{"id":258830,"date":"2023-12-12T07:15:00","date_gmt":"2023-12-12T12:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/?p=258830"},"modified":"2024-01-16T13:51:08","modified_gmt":"2024-01-16T18:51:08","slug":"what-the-real-housewives-franchise-tells-us-about-the-triumphs-and-pitfalls-of-modern-feminism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/what-the-real-housewives-franchise-tells-us-about-the-triumphs-and-pitfalls-of-modern-feminism\/","title":{"rendered":"What the Real Housewives Franchise Tells Us About the Triumphs and Pitfalls of Modern Feminism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The WGA had been on strike for months, with SAG-AFTRA joining the picket line fray just days earlier, when Bethenny Frankel, former star of Real Housewives of New York City<\/em>, took to Instagram to say her piece: reality TV stars needed a union. It wasn\u2019t fair that networks aired reruns of their shows for years or could use their faces in promotional materials for forever, all without paying the people who owned those faces one cent in residuals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Soon, Bethenny upped the ante: She was suing The Real Housewives\u2019s <\/em>network, Bravo, and parent company, NBC, in a class-action suit alleging \u201cdepraved mistreatment\u201d of reality TV participants. \u201c[T]he sordid and dark underbelly of NBC\u2019s widely consumed reality TV universe has remained under wraps for far too long,\u201d Bethenny\u2019s attorneys wrote. \u201cPlease be advised that the day of reckoning has arrived.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The news grabbed my attention immediately. Regardless of Bethenny\u2019s motives\u2014which were quickly questioned in my social media feeds\u2014if somebody wants to start a union and blast the executives who messed with my WGA friends, I\u2019m here for it. But I was also interested for selfish reasons. I was working on a reality TV project myself, one centering Bethenny\u2019s television alma mater, The Real Housewives.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Put another way, I\u2019m 34 years old, which means The Real Housewives <\/em>has been on television for half my life.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve been re-watching old seasons of the franchise, trying to understand what this show\u2014often treated as a trashy guilty pleasure\u2014means for the more feminist, equitable society I want to live in. This undertaking involves dissecting women in 11 different cities over 17 years because, yes, that\u2019s how big Bravo\u2019s franchise is. Put another way, I\u2019m 34 years old, which means The Real Housewives <\/em>has been on television for half my life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Re-watching old episodes, the overlap in our lifespans couldn\u2019t be more obvious. It didn\u2019t feel like viewing a show; it felt like reliving my life, remembering the world that raised us both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the last 17 years, The Real Housewives <\/em>and I made ourselves small, viciously slut shamed, and un-ironically Girlbossed; we mourned past pains and wore pussy hats so we could be #WomenSupportingWomen, but we also lost sight of what support should look like and who deserved supporting. We made paltry attempts at intersectional feminism that ended in backlash, costing us allies\u2014and rights. Throughout all this, society\u2019s expectations and definitions of women kept changing\u2014continue changing\u2014but one truth remains: We might often categorize The Real Housewives <\/em>as frivolous pop culture, but it has always reflected how the world exists for real women. Two things can be true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then came Bethenny with her call for a union, safer workplaces, and management accountability, all things I want for women everywhere in that more equitable world I dream of. When Bethenny introduced those ideas as Real Housewives <\/em>demands, I wanted her to succeed because I want women to succeed, and I see The Real Housewives <\/em>and regular women\u2019s fates linked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So yes, I\u2019m paying attention to Bethenny Frankel. I don\u2019t want her call for change to go the way of our dream for a female president, of a lasting MeToo movement, of a woman\u2019s right to define themselves and control their bodies\u2014all things we thought we\u2019d achieve in the last 17 years, only to come up short.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Speaking of those years, how did everything go so wrong? If my Real Housewives<\/em> re-watch has taught me anything, it\u2019s that the answer was always there. We just needed to pay more attention to what we were watching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Real Housewives <\/em>debuted following five Orange County women in 2006 when I was 16 years old. It was a time when fashionable meant wearing skin-tight, low-rise jeans, pants so traumatically unflattering, we invented an insult for how they deformed our bodies\u2014the muffin top\u2014and everyone publicly counted the days until the Olsen twins, Lindsay Lohan, and other starlets turned 18 and could all be legally slept with. