If you don’t fancy reading this lengthy blog post, you can listen to the Context Collapse episode on this topic here.
I often find myself having to defend The Real Housewives as a reality TV phenomenon. “But it’s just women screaming at each other!” people say. Yes, and wasn’t it French philosopher Francois Lyotard who said that conflict is the organising principle of the human condition?
I see it as a survival guide to the postmodern world, as told through the contemporary equivalent of our beautiful but dysfunctional cast of Greek goddesses; some are occasionally cast out of the kingdom of heaven and replaced, and others take leave in the underworld only to reappear triumphant years later. A lot of the storylines in the show tell us nothing new. The narratives are often universal: There is misplaced nostalgia for failed relationships, seen through rose-tinted glasses. Friendships that are thrown into tumult by a sudden shift in power and wealth. Quests for an autonomous identity within the confines of a lengthy, traditional marriage. And increasingly – financial issues characterise the concerns of our casts across the world.
The Real Housewives is an important cultural product. I will die on this hill. The Real Housewives tells us so much about the normalisation of the branded self. It is a space in which economic precarity and the digitalization of our day-to-day and postfeminist perspectives create a world in which self-branding is central to survival. It is a self-performance, constructed and enacted for show. Ordinary people who have extraordinary lifestyles ‘play themselves’ in their ‘own environment’ - Brzenchek and Castañeda, characterise this as ‘performing and perceiving merging in public.’ (Brzenchek and Castañeda, 2017)
Ironically, the ‘housewife’ cast in these shows is rarely an actual housewife in the domesticated, child-rearing sense. It follows heterosexual upper-middle-class women but boasts an incredibly diverse audience – racially speaking and with regards to the LGBT community. Not only is self-branding a feature of the show, but it is also integral to the business model – the self-brand absolves the industry apparatus from the pressures of content by monetising the image of a housewife who can then spawn companies they promote on the show and of which the parent network owns a percentage.
The accessibility of images and media portrayals of wealth was growing in tandem with the multiplication of new financial instruments that enabled the lower middle classes to access previously unattainable consumer goods and lifestyles. Brzenchek and Castañeda explain that Bravo offers ‘identity politics grounded in fashion, beauty and design.’
Reality TV is still regarded with suspicion by visual culture scholars – still seen as a gimmicky area of research – but the large pool of potential recruits and relative affordability of creating this type of content means it is likely that its domination of streaming platforms and television channels will only become more apparent in a new age of recession.
Guy Debord said that the ‘spectacle’ has become not only the product of but the framework for large parts of modern life, including but not limited to the economy, consumer behaviour, politics, fashion and art. Part of this ‘spectacularisation’ of society is that the language once reserved for entertainment – films, television shows, pop music – is now bleeding across cultural categories and infiltrating other media forms. The Real Housewives is a spectacle that sells itself as being closely aligned to real life. There are conventions and motifs from other media forms that are snuck into the episodes – such as news-style chyrons flashing up on screen to introduce characters, vignettes and cutaways to previous episodes to establish context or reinforce a point, and iPhone screenshots flash on screen to give form to their many disagreements.
I think that social media as a dissemintation platform paired with the ubiquity of the front-facing camera encourages the sort of highly emotive performances that we see on The Real Housewives – maybe that’s why people are so consistently offended by it – because increasingly they recognise themselves on the screen. We can speak of identity, we can speak of performance, but really for the format of reality TV we should think in terms of ‘identity performance’ as a whole.
This affectivity leads to increasingly histrionic and hysterical ways of presenting ourselves and in my mind, addiction to plastic surgery is just a natural development of this. The true plastic surgery obsessive is lusting after an ideal that is a caricature of a woman, sex doll-like, exaggerated and almost humorous for that reason. So I think in general there is a tendency towards expensive excess and over-the-topness that is increasing even as our material comfort is more and more precarious. Perhaps it is increasing because of this, not in spite of it, as we try and escape our feelings of economic insecurity by asserting medicalised control over our bodies. I’m digressing slightly, but the society of the spectacle is the one that gave birth to The Real Housewives and what continues to feed it; the erosion of the private and public spheres of domestic life, as well as the importance of making everything ‘entertainment’ in order to attract ears and eyeballs.
The Real Housewives must maintain the illusion that what is shown on screen is the ultimate reality – so that the audience reading of it closely corresponds to the ‘party line’ - the plot unfolding as Bravo wants us to see it. Bravo introduced a fine for housewives that discussed or made allusions to editing on social media a few years ago, seeing it as potentially undermining the sanctioned plot line for the season.
