A Traditional Marriage - scandal over 'Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire?' TV show - Brief Article

National Review, March 20, 2000

When the dust settled, everyone was down on Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire?, the scandalous Fox TV special, except the 23 million people who watched it.

Fox abandoned the child of its fancy when Rick Rockwell, ne Richard Balkey, turned out to have been slapped with a restraining order in 1991 after a fiancee complained that he had threatened her. Rockwell, understandably, has shunned the limelight. Not so Darva Conger, his ex- wife, who has made the talk-show circuit to protest that she never thought she would win, and never considered herself hitched even after she did. "I'm a Christian woman. If I'm not married in a church with a preacher, I am not married before God, and I am not married in my heart." Yes, and she probably never modeled the swimsuit before God, or wore the evening dress in her heart either. The National Organization for Women condemned the spectacle. Given NOW's current makeup, the fact that the women contestants were competing to marry a man was probably the deal-breaker there. Open homosexuals filled the letters pages of the elite press with demands that their unions be recognized, if Who Wants to Marry . . . represents the norm of straight matrimony.

In fact, the show told us a lot about love and sex in 2000-and in any year. Women want to live with powerful men. Many forces, from comparative muscle mass to memories of one's parents to the rigors of childbearing, create the desire. "It is a truth universally acknowledged," Jane Austen began Pride and Prejudice, "that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." She wrote this with a smile, and the ensuing novel shows how complicated the proposition is. But at the end, Elizabeth Bennet marries Mr. Darcy, whose income is 10,000 pounds a year. Even Austen's last and darkest novel, Persuasion, brings its heroine together with a prosperous captain in the Royal Navy.

Human nature being what it is, the real-life fulfillment of our desires is generally broken and harsh. People sin. For most of history, women have been sold as children, yoked in harems, or employed as concubines. In the United States, a compromise of Christianity and republicanism matched one woman and one man, and narrowed the sexual status gap. But like all compromises, it is subject to internal stresses. Christian heresies release passion into the world under the guise of a divine force of erotic love. Democracy, the bastard child of republicanism, asserts that all men (and women and children) are equal in fact, as well as in right. So we get fiancee-beaters, NOW, and gay rights.

But nature always returns. The Fox executives probably didn't have Horace in mind when they planned their blockbuster, but he had them in mind. "If you drive nature out with a pitchfork, she will soon find a way back." If we have scorned and ignored her, she returns in forms that are brutal and ludicrous-as Rick Rockwell and Darva Conger.