My God, my eyes...MY EYES!!!

Mean Mommy may have been bested by a reality show, dear readers. And that is really saying something considering I am one of the three people in America who watched Mr. Personality. Having sat through the last season of The Bachelorette in its entirety, I got to know this season's star well enough to be sucked in to watching The Bachelor: On the Wings of Love. Or I will if I can master my gag reflex.

So the show opens with footage of Jake, the new Bachelor, on the beach in, what will wind up being, one of his only shirt-sporting shots of this segment, because after this we will be treated to Jake cooking eggs shirtless, jumping rope shirtless, jogging shirtless, sawing wood and constructing a gazebo shirtless. All of this must be to counteract the evidence that Jake is actually a deeply closeted, gay man. For example, he owns a beautiful house in Texas, which is not only super clean, but sports a four-poster bed complete with sheer black draperies. To quote H, "That guy has not one single friend who's a dude."

The butching of Jake continues, as we hear Jake describe the pain he went through being voted off The Bachelorette and subsequent healing process, and we are treated to visuals of Jake in his commercial pilot's uniform (the fifth Village Person anyone?), flying acrobatic aircraft on the weekends and finally wearing a leather jacket as he rides a motorcycle on the highways of Los Angeles. He tells us love is "perfect". Reality? Jake? Have you met? This whole time various tempo versions of "On the Wings of Love" are playing in the background and as the climatic closing strains swell, we see Jake, at sunset, on the beach, on his hog, with a goddamn airplane flying overhead. I swear to God I threw up in my mouth.

Back from commercial. We move on to Jake's cast of psychos, I mean, potential mates. Spoiler alert, half of them are lying about their ages or have spent waaaay too much time in the sun. I have several favorites, each crazier than the next. One of them apparently dresses up as a stewardess during the first party. Part of me loves her for her ingenuity because you really do need a gimmick to stand out in this sea of Single White Females. Then there's the one who I will call The Virgin. The Virgin and her first husband saved themselves for marriage and apparently it wasn't all Mr. Virgin dreamed it would be and he started cheating. Cue tears and babbling about understanding Jake's heartbreak.

My absolute favorite bag of saline and Restalyn though, is a graduate of the University of Central Florida, "with a BA in Interpersonal Organizational Communication....so I'm unemployed." Thank you for saving me the trouble on that last part. She "loves herself" and has a "really big personality" which is being supported nicely by a halter top.

The rest of the crew is straight out of central casting - swimsuit model, self-proclaimed "bitch", older woman who's "ready to take on all the young girls", single mother and even a few regular girls who don't make me want to turn in my ovaries. There is an Air National Guardsman (woman?) though, who restores my faith in womankind.

So why would the person who sat through all of Jillian's Canadian nonsense last season not be able to stomach all of this? Because of the lack of dude-ry. Watching The Bachelorette, you get to see all the tomfoolery going on in the men's bunkhouse. Beer pong and farting and good and bad-natured ribbing, and all of it honest. If these guys hated each other they told each other during the drunken boozefests masquerading as Rose Ceremonies. And previous seasons of The Bachelor, while lacking all that, at least had a Bachelor both manly and real enough to mitigate the bitchy bullshit (Bob, anyone?). This one might as well have a vagina.

I say all of this with two thirds of the first eposiode ahead of me. It's touch and go at this point. It might be so bad as to enter Mr. Personality territory, in which case it will just be skimmed through on fast forward during takeout pizza Friday night. But it might turn around and Jake could shed his frozen Ken doll smile and tell one of these freaks she's fucking crazy. Lets' keep our fingers crossed.