The second dinner party on Married At First Sight Australia season 13 was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever watched. That’s coming from an entertainment journalist who is still traumatised by 13 Reasons Why, dissected the drama around The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, and reported on the Love Island manosphere and beyond. I am well acquainted with the trenches of reality television and the uncomfortable ways people can treat each other on screen. And yet, I still stand by reality TV, because I genuinely believe it can shine a light on real behaviour and act as a kind of social microscope for emerging cultural trends.
I previously reported on the female-on-female tension in Love Island: All Stars, but it was nothing — truly nothing — compared to the latest season of MAFS Australia. We were promised a season like no other, and I naïvely assumed the chaos would be confined to the couples themselves.
Instead, love took a back seat entirely in season 13 of MAFS Australia. That classic reality TV mantra — “I’m not here to make friends, I’m here to win” — was nowhere to be found in its usual form. No one seemed interested in making friends, finding love, or winning anything at all. Instead, we were confronted with some of the most toe-curling displays of women-on-women harassment I have ever seen on screen.
Quite frankly, this season of MAFS Australia left me feeling ashamed of my fellow women.
The dinner party debacles
The main perpetrators this season of MAFS Australia were Gia, Brook, Bec and Juliette. These are the four who repeatedly came after each other, as well as fellow contestants like Alissa and Stella. This isn’t about singling individuals out for the sake of it, especially as they are already facing consequences through job losses and intense social media backlash. But it does feel important to reference them directly, because what unfolded on screen wasn’t a single heated moment or an isolated drunken outburst taken out of context. It was, instead, a pattern repeated across multiple dinner parties, sustained text exchanges, and prolonged confrontations. This wasn’t accidental; it was deliberate, repeated behaviour. This was bullying.
Among the attacks, Brook insulted Stella’s clothing and her “stripper boots.” Bec sent messages referring to Alissa as a “rat b*tch” and a “c*cklicking Christian influencer wannabe c*nt.” Juliette called Bec a c*nt, among other insults, and even directed similar language at her husband sitting beside her. No one, it seemed, was spared from the intensity of the exchanges.
There was more shouting across dinner tables than that infamous Real Housewives Amsterdam fight — you know the one. But even that comparison feels slightly off, because Real Housewives feuds are typically mutual and understood as part of the dynamic going in. This, by contrast, involved people who had signed up for a matchmaking experiment suddenly being screamed at across tables, often without engaging in kind.
At one point, Stella calmly asked Brook to step aside to discuss things privately, which was refused outright. That group dynamic — where confrontation required an audience — ran throughout the season. Alliances shifted constantly: Brook and Gia versus Bec, then Bec siding with Gia for reasons that were never entirely clear, then Juliette and Gia against Bec, with others pulled into the crossfire whenever possible.
Gia defended her behaviour towards Alissa by exposing texts from Bec, while ignoring her own role within the same exchanges. Bec, in turn, attempted to turn other couples against Gia by claiming Julia and Grayson’s breakup was due to Gia wanting a woman in the experiment — bringing sexuality into the argument in a way that veered into overt biphobia and left others visibly in tears.
We've reverted to our teenage selves
As mentioned, this isn’t limited to MAFS Australia; it reflects a broader pattern of women-on-women hostility that keeps resurfacing across reality television. In Love Island: All Stars season 3, for example, internalised misogyny often played out through group dynamics, with several women ganging up on Lucinda Strafford. Things also became deeply personal with former friend Jesy, who accused her of “playing dumb,” escalating tensions beyond gameplay into something far more cutting.
In recent seasons of Below Deck: Mediterranean and Below Deck: Down Under, much of the central conflict has also unfolded between female cast members, often revolving around romantic interests, perceived betrayals, appearance-based jabs, and increasingly underhanded tactics used to gain advantage in the crew hierarchy. Cast members like Kizzie and Alessia have been remembered largely for their more divisive behaviour and the friction they created with other women on board.
But this isn’t confined to reality television either. It feels like something we’re witnessing more broadly in real time. What was once more recognisably “schoolyard behaviour” — the cruel friend “interventions,” whispered exclusions, and the slow violence of the rumour mill — hasn’t disappeared. I can still remember sitting in a toilet cubicle, hearing two friends casually dissect me on either side, completely unaware I was there. I was once also sat down and told, matter-of-factly, that “everyone” agreed I had become awful to be around and needed to change. This landed during a period of severe eating disorder and depression, and tipped me further into my downward spiral.
You see echoes of it now on social media, too. Where once the harshest comments I’d receive would come from anonymous men with cartoon profile pictures, it’s increasingly women who are delivering the most personal attacks. Comments about weight, appearance, and character are often made with startling cruelty, sometimes from accounts that otherwise project a carefully curated image of family life and happiness. It’s a strange dissonance, profiles showing smiling children and picture-perfect routines, while the words underneath are anything but.
We don't want to be them, but we just can't stop watching.
Carrying the mental load of prejudice
It's common knowledge that women are often expected to carry the emotional and practical labour in relationships with men, and increasingly, it can feel like some of that pressure is spilling into how women relate to one another. Instead of simply “taking on” an additional role, what we’re seeing is a culture where conflict between women is amplified, performed, and circulated — sometimes in ways that feel unnecessarily cruel.
A lot of energy has rightly been spent calling out the manosphere, which is undeniably a serious issue. But that focus can sometimes mean that equally harmful behaviours elsewhere go under-scrutinised. In some cases, it even creates a distorted logic: if women are being attacked so publicly and freely online, does that justify women attacking each other in return? Of course not. Harm doesn’t cancel out harm.
And the impact is cyclical. When women turn on one another, it fragments solidarity and creates space for wider systems of inequality to continue unchallenged. Whether it’s misogyny being redirected laterally or broader culture-war dynamics that pit groups against each other, the result is the same: attention is pulled away from the structures that actually benefit from that division. Just look at how trans women are subjected to such scrutiny and hatred, rather than focusing on the real perpetrators of assault and other crimes.
MAFS Australia didn’t create female conflict out of nowhere, and it didn’t randomly assemble moments of people shouting slurs at one another. It reflects something already present in parts of reality TV culture and online behaviour, but amplified, edited, and placed under a microscope. It’s not about blaming individuals alone, but about recognising the patterns being broadcast back to us.
What it ultimately shows is a need for accountability and reflection across the board. Not perfection, but a baseline of decency: calling out cruelty, challenging harmful language, and refusing to normalise behaviour that degrades other women for entertainment.
Because whatever the platform — reality TV, social media, or everyday life — there’s value in choosing something better than this. I'll keep watching MAFS Australia and reality television, but I'll take the lessons and apply them to my life.
