Listen, Fellas, I Don’t Get It Either – The Real Housewives Of….

In 2006, Bravo started airing The Real Housewives of Orange County, a sculpted reality series that follows a group of wealthy, ostensibly beautiful women who are all friends because of their shared interests in money, plastic surgery, and day-drinking on weekday afternoons, when they are least likely to be faced with the grotesque sight of any Poors.  The show was apparently so successful that the network felt it necessary to create nearly identical iterations in New York, Atlanta, New Jersey, D.C., Miami, Beverly Hills, Vancouver, France, Melbourne, and Athens. Some of these were less successful than others, but they’ve all managed to garner some kind of an audience. By “some kind,” I obviously mean droves of chicks who just can’t seem to get enough.

Why Chicks Love It

Surprisingly, many of the cast members on these shows are actually intelligent, successful women with legitimate, impressive careers. There are lawyers, journalists, real estate agents, entrepreneurs, and the like. These aren’t exactly careers you can just dabble in as a hobby and suddenly discover one day that you’ve accidentally made a name for yourself. It didn’t even work that way for Elle Woods — there were multiple montages of her studying real hard in Legally Blonde, okay? Yet, despite all their intelligence and education, they’re still concerned with the label inside their dress, the size of the rock on their finger, and which of their backstabbing whore friends called them a bitch this week. So, see?? If intelligent, successful women are also petty and superficial, then it’s totally okay for normal girls to feed into the same  bitch-pack mentality! It’s proof positive that they don’t have to be “better than that” because there is no better than that. This is just how females are intrinsically — perpetually worried about who is the prettiest and who has the best stuff and whether or not they have a handsome man to validate their lives. Chicks want to watch chicks be shitty to other chicks on TV because it gives them permission to (continue to) be shitty to other chicks in real life and still call those other chicks their BFFs.

Why It’s So Very, Very Bad

If the previous paragraph didn’t convince you, let me explain further. Just being a female in this world is as close to living in Westeros as a real live human being can get. In my 32 years on this planet, I’ve witnessed some of the most heinous girl on girl crime imaginable, from shit talking and backstabbing to creating and pretending to be fake online boyfriends (oh the naivete of the 90s) just to ultimately crush their friends’ hearts. I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve been guilty of some of it myself — in the Game of Cunts, you win or you die and everyone must play. When I was a kid, there were three other girls in my neighborhood that I played together with all the time. One day, one of these girls, “Suzy,” decided she didn’t like another one of these girls, “Betsy.” She somehow convinced me and the remaining girl that we should cut Betsy out completely from all of our playdates. I don’t remember the details now, but I’m sure we weren’t kind about it as Betsy’s mom eventually organized a tea with all of us and our respective mothers to see what we could do to correct the situation. It was a lot like a mafia sit down between feuding families, but there were petits fours and way more pleases and thank yous. It was a child’s version of the exact same shit you see happening on any given episode of any one of these Real Housewives shows right after the episode where someone called someone else a bitch and threw a drink in her face. The only real difference is that I was about 11. These are grown women — women with apparent intelligence and successful careers — who still cling desperately to the High School Mean Girl mentality. They pump their bodies full of plastic and chemicals and botulism (never forget, Ladies, that that’s exactly what Botox is) and paint their faces with shellac and a trowel, then wear the sluttiest, skimpiest dress and the tallest, thinnest heels they can find in order to attend a social event on a fucking Wednesday night, all for the sole purpose of confronting their ex-bestie for being a bitch and a whore.  And millions of women tune in each week to bear witness to these inane displays because these women are supposed to be who all women want to be. They’re vacuous and self-centered and really contribute nothing of value to the greater good of humanity, but OH MAN, the clothes! And the shoes and the jewelry! And the cars and the husbands! ALL THE THINGS!

If I’m to believe what Bravo is selling, that all women, deep down, really just want to be the grownup version of Homecoming Queen, then I’m going to need to see something else. Something like The Real Justices of the Supreme Court, where Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor get into hair-pulling slap fights because GOD KNOWS that Ginsburg bitch looks like the type to tell you to your face that your Supreme Court Justice robes look really good on you, then call Sandra Day O’Connor that night to let her know that she missed out on how fat your earrings made you look.