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It meant wearing suggestive clothes and a don\u2019t-take-me-too-seriously demeanor.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Our ideas about what it meant to be a woman were so small that when Bravo announced its new show following five \u201cglamorous\u2026 sexy, sophisticated\u201d housewives, viewers knew exactly what that meant: Straight, skinny, white, cis women. It <\/em>didn\u2019t yet mean screaming, partying, or throwing wine, stereotypes with which the show would later become synonymous. It meant wearing suggestive clothes and a don\u2019t-take-me-too-seriously demeanor, all while performing the labor of the homemaker archetype with an easy, agreeable smile. Those first season Orange County housewives <\/em>nailed this formula\u2014except Jo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jo is a 24-year-old engaged to an older, wealthy man named Slade. And Jo, it should be said, is not white; she\u2019s Peruvian-American, though we can likely thank ABC\u2019s fictional Desperate Housewives <\/em>for The Real Housewives\u2019s <\/em>decision to cast one token Latinx woman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When we meet Jo, she\u2019s acing the acceptable type of womanhood. Low-rise jeans look great on her. She\u2019s recently quit her job, intending to stay home, to be Slade\u2019s perfect housewife. The problem? She hates cleaning! She\u2019s bored! In the 1960s, <\/em>women were prescribed valium for this. In 2006, we put them on TV and watched their relationships implode.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Slade wants Jo to be happy caring for his house, picking up his dry cleaning, and parenting the kids from his first marriage. But Jo wants to go out! Jo wants to work! Jo does not want to clean! So, they fight. Slade laments Jo\u2019s disinterest in becoming that housewife he\u2019s always wanted, and she cries <\/em>because she loves this creep. She wishes she was more like the woman he dreams of, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Enter Kimberly, Jo\u2019s housewife fairy godmother. Kimberly, like Jo, used to work, until it was time to quit her job to raise babies. Kimberly, also like Jo, struggled with this identity shift at first. But then, Kimberly found new hobbies: Day drinking at country clubs, getting a boob job, buying lingerie. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The worst part of this regressive Cinderella story is realizing Kimberly seems genuinely happy. She\u2019s not only accepted the narrow parameters of womanhood in 2006\u2014she\u2019s embraced them, just like my friends and I embraced low-rise jeans. We never considered changing our pants or the roles society thrust upon us. We shrunk our bodies to fit the jeans, and we shrunk the women to make them ideal wives.      <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Real Housewives <\/em>scored one of its first water-cooler moments in 2009, courtesy of the first season of The Real Housewives of New Jersey<\/em>. This cast had no token Latinx woman\u2014only skinny white ladies with dark skin via spray tan. Needless to say, our ideas about how to be a woman were still very straight, very white, and very small. And maybe it was because I was getting older, but it felt like the punishments for acting out had gotten steeper. Which brings me to a popular late-aughts punishment: Slut shaming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Laurel\u2019s face crumpled as she realized what everyone really <\/em>thought of her.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Exhibit A: Laurel. My senior year of high school, my class voted Laurel \u201cbiggest mouth,\u201d because once in English class she made a list of all the guys she\u2019d hooked up with, and \u201cclass whore\u201d wasn\u2019t allowed. When an oblivious teacher announced, \u201cThis year\u2019s biggest mouth is\u2026 Laurel,\u201d  during Senior Awards Night, Laurel\u2019s face crumpled as she realized what everyone really <\/em>thought of her. I thought she was going to cry. Girls who were her friends\u2014some of whom had voted for her\u2014tried to comfort her, while boys who\u2019d gladly accepted blowjobs before also voting for her snickered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Exhibit B: Danielle. Danielle is <\/em>New Jersey\u2019s single wife who likes wearing skimpy clothes and sharing that she\u2019s been engaged 19 times. She does not fit the mold of what a proper housewife, n\u00e9e woman, should be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rumors begin: most involve her sex life\u2014specifically that she sleeps with married men, something the other housewives frequently repeat without much proof. During the season, the women also find a book and <\/em>police records that seem to very much prove Danielle was arrested in the \u201980s for kidnapping and extortion, and for troubling involvement with the Columbian drug cartel. But why shame a woman in 2009 for her cartel-kidnapper connections when you could nail her for a real crime, like enjoying sex? In the season finale, Danielle and married housewife <\/em>Teresa have a fight that ends with Teresa flipping a table and calling Danielle  \u201cprostitution whore,\u201d a moment still seen as one of series\u2019s most iconic of all time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

