In a recent article on Jezebel (<3 <3 <3), the author referenced comments made by celebrated feminist Gloria Steinem (celebrated by all reasonable people, hated by misogynistic wackjobs – fact, not opinion.) about television. In summary, she hates the Real Housewives and thinks Girls is pretty good.
This was problematic for me since I love Gloria Steinem, love the Real Housewives, and love Girls. I had to do some serious mental-gymnastics to re-align my worldview, see if you can follow:
I’ll start with Steinem’s perfect quote about Girls:
I only saw the first couple episodes of Girls, so I can’t speak to all of it, but I think it was much more realistic as to how girls look and dress and talk, and that all sex is not wonderful. Some of it is silly and boring. It felt much more realistic to me.
She gets this so right. What is so beautiful about Girls’s sex scenes is the ugly reality in them.
So perhaps there can be something beautiful in the ugly reality of the Real Housewives. Steinem summed up the ugliness of it all pretty well:
I think the worst [shows] are the ‘Housewives’ shows, because they present women as rich, pampered, dependent and hateful towards each other
Her description is not wholly untrue. Many of the women on the Real Housewives shows embody all of those adjectives and worse. But, the shows also feature women who are empowered, strong, hardworking, and who build other women up rather than tearing them down. (I f-ing love you Lisa Vanderpump.) Both of these types of women exist in the real world, just like there are awesome men (Oh heyyyy, Mauricio) and shitty men (We’re all looking at you Kelsey Grammer) on and off TV.
Just because these women are on TV does not mean they are aspirational figures. We’re interested in the lives of exceptionally wealthy women as much as impoverished pregnant teenagers. Reality television tends towards the extremes because extreme situations reveal the most interesting human behaviour.
If anything, watching the Real Housewives reminds us why money WON’T make us happier. The worst of them spend several months of the year in recovery from elective surgery and the rest of the year starving themselves to fit into their expensive clothes. I have no doubt that the quality of my life — cellulite and all — is better than the quality of theirs.
As feminists, we shouldn’t try to hide certain kinds of women from the world out of fear that the rest of us wont be taken seriously. Instead, we need to demand that the basic rights of all kinds of women, just like all kinds of men, need to be taken seriously. Whether you like Taylor Armstrong as a person is irrelevant to her right not to be abused by her husband. And THAT is the feminist lesson we can find in the Real Housewives.
And that is obviously why I watch it.
