Bachelor runner-up Abbie Chatfield has taken to Instagram to call out the double standards on Australian reality TV, comparing her experience while on Matt Agnew's season to current Bachelorette contestant Ciarran's and pointing out how different the public would've reacted if the person stripping naked on last week's episode had been her.
The 24-year-old, who faced immense backlash over the duration of the show for being 'too sexual', posted a naked photo of herself lying on the couch with grapes covering her, mimicking the pose Ciarran was in when he volunteered to be the naked model on a group date. Abbie wrote that she was nervous to post the image because of the backlash she was worried she'd get, but that "nothing will change" if people don't speak up about what they believe in.
"Last week on The Bachelorette, fan fav Ciarran stripped down to nothing as part of a group date. In the same week, he admitted he used to dance in bars and has had a nose job. This caused Australia (including me) to fall even further in love with him, admiring his confidence, sense of humour and cheeky behaviour," she wrote.
"While I LOVE that the majority of the public got behind Ciarran, I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like if the gender roles had been reversed. What if I had been on a group date, offered to strip down to nothing and posed nude on National TV? What if in the same week I had shared that I had had plastic surgery and had danced in night clubs?!I can imagine the nation would riot," she continued.
"As we know from another one of my ranty posts, I got slut shamed HARD while on Bachie. When I wore a short skirt, I got messages saying that I was unworthy and unlovable for showing some skin. In contrast, Ciarran’s nudity made him a clear contender for Angie’s heart, his confidence being a quality that many women look for in a partner."
Previously, Abbie shared a lenthy post detailing all of the abuse she received while the show was airing, writing that she didn't think people would treat a woman the way she was in 2019.
“Things I got slut-shamed for on #thebachelorau: this bikini, my skort at hometowns, multiple cocktail party gowns, kissing matt ‘without a date’ and at a cocktail party (out of sight of anyone), pashing Matt in various locations with varying degrees of intensity, honestly admitting that I wanted to have sex with a man I was dating for 10 weeks and all around just ‘using sexuality to manipulate Matt’,” she wrote.
The trolling of Abbie got so bad after the show's finale that The Project host Lisa Wilkinson condemned fans, saying that it was a 'mean girls mentality.' Under a photo posted to her Instagram page with Matt and this year's winner Chelsie, Lisa replied to a troll, saying, "Whatever you think of these shows, no-one deserves the next-level nastiness, the threats of violence, the vicious pile-on, and the mean girls mentality that has gone on around her— both on and off the show— just because she decided to run her own race."
"She found him— and he clearly found her— sexually attractive. That was caught on camera but judging her, and not him, for taking part in that...is an attitude that belongs to the 1950s. Abbie is, clearly, heartbroken, and not the tough cookie she tried to portray in that final episode, so let's all be mindful of that, at the very least."