The climax of each season is frequently a scene of confrontation between characters, highly emotionally charged and occasionally involving elements of physical aggression (although recently the network seems to be trying to de-emphasize these, in line with what is considered acceptable and appropriate by audiences). This is what scholars such as Evie Psarras have called the ‘digital money shot’ that captures audience attention and sparks conversations online across fan communities – which Bravo also monetises and leverages for promotion effectively.
It is appropriate to render this in financial terms – what The Real Housewives does is mobilise women into a financial model that depends on emotional performances to stimulate and maintain audience interest, creating enough of a spectacle for an episode or series to become ‘iconic.’ Most of the series’ most quoted moments have been plucked from the dialogue of monologue of a drunken or hysterical meltdown. The testimonials function as soliloquies, allowing the cast to reflect on the events at hand in a ‘third space’ that takes them out of the immediate action but mimics instant response.
The Real Housewives claims to offer us a 360-degree view of subjects’ lives, and while that can never truly be the case, between filmed events and housewives’ own social media practice, we often get a more intimate view into their world than other formats. In fact, it is an expectation that housewives will reveal themselves and their lives, warts and all, to the cameras when they sign up. Erika Jayne from RHOBH was frequently criticised for relying too heavily on her alter ego and playing a ’character’ before her husband was revealed to be engaging in large-scale fraud and she could no longer be the staple frosty sex kitten on the cast. She was quite literally forced into displaying her humanity. Kyle Richards represents the Stepford wife archetype. She is anxious and neurotic, in spite of being sheltered by many of the realities of life with her vast wealth.
She approaches her female friendships with the strategic consideration of an army general – she is objectively a very attractive woman but relatively lacking in raw sex appeal and sensuality. She may be a functional metaphor for America whose glossy and moralising exterior has a reputation for unusual prudishness and repression. These women are, in a way, caricatures of themselves as production will choose to edit and emphasize accordingly. There are some identifiable archetypes that usually align with pejorative gendered stereotypes – such as the gold digger, the bimbo, the drunken party girl etc.
Scholar Psarras notes that the ‘emotional labour of camping and curating these personas could alienate the women from their sense of self,’ and that is a sentiment that has been echoed in interviews with Housewives in the mainstream press. Of course, it could also be said that performing a certain self or constructing a façade is a part of any professional occupation – with the exception of the vast visibility The Real Housewives casts are now afforded by the expansion of the Bravo network across the globe.
On-screen, the women become what Psarras calls ‘walking GIFS’ - it’s not a culture of me, me, me anymore, it’s a culture of me as meme. These easily transmissible cultural units become repurposed by the fan community, frequently as ‘reaction images’ that are then redeployed within the real housewives’ online fandom to respond to other content about differing franchises. The splitting of the housewives into two: the ‘real ‘person and the ‘real’ housewife is characterised as a coping mechanism that allows them to cope with some of the hatred and scorn that is directed their way by audiences.
The past 2 decades have seen an aggressive acceleration of commercialisation into all arenas of life in which mass culture plays a more important role than ever. Jacques Barzun, an art critic, proclaimed that not too long ago ‘the notion that a soft drink manufacturer could sponsor a travelling art show or the government benefit in its foreign policy by flinging an orchestra or a ballet across the Iron Curtain would have seemed an absurdity.’
The democracy of images that popular culture, and particularly television in the early post-millennium era, has created has sold dreams to social groups. Advertising executive Mark O'Dea said the purpose of popular entertainment was to release people from the limitations of their everyday lives. The Real Housewives’ aspirational appeal is not hard to see as sweeping shots of walk-in wardrobes and extravagant parties are consistent features across franchises.
Interestingly, Bravo’s core viewing demographic is among the most prosperous – they were characterised as ‘affluencers’ - a portmanteau of affluence and influencers – by NBC’s presidents. Bravo reached approximately 90 million households in 2011 and boasts the highest concentration of viewers earning more than 6 figures, making the show fertile ground for advertisers. Bravo audiences, according to a study by Crupi in 2008 are more highly engaged on average than other TV audiences and the network actively encourages discussion and fan participation, particularly on the ‘viewer questions’ segment of their recap show, Watch What Happens live with network executive Andy Cohen (himself now a celebrity).
Bravo’s content feeds into a market-based understanding of belonging in which our identities are not so much constructed, as simply purchased. Not only does this take place in constructing the self, but relationships are also market forces – allegiances are forged on a transactional basis, with cast members ‘teaming up’ to drive certain storylines or to cast one another in a more likeable light.
Women’s fashion and beauty is largely a legacy of the second half of the 20th century when companies in these sectors made women with disposable income (whether their own or their partners) their primary target market. Today’s Fashion and beauty culture are a direct descendent of capitalist market forces expanded through the globalisation and mass production of consumer products in the 1980s and 1990s.
