Audiences are encouraged to embrace “traditional” romance narratives (overlooking same sex or bisexual relationships). But what’s most disturbing about The Bachelor is the way it drives women to undermine one another.

Unlike a Cinderella or a Snow White fairytale, the romance isn’t limited to two lovers of the opposite sex, but manifests in a bevy of perfectly sculpted women battling for the affections of a single man. This is heterosexual love as virtual blood sport.

Housing numerous women within a mansion, plying them extensively with alcohol and asking them to fight over one man does not bode well for female friendship. The maths alone equals trouble. This female rivalry illustrates a challenging fact: sexism is not determined by one’s gender. Women can be just as sexist as men. And under certain conditions, they can be worse.

The designated “villain” of the series, 29-year-old account manager Kiera Maguire, provides what producers are looking for as she gushes forth disparaging comments about her fellow contestants. Unfortunately, in providing this kind of entertainment she enacts a form of sexism that might be termed “female misogyny”.

However, perhaps her antics reveal more about the show’s creators, who engineer confrontation, prompt contestants for soundbites and edit together artificial conflict.

Narratives like The Bachelor give prominence to women, but push them to devalue one another on the basis of their looks, or lack of acceptably “feminine” behaviour.

The current series of The Bachelor dramatises far more aggressive conflicts than previous seasons. Provoking competitive nastiness among women is a winning ratings strategy.

Tellingly, in the first episode of this year’s Bachelor, 24- year-old Georgia Tripos likened her fellow contestants to a “pack of hyenas”, asserting that she’d “seen this behaviour before, but in primary school”.

Even good-natured contestants can produce insulting soundbites, such as 26-year-old Faith Williams, who described Maguire as a “duck dressed up as a kangaroo” when the latter pouted about being coerced into wearing an absurd kangaroo outfit.

Undoubtedly, men can be just as competitive and this was made abundantly clear in last year’s Australian premiere of The Bachelorette (where the gender ratio was reversed). However, the rivalry was diffused by the focus on heroine Sam Frost’s emotions. (The year before Frost won the 2014 season of The Bachelor, but was subsequently publicly dumped by Bachelor Blake Garvey.)

The tone of the conflict in The Bachelorette was very different from The Bachelor and in part this was because much of the screen time was devoted to Frost’s feelings. But more disturbingly, the nature of the competition was far less demeaning. The heady cocktail of spite that is onscreen right now sharply contrasts with that sense of camaraderie developed by the men in The Bachelorette.

The unedifying spectacle of women psychologically tearing each other apart indicates that misogyny is not an exclusively masculine domain.