No one chastises Teresa for making a scene at dinner\u2014never mind for weaponizing sexuality, shaming sex workers, or confusing cheating rumors with sex work. Those latter infractions were the era\u2019s social norms. But calling attention to oneself, making a scene, that <\/em>could get a woman in trouble. At 18, when the show first aired, I attributed Teresa\u2019s lack of punishment to the fact that she, unlike Danielle (and Laurel) had a husband\u2014a man\u2014who vouched for her behavior. In fact, he called it \u201csexy.\u201d I thought loud female behavior didn\u2019t matter if guys still wanted to sleep with you and <\/em>support you. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But that teenage explanation was a shallow understanding of a deeper truth: Teresa didn\u2019t flip the table because she was angry about how the world controlled or shamed women. She flipped it to put a woman who didn\u2019t conform to traditional expectations in her place. (Which was also why Laurel\u2019s friends voted for her, even if they didn\u2019t know that themselves.) Any woman who stands up for a world that holds women down always will find allies to protect her. It\u2019s the ones making moves against that world who end up out of luck. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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With the 2010s came changes for women. Not systemic changes. But we did<\/em> make several superficial changes. And we certainly called it progress. Actually, we called the changes Leaning In, and from leaning in, a new female archetype was born: The Girlboss. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The<\/em> Real Housewives<\/em>\u2019s viewers Leaned In by embracing louder, Teresa-esque wives who weren\u2019t afraid to start fights, throw drinks, or even launch a prosthetic leg. We didn\u2019t care if these women had a man\u2019s permission\u2014as long as they were mostly still white, conventionally attractive, and managing the houses and kids (labor that continuously went unacknowledged). And these new, louder housewives Leaned In, too: They capitalized on fame from the show and started businesses. The women sold everything from clothing to cannoli, sex toys to hair care, butt workouts to booze. They were women; hear them roar\u2014then buy one of their products.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Outside of Real Housewives<\/em>-land, I was a college student, then a recently graduated twentysomething who embraced this Lean In-Girlboss mantle in full. It\u2019s embarrassing now to admit, but I did. After years of being told to stay small and quiet, of understanding men should dictate when loud female behavior was OK, this new attitude felt good<\/em>\u2014or, as my friends and I suddenly loved to say: Empowering. And since we couldn\u2019t put our names on products like the housewives, <\/em>we Girlbossed by focusing on different things, like pants. First, we killed muffin tops by moving our jeans\u2019 waistlines higher. Then we ditched jeans altogether for something infinitely more comfortable: Leggings. When the world told us leggings aren\u2019t pants<\/em>, we insisted they were. We channeled Orange County housewife <\/em>Tamra, who in 2014 became a GIF after screaming, \u201cTHAT\u2019S MY OPINION!\u201d perfectly encapsulating the regrettable Girlboss attitude that having <\/em>an opinion is the only requirement necessary to share it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Plenty of people at the time knew these Lean In-Girlboss ideas were garbage.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Plenty of people at the time knew these Lean In-Girlboss ideas were garbage, particularly queer and trans writers and writers of color. They called it faux feminism. Rich people feminism. White people feminism. Because the opportunity for conventionally attractive, mostly white housewives on TV to make money isn\u2019t a landmark moment for labor or gender equality; it\u2019s capitalism with beauty gatekeeping thrown in. And what oppressive systems were we dismantling, exactly, by replacing skin-tight jeans with\u2026skinnier, tighter leggings? (Leggings that, in 2013, Lululemon founder Chip Wilson proclaimed \u201cjust don\u2019t work\u201d for all bodies.) Critics dubbed the era\u2019s pathetic attempts at feminism as society paying lip service to progress while making none at all. And they were exactly right, except for one thing: Not enough people who needed to hear this criticism\u2014and yes, I\u2019m talking about white women\u2014were calling themselves feminists, anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most were in a period of I\u2019m not feminist, but\u2026 <\/em>a line I distinctly remember telling my college roommate in 2012 after one of our school\u2019s star athletes allegedly sexually assaulted a female student and received little punishment. Not even Sophia Amoruso, the largely forgotten white woman who coined the term Girlboss, considered herself a feminist, telling Elle Magazine<\/em> in 2014, \u201cI don’t really like to use that word.