Big Brother kicked off its 20th season on June 27, putting 16 strangers under one roof and forcing them to get to know each other. Some people became fast friends and others became foes, but Season 20 also showed people trying to get very personal way too quickly. In the premiere, some of the BB20 houseguests tried to force a kiss on Scottie and it was pretty inappropriate.
Scottie follows a long lineage of Big Brother nerds, from BB19's quickly evicted Cameron to BB17 winner Steve Moses. While Scottie fills a long-running role in the Big Brother casting tradition, one detail about his life piqued the interest of some of his fellow houseguests. When being asked questions about his love life, Scottie revealed to his fellow houseguests that he has never been in a relationship and has also never been kissed. An appropriate response to this may have been "Oh!" or "That's OK!" or even "Thanks for sharing that detail about your personal life after I asked you a question that may have been seen as invasive." Instead, a few of the women in the Big Brother house decided to start screaming and start chasing him around the house, promising to be his first kiss.
The exchange was pretty uncomfortable for a few reasons. Scottie had no hesitation revealing which people he found attractive in the Big Brother house, claiming that he would be sharing space with multiple "femme fatales" for the summer. Contestants being attracted to other houseguests is part of the formula for every season of the show, but Scottie's "femme fatale" comment implies he expects a deceitful intent from the other women in the house and thinks his fellow houseguests may try to seduce him or others to further their own standing in the game.
While Scottie's attitude towards the women in the house is immature at best and sexist at worst, the women's behavior around Scottie is also pretty inappropriate. Scottie's revelation that he had never been kissed was met with the women in the room infantilizing him. There was an increase in people referring to him as "cute" the way one would refer to a pet or a young child. While late-in-life virginity is not an indication of a lack of maturity, this revelation seemed to be met with others treating him in a more childish manner. This isn't helped by the fact that some of the houseguests decided to make chase and "give" Scottie his first kiss.
Big Brother isn't the first time in 2018 that the topic of a forced "first kiss" was a topic of discussion on reality television. Earlier in the year, Katy Perry made the decision to "gift" a contestant with their first kiss on American Idol, and the contestant later described the situation as uncomfortable.
The contestant, Benjamin Glaze, stated on Instagram, "I do not think I was sexually harassed by Katy Perry and I am thankful for the judges comments and critiques. I was uncomfortable in a sense of how I have never been kissed before and was not expecting it." While the person at the other end of Perry's kiss said that the kiss was not harassment, the fact remains that these two reality series both featured people pushing others to allow a kiss. This shows that there are still societal conversations to be had about what is and is not appropriate when it comes to physical contact with strangers.
The fact that this interaction happened in the very first episode of the show hints that Scottie's lack of a kiss will become a recurring topic during the season. Hopefully, both Scottie and the women in the house who were amused by his lack of relationship experience will start to see each other as nuanced human beings and not boil each other down to labels like "femme fatales" and "virgin."
