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Rural bachelors and Marcella Bakker - By Lynley Tulloch

Rural bachelors and Marcella Bakker

By Lynley Tulloch

Rural New Zealand has had a lot of publicity recently. Polluted waterways, unmanageable debt, farmer suicide and animal cruelty - it seems all bad news. Now another issue has been added to the mix: the maintenance of New Zealand’s rural population due to a shortage of attractive males.

Before you dismiss this as hearsay, I will refer you to a front-page story in a major regional newspaper (Waikato Times 4.2.2017) that covered the quest of a young woman, Marcella Bakker, searching for love. Despite posting an advertisement on a Farmers NZ Facebook page last September looking for a mate, she has yet to find one who is good looking, intelligent, emotionally sensitive, and confident.

Ye Gawds (which in the urban dictionary means “Oh, My Gosh” or in social media speak “OMG”) what is a girl to do? No one who looks like Bakker wants an oldie with a pot belly, a pipe and a dog underfoot.

Yes, Bakker is leaving the muck and cow dung to go to OZ, to become another kind of woman (even though she is a tomboy at heart and not a girly girl, as Bakker is quoted saying).

Here is essentially what is a pin-up ‘dear aunt’ story grabbing front page status at a time of international instability and crisis. Is the world just all too much? Are we seeking distractions?

But seriously, how will the rural sector of our society reproduce itself if it does not take care of its collective good looks and intelligence? C’mon men, you’re letting the side down.

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Bakker is apparently saying that rural Kiwi men (of her age) are all unintelligent and not good looking. The older ones (plus 40) sadly appear lonely, divorced and desperate with baggage the size of an Angus bull.

Now, there’s another headline! “Middle aged farmers are deserted by their spouses in droves”. Alongside the problems of maintaining a farm, lowering milk prices and crippling drought it’s no wonder that farmer depression statistics are high. Being slammed by the amazing looking Bakker surely won’t help their self-esteem.

Well they need not worry much longer. Bakker is traversing the ditch to find herself a man and a new career in real estate. Anywhere, it seems, but rural New Zealand. Which leaves rural New Zealand bachelors stuck in the mud. Literally.

At least the rodeo folk have a solution of sorts. The blonde blow up doll that attends their events is always at the pub down the road after each rodeo. She won’t be running off to Australia at least. Not a conventional way of addressing the problem I suppose, but evidence of rural intelligence if nothing else.

It seems to me that a whole lot of assumptions are being made about both women and farmers in this article. And they sit a bit uneasily with me.

To begin with, Bakker is projecting the image of the ‘incomplete woman’; that is, a woman who needs a man (equal in intelligence, looks and career aspirations) to make her life complete. Yet this same narrative is rejected in the ‘Your Weekend’ section of the Waikato Times on the same day. In a cover story entitled “The power of one: why single women are winning at life”, we are told that there is no need to put a ring on it.

Mainstream media fulfils a role in establishing, fixing and disseminating normalized gendered ideas. Today’s woman is an enigma. She is both complete and incomplete. Further, women are in search of the ‘Other’ (male) to define themselves and yet at the same time positioned as independent from him. They are tomboys and girlie girls. They are everything and they are nothing.

Not quite sure where that leaves the rural male. Up s**t creek I would think.

Don’t get me started on dirty dairying.


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