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the deeper into the 2010s we went, the more many women\u2019s relationship to the word changed. Maybe it was because one in five women were sexually assaulted in college\u2014a new stat for the public in 2014, even though it seemed obvious to me and so many others who\u2019d attended college in the 2010s. Maybe it was because of Beyonc\u00e9. Isn\u2019t everything good that happens, on some level, related to Beyonc\u00e9? Or maybe it was because the more times society leaves you saying, I\u2019m not a feminist, but\u2026<\/em>, the more opportunities you have to ask yourself, But why <\/em>not? <\/em>Which is to say: The 2010\u2019s embrace of feminism\u2014particularly for white women\u2014took time. But once we arrived, the Girlboss\u2019s rebrand from superficial symbol of vaguely empowered white woman in leggings to superficial symbol of a white feminist was swift. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And there\u2019s no doubt she was a superficial symbol, because if this new Feminist Girlboss had any substance to her, then we would have addressed the important critiques about how class and race and wealth and other factors create uneven pains and obstacles for women. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But she didn\u2019t. So we didn\u2019t. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Worse, by the time masses of white women did <\/em>start considering these critiques, we were approaching November of 2016, the moment we thought we had a fool-proof plan to solve them. As New York housewife Carole put it: \u201cThis is a historic election [because] \u2026 we showed the world that Americans will not tolerate division, exclusion, fear-mongering, sexist, and racist rhetoric.\u201d Carole is reading from a pre-written speech, of course, one she never delivers. But it\u2019s a speech that echoes what my fellow Girlbosses and I had been so sure was true: We were going to solve gender inequity by making a thin, blonde, white lady the first female president of the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The 9th season of The Real Housewives of Atlanta<\/em> filmed the summer before the 2016 election but aired mostly in its aftermath, premiering just two days before the election where the lady president did not save us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idea that America was cruel enough to elect him<\/em> forced me to do some long-overdue white feminist Girlboss reflecting.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I was a 27-year-old who stayed up crying until 2 a.m. on election night, desperate to hear officials had found another 70,000 Democratic ballots in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. I wasn\u2019t so surprised the country couldn\u2019t elect her<\/em>, but <\/strong>the idea that America was cruel enough to elect him<\/em> forced me to do some long-overdue white feminist Girlboss reflecting. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDon\u2019t blame me,\u201d Atlanta housewife Kenya quips about our new president at one point. She\u2019s joking, but not, because, Black women aren\u2019t the reason we failed to make the thin, blonde, white lady president. As for white women, that\u2019s another story, but this Atlanta season features an all-Black cast. (Atlanta is, in fact, the only city <\/em>to feature any <\/em>Black Housewives <\/em>for the first decade the show is on television, apart from one woman on one season of the since-forgotten Real Housewives of D.C<\/em>.) Still, the Atlanta wives <\/em>had their own reflecting to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Phaedra sets the self-improvement tone early by making peace with Kenya\u2014a woman she\u2019d nicknamed Kenya Moore Whore two seasons prior\u2014and declaring, \u201cAs women, it cannot be acceptable to call each other hos and bitches and prostitutes\u2026 We have to make a conscious effort to change.\u201d <\/em>Then the message explodes in her face at the end of the season.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But first, Shere\u00e9 and Bob. We spend much of this season rooting for Shere\u00e9 to get back with her ex, Bob, only to later learn that Bob previously abused her. This comes to light when Bob jokes(!) on a group vacation that maybe he \u201cdidn\u2019t choke [Shere\u00e9] hard enough\u201d years ago. In a confessional interview, Shere\u00e9 says she didn\u2019t want to cry because that would give a man power while ruining everyone else\u2019s day. I know Shere\u00e9 thinks she\u2019s being the strong, feminist woman we were all supposed to be now, but in practice, that Strong WomanTM<\/sup> is just another way we teach all women to stay small and quiet, now under the guise of having power\u2014and for Black women, this trope comes with bigger consequences. <\/p>\n\n\n