Welcome to our Thursday Recap of The Bachelorette — you can read Nadine Cohen’s upsettingly funny recap from Wednesday here. We’ll be recapping every episode, because we are very passionate about love or TV or whatever.

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Can I just say that women who date straight men are fucking heroes?

This whole column is meant to be about taking one of those gold-panning things (a pan?) and then taking it down to the ol’ Bachelorette stream, and sifting through the polluted, viscous water and sorting out the literal chunks of crap and collected balls of hair and fat to see if there are nuggets of gold. That’s dating. That’s the horrible Sisyphean search for love. That’s a metaphor.

But since we moved on from The Bachelor, which was weird enough in itself, I’ve been struck by one inescapable truth: men are goddamn awful! This house is a like a box of chocolates, except maybe there’s one chocolate which is actually edible, and all the rest are full of glass and poison and swagger and bravado.

And you know what — even the one dude WHO ISN’T ACTIVELY DREADFUL is still a chocolate. He’s still not that good for you, he’s not healthy.

This is apparently what dating straight men is like. I’m shook, I’m worried.

Every man in this house seems like a volatile mixture of paranoia and insecurity and hair and toxic masculinity. Even the sweetest dum-dum amongst them (Army Jules) has a horrible moustache. A moustache! This conventionally beautiful blonde lady shouldn’t have to struggle so hard to find a nice, non-threatening, non-sociopathic boyfriend.

ANYWAY. Let’s see what lessons about love we managed to extract from this trashfire episode of The Bachelorette.

LESSON #1: Learn To Mimic Human Emotions

I’ve seen a lot of crime shows, so I feel pretty qualified to make this statement: Bill is a sociopath.

Bill has this huge fake smile and silver hair and a chin you could use to cut butter, if you were a weirdo. I know I’m not allowed to defame people like this, but when he was a child he definitely killed an animal. But because he’s smart, he’s learned how to mimic human emotions and get ahead in business (which is apparently mechanical plumbing, which I imagine is pipes for robots?)

This is all allegedly, for any LAWYERS reading. (Alleged by me).

Anyway! He’s definitely a sociopath, because after using his Wild Rose to steal the date from Tait (rhymes are fun), Ali asked him which super-power he would choose, and he answered “the ability to read people’s minds” as if that wasn’t THE MOST FUCKED UP and INTRUSIVE psychopath ability there is. What possible wholesome reasons could you ever have for reading someone’s thoughts? Fuck!

Ali chose “flying” as her superpower, which is so fucking basic, but honestly, I respect that. Fly away from these horrible gross men, Ali.

Anyway, after Bill tried a whole bunch to go wake-boarding, which was sorta his punishment for stealing Tait’s date, he and Ali sat down and kinda robotically went through the motions of date conversation, and Ali was sucked in somehow. Bill was clearly just telling lies in order to sound more attractive, because he said multiple times that he’d be HAPPY to move to Adelaide, which I think eventually tipped Ali off.

Nobody is happy moving to Adelaide, it’s just a thing you put up with. Big red flag.

LESSON#2: Understand What Respect Means, Danny

Every so often The Bachelorette does something so dystopic, so on-the-nose nightmarish that I think: surely the producers are fucking with me. They know. They know and they are fucking specifically with me.

Such as this episode, where each troll-man was forced to bid at an auction on qualities that Ali admires, putting a literal dollar quantity on the performative value of these traits. Compassion, loyalty, humour — all were fiercely bid upon.

But the man who won — Danny, 39, chiropractic student? — put all his money on “respect” and therefore won a date.

Anyway, then this weird self-proclaimed “soft-spoken” guy absolutely monologued about respect to Ali, using several hundred trite phrases during his never-ending soliloquy.

“The beauty in music is the space between the notes,” he says, talking so quickly over Ali that she is unable to get a word in. Also, fun fact — that’s a bullshit saying, because the real beauty in music is actually the sick guitar riffs. Like, when it’s all “needly-needley-needly, NEEDLY NEEDLY NEEDLY NEEDLY” and then the drums are like “ba-ding, bom bom” and the sax is going “awooooooooooooooooooooooooooo” behind it all?

Ali manages to get a word awkwardly in and say “You’re so smart”.

Anyway, after waxing awkwardly about respect for so long that Ali’s eyes glaze over, he just grabs her face and goes in for a completely un-prompted kiss, which she had to reject. It was fucked and awkward, and a darkly hilarious example of how despite performatively shouting from the rooftops about how much he respects women, he has no idea of how to fucking actually do that. Should have put $100 on “consent” too.

If that wasn’t bad enough, he later wore a really ugly tie.

LESSON #3: Gossip Furiously

Let’s get this straight — the men of The Bachelorette mansion gossip so much more than anyone else. Fact.

Anyway, some truly gross shit went down, with 23-year-old fuckboi Nathan caught spreading rumours about something super slut-shamey about Ali and her ex-boyfriend, Grant. The boys all have a sick gossip about it, and then Charlie, who moves between seeming like a good-intentioned idiot and a patronising paternal asshat, decides to go and tell Ali about it.

Even his reasoning is shit — “she’s been duped by men before, I have to protect her” he says. Tell her because she deserves to know what’s being said about her, not because she’s a helpless dove. I saw this lady effortlessly wakeboard, I’m pretty sure she could crush every man in this house to death with her muscular thighs, like Xenia from Goldeneye. And she’d be right to do that, too.

Anyway, it all ended with Nathan being kicked out after having some tense blowups, and everyone loved how dramatic it all was, except for Ali who obviously found it all wildly distasteful.

Here’s what it all looked like:

I mean honestly, was a 32-year-old woman who wants to get married WITHIN 6-MONTHS and have babies shortly after ever going to actually settle down with a 23-year-old fuckson, let alone a gossipy little shit who likes to spread rumours? It’s good he is gone. I hope he learns something.

The Bachelorette is on every Wednesday and Thursday night, and Junkee will be recapping every episode like idiots.

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Patrick Lenton is the Entertainment Editor at Junkee. He tweets @patricklenton.