There’s an old saying on Survivor: when Zac Brown is racking up more confessionals than actual players, and more screentime is devoted to some guy sharting than to an entire arc of another castaway, you have taken a wrong turn.

In reality TV, editors are God. They sift through hundreds of hours of footage and decide what story gets told, with far more loyalty to the “TV” part than to the “reality.” On Survivor, they don’t control the boot order or the winner—but they control how we perceive both. By choosing the confessionals, social interactions, and gameplay that make the cut, they not only shape the narrative but the reputations of the people inside it. Innumerable factors determine a player’s edit: are they quotable? Are they a villain we love to hate? A scrappy underdog? A noble hero? Or, as Survivor 50’s Angelina Keeley puts it, are they a man?

In her post-boot interview with Entertainment Weekly, Keeley clued us in on what actually happened on the island, and how the story she lived differs from the one she’s watching on TV. She called the season’s lack of women’s stories an “abysmal shame,” pointing out that by the end of episode five, castaway Tiffany Ervin had gotten two confessionals’ worth of screentime. Meanwhile, Zac Brown—who was not, to be clear, playing—had four. (ZB is not catching unwarranted strays; the episode he appeared on was approximately 60% devoted to his Fiji adventures with little to no connection to the game.) Keeley makes it clear that she isn’t asking the editors to create utopic equity, but asking them to turn down the bro-fest and let viewers hear from castaways who are actually impacting the game, or delivering compelling TV.

The gendered edit isn’t new; it just feels more glaring now than it did in 2000. A Survivor data scientist found that, before 2022, men received 10,600 confessionals compared to 7,900 for women—despite gender-balanced casts being the norm. Though confessionals aren’t a perfect proxy for screen time, the gap is still very hard to ignore. Even more telling: men, on average, receive edits that are about 8% more favorable than the women they play alongside.

Keeley noted that, even when women are dominating the story, they’re still more prone to a negative edit. “It’s not even the absence of the voices,” she said. “It’s also, when we are present, why are we so overly negative? Why are they pandering to the worst possible part of who we are?”

It’s the nature of reality TV that anything you say can and will get twisted into the best television possible, which often means cranking up the venom regardless of gender. Still, I find it hard to believe that the men who go on Survivor are just 8% more sunshine-y than the women. Call it healthy skepticism. It also doesn’t bode well that the first woman-dominated edit that comes to my mind is Micronesia’s Black Widow Brigade, an alliance from Season 16 in 2008 known for preying on the souls of earnest ice cream scoopers.

Keeley hinted to EW that more women from 50 will be speaking out as they’re voted out, and she’s hoping that the conversation gains enough traction to change the edit of this season, if it’s still in the works. The winner is already set, Zac Brown’s legacy as an all-time spearfisher is locked in, and R-I-Z-G-O-D (RizGod, baby!) is cemented as a champion of strong, independent women everywhere. But the actual story of Survivor 50? That’s still up for editing.