What We Can Learn From Real Housewives
Make it stand out
My obsession with Real Housewives has baffled many of my friends, family and partners, they can’t fathom how I can sit there and watch entitled women scream at each other while they wear a dress worth more than my car. The fascination began during my first degree, I caught an episode of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and something about the bleached hair and shiny jewels lulled me into an almost catatonic state. When you’re someone whose worth is tied to productivity, it’s a god-send when you come across something that allows you to truly relax. Real Housewives however, offers something more than just a substance free form of escapism; it’s a grotesque staging of the consequences for women when aligning themselves with the Patriarchy.
As you can imagine, most of the housewives got where they are largely on looks with the various franchises made up of either former models or pageant girls. The few that were neither of these most likely still enjoyed the spoils of pretty privilege, allowing them to achieve what they probably didn’t deserve to achieve. Who can blame these women when most of us are raised to value their looks above all else. Some of us aren’t as fortunate to be born as the standard, and so we either have to brutalise ourselves in order to meet it or rip out the internal narrative installed in us and rebuild our self-worth from the ground up.
The latter is grueling work, and so it’s almost understandable why some women choose not to do it. It requires not only an immense amount of unlearning, but a willingness to kill a part of yourself that relied on that narrative to exist.
A woman who constructs her sense of self based on an ideal that is tightly controlled by the Patriarchy and White Supremacy is a game women will always lose. As soon as she dares to age, her value plummets, her self-worth crumbles and the man that uttered the words until ‘death do us part’ decides that particular part of the vows actually meant the death of her youthful looks.
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We watch as these women begin to realise that performing as the perfect woman, by having his kids and positioning his needs above hers landed them in the place they feared most, as the undesirable. Some manage to scrounge up some form of a career in an attempt to resurrect a fraction of their old self-worth, which they could only do due to their immense wealth and army of underpaid nannies and cleaners. Other wives spiral, which does become problematic when you realise people are profiting off of it. It is something however that I believe we need to see as a society, middle aged women who become ‘unhinged’ as it forces us to watch what the Patriarchy does to women. It’s confronting because middle aged women are supposed to disappear, as they have no sexual value anymore, their feelings are irrelevant and yet this show pushes them to the forefront along with their undiagnosed mental illnesses. We hate it because middle aged women are supposed to internalize the damage the Patriarchy does, and yet we watch these women do what men do, succumb to addiction and externalize their pain onto the world.
“It’s sad how a reality show does more to raise awareness of the experiences of middle aged women than most shows on TV.”
These women are incredibly privileged, and yet I see the same hollow misery as I did when I worked in Early Childhood Education in Western Sydney. Women so let down by their relationships, waking every day mentally and physically exhausted and acutely aware of the impossibility of being the ‘perfect mother’ but using what little energy they have left to be one anyway. The show’s objective is to mock these women and provide consumers with the media version of junk food, but somehow unintentionally, a window was created into the messy, horrifying reality of being a middle aged mother. In a world where mothers are expected to carry the world on their shoulders with a smile that says they’re fine, the wives openly admit their fears of feeling inadequate as mothers and as partners. They share stories of miscarriages, abuse, eating disorders, addiction, financial ruin, grief, betrayal, infidelity and traumatic births, and for women of colour, these stories are told against the backdrop of a White Supremacist Patriarchy. In the shows based in Potomac and Atlanta, African American women share how they navigate the world as successful Black women, the immense pressure they feel to not just survive but thrive in a society determined to see them fail. Academic, political commentator and cast member Wendy Osefo shares her dismay at having to teach her sons how to behave in front of police to avoid being shot, evidence that ‘proving yourself’ will never be enough in a racist society. Despite their wealth and social status, these women continue to feel the pressure to comply with the culture of respectability. The fear of being perceived as ‘angry black women’ after two housewives got into a physical altercation is a fear the white housewives never have to deal with.
It’s not necessarily the best platform to share such important and disturbing stories, unfortunately it’s not often that I see these stories being shared with such raw and unabashed emotions, and whether it’s done out of a desire to raise awareness or to make good TV, it doesn’t diminish the power of broadcasting women talking about experiences that are so often ignored.
As bell hooks talks about in her book All About Love, the individualistic culture inspired by Capitalism and the nuclear family structure isolates women, the responsibility of the home has made it increasingly difficult for women to maintain relationships outside of it. This is detrimental for women who need their traumas recognized and their feelings validated, and when watching the housewives connect over shared traumatic experiences, I realise that mothers in Western culture, regardless of socioeconomic status, are starved of connection.
Real Housewives is a ridiculous show filled with ridiculous people. It’s superficial, shallow and at times incredibly problematic. Yet I believe we can learn from it, as it reveals to us the consequences of not challenging the Patriarchy, and ironically the responses to the show are themselves examples of misogyny alive and well in the West. It’s sad how a reality show does more to raise awareness of the experiences of middle aged women than most shows on TV, while also showcasing what sharing stories can do for women and the power it yields when combating isolation. My conclusion isn’t that we should all watch Real Housewives, it’s to highlight how little middle aged women’s stories are depicted in media, and how this reflects the little value we hold for older mothers in our society.
Words: Lucinda Slevin. For more of Lucinda’s writing you can check out their blog.
