Beauty and the Geek is a reality television show where women, who have relied primarily on their looks, and men, who have relied primarily on their intellect, are brought together to live in a house and compete for $250,000. They are split into teams consisting of one man and one woman, who share a room together in the house. Each week the teams have challenges to be the team that nominates two other teams for eviction. In the challenges the men are usually given social, pop-culture tasks and the women are given academic challenges. The teams find out before what challenges they will face and they are given a set amount of time to prepare. During preparation the men will help out the women and the women will help out the men to get each other ready for the competitions. When the challenges actually take place I am always shocked at how well the men and women do.

I think this reality show shows us a number of things. For one it shows us just how well these women who are considered beauties work with these men who are considered geeks. In real life you don’t think of beauties and geeks are working together very often or very well together. Surprisingly these teams are motivated to win and usually work extremely well together. Occasionally a team has differences in the beginning that they are unable to overcome so they continue to fight and argue until they have left the house. I mentioned earlier that I was surprised at how well the women and men do in their challenges. Since the men are picked because they are very intelligent and most are socially awkward we do not expect them to handle their social challenges very well but they are motivated are usually remove themselves from their comfort zone and perform very well. Since the women are picked because they have primarily relied on their beauty to get by in life we do not expect them to do well in their academic challenges but they too are motivate and work hard beforehand so that they will perform well in their challenge. It is a good thing that these men and women do well in the challenges they are given because they show us that the stereotypes we have for them are not right since both groups prove their stereotypes wrong. The men show that geeks aren’t just smart they can perform socially too and the women show that even though they are beautiful they have brains too. I believe that both teams are able to pull out of their comfort zones because they are not just working for themselves they are working for their partner too. I believe that by showing they are more than just beauties they are empowering all women.

Beauty and the Geek helps us realize that in our society we are quick to label people. We have several labels in our society that we like to give people such as jock, athlete, geek, popular, and beauty. Once we have given these labels we have given characteristics to people and are surprised when they do something not fitting of their label. This show helps us realize that not people cannot be given a label because human beings are very unpredictable and are constantly changing. No one label fits one person.