs. Already, the seedy ‘reward’ structure is laid bare - impress him enough and you might get to go up there. They all squeal with excitement and clap.

My flatmate and I found ourselves saying, more than once, that certain scenes were how you’d expect an adult film to start. Harry in the shower (clothed for now) with all of the girls around him cheers-ing their glasses. Harry making out with multiple women in bikinis on a boat where the camera deliberately puts their bum and breasts front and centre, as he puts his hands all over them. The vouyerism is so prolonged and immersive that we wondered how much the camera operator was enjoying it.

Making women compete for a man just does not sit right with me, but the women on the show know what they signed up for. But what I doubt they realised is that their worth would be minimised and judged based solely on how much they impress Harry and his high-and-mighty confidants, who run dumbed down ‘compatibility tests’ for the girls and are deliberately cut throat in their assessment of them.

An early moment in the show made me realise how this was going to go. It was the brief storyline of contestant Faith Gonzalez.

She and Harry had, by the show’s own telling, a genuinely good connection. He took her on a group date (because all dates must require five women for one man), which was set on a yacht. A deliberate choice by the producers, by the way, for the first date to require the girls to be in bikinis and twerk for the camera.

The competitive nature of the show meant Faith went for it - after seeing Harry kiss another girl, it was her time for some 1-1 time. As they were getting a massage, Faith offered to take over and rub Harry’s back. This quickly turned in to a steamy snogging session with Faith grinding on his lap and his hands grabbing her bum whilst the camera was right up in there.

Faith went back to the house and told the other women what had happened, which is… what happens on these shows. It’s the entire economy of the genre. And yet Harry sent her home almost immediately afterwards, reportedly because he felt she’d been too “braggadocious” about it.

Hang on - was the not one all over her on camera for the show’s benefit. She talked about it in the house, the way every contestant on every one of these shows has always done, and she was the one punished for it - cast as attention-seeking, cut loose, humiliated in front of the group. It’s a masterclass in how these formats let a man have it both ways. Perform intimacy for the cameras, then discipline the woman for acknowledging that it happened.

Harry may tell himself he wants a wife, and I genuinely believe him when he says he wants somebody to share his life with. But he comes across as a man who has spent his entire adult life on camera being desired, with networks and producers who enable it to such an extent that they have now built a show that guarantees twenty women will keep doing exactly that.

A leopard never changes its spots - and that is proven when one of the girls who he’s barely acknowledged before, celebrates her birthday. “Because it’s your birthday” is Harry’s reasoning when he takes her upstairs and, from the moaning we hear during a cutaway shot, has his way with her. How generous!

The thing that unsettles me the most is how easily I kept watching anyway. There’s something almost designed about that discomfort. The show doesn’t need you to like Harry, it just needs you to keep pressing next episode. Mild moral queasiness is apparently no match for a really good cliffhanger.

Discomfort keeps people talking, screenshotting, arguing in the group chat about whether Harry’s a bad guy or just a product of a genre that was never built to protect the women in it. Either way, Netflix wins, Harry will be on another show, and the women whose expense it came at will fade in to the background.

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