Reality TV's 9 Worst Stock Characters

From frenemies on lifestyle series such as MTV's The Hills and Bravo's The Real Housewives of Orange County (and New York, Atlanta, New Jersey, D.C., and Beverly Hills) to flat-out enemies on dating and modeling shows, reality television presents women as being in constant competition for romantic love, professional success, and personal fulfillment. Like the crabby villains in those old Scooby-Doo cartoons, everything a woman is supposed to want could be available to her, if not for some meddling bitch. "Women tend to be jealous and catty and bitchy," one of Joe Millionaire's so-called gold diggers sneers. Angry at such smack talk, a Bachelor babe explains that "girls can be conniving, deceiving, and just vicious!" The men they fight over hardly hold their harems in higher esteem: "All they wanna do right now is fight. But you know what? There's nothing like a good catfight," Flavor Flav smirked during Flavor of Love. "The backstabbing begins!" dating show narrators promise in promo commercials. During a hunting lesson on Fox's Farmer Wants a Wife, a city girl aims her rifle at some tin cans and talks of preemptive war: "I fight for men the way they do in the Middle East. Before somebody blows me up, I blow them up." So if you don't want to get stabbed in the back, reality TV producers want us to believe, know better than to trust women.