The Great Masculine Renunciation changed the way men dress forever. Utility became the order of the day and the elaborate and flamboyant designs of the past now look more at home in a pantomime costume department than on the streets. Women gained what men lost in terms of clothing options and have a huge amount of options available to them.
The ability for women to dress according to their whims – to embrace an array of identities, depending on their mood, the day or the occasion – has turned them into an object of suspicion. Women are duplicitous. They use their dress and makeup to get ahead. They manipulate with calculated flashes of cleavage and leg. Erika Jayne’s overtly sexual performances come under scrutiny by fans who see it as vulgar or inappropriate for a woman of her age to be performing pornographic dance routines. Instagram accounts crop up with the sole aim to ‘expose’ housewives who have heavy-handedly photoshopped, Facetuned and airbrushed their images so they are barely recognisable.
Interestingly the ‘housewives’ word in the title is a misnomer. Very few of the women cast, particularly for more recent seasons, are working in the domestic realm alone. Many are professionals – many are lawyers, doctors, aestheticians, and marketeers – and have their own companies to boot. The choice to maintain this use of the word ‘housewife’ is worth thinking about, given that it is inaccurate. Bravo might be redefining the contours of what a ‘housewife’ can be – is a housewife a postmodern lady of leisure? The aspirational endpoint of surplus income, who can afford the designer bag and shoes, even if she does have to put in a shift for it?
Women have always been tasked with the bulk of domestic labour. Domestic labour has rarely been valued in the way that salaried professions have. The aim of women’s work was, up until quite recently, directed at sustaining and supporting others. Her erasure is the natural consequence of her position in the marketplace: her labour sustains others who gain visibility through the sacrifice of her own. The home is her workplace and motherhood in popular culture is often characterised as subordination (the trope of the sitcom housewife etc., wine time signs)
Leisure time, then, came to represent her emancipation. Leisure time was freedom in every sense of the word.
We can construct ourselves in lots of diverse ways. The signs and symbols we can attach to our identity are manifold and change in meaning depending on context. In the 20th century, this abundance was best represented through the shopping centre environment. Constructed to inspire awe, to arouse the senses and to make us lose a sense of time outside of it, it was where people went to feel satisfied. It was also a predominantly feminine realm and ‘shopping trips’ with groups of housewives are a recurring feature of every franchise in which friendships and financial transactions are acted out in the same space.
Shopping became the primary activity that represented the inception and maintenance of female friendships. Shopping was an escape from domesticity. Leaving her home and becoming unavailable to her dependents for the day was characterised as the ultimate guilty pleasure. The woman’s independence was gained symbolically through the act of being at the shopping mall, even though she may have been spending her partner’s capital while she was there. The culture of hiding receipts from oblivious husbands, lying about the cost of items and ‘making his wallet hurt’ as a form of revenge is evidence that spending your partner’s pay cheque can be a guilty act or one of covert revenge.
Certain motifs have become central to the show’s emphasis on conspicuous consumption: in one early RHOC episode, Dana points at her sunglasses and states ‘$25,000’ - can you believe it?’ Whether she spent her own money or her husband’s to purchase them is unclear. Dorit Kemsley, from the RHOBH franchise, is famed for her logo-clad head-to-toe designer outfits. Through their outrageously expensive and explicitly branded outfits, the Housewives subvert ideas about good taste and lean into on-screen vulgarity. As Bukowski once said - ‘bad taste creates more millionaires than good taste ever did’. Looking rich is as important as being rich – and being on the show affords a certain level of visibility and access to a well-endowed audience – so can at times be a self-fulfilling prophecy for those who didn’t start out with vast wealth. Bethenny Frankel from RHONY is an obvious example of a cast member who leveraged her popularity on the show to create spin-off businesses that netted her huge amounts of money.
As a result of being showcased on the programme, each housewife’s financial status comes under scrutiny. This happens both within the show as characters question those living beyond their means, but also as part of a meta-narrative online as fans delve into the backgrounds, and sometimes even legal proceedings of the cast to ‘uncover’ what they can. In RHOP, Karen Huger’s postcode becomes part of a storyline that casts aspersions on her financial well-being. There is also scepticism about which houses are rented or owned, as in the case of the ‘Shah chalet’ on the RHOSLC. The importance of home ownership, entrepreneurialism and the pursuit of beauty are themes that recur consistently throughout the show – Van Cleave speaks of how the ‘right look interacts with the right behaviour to produce a productive citizen.’ Housewives are representative of a civic ideal and a feminine ideal which makes the ‘fall from grace’ storyline particularly potent for inciting feelings of audience schadenfreude – that is, deriving pleasure or satisfaction from someone else’s downfall.
Reality TV is, to many, a harbinger of cultural collapse. Even those who actively enjoy it often admit it furtively, with an uneasy embarrassment that betrays their consideration of it to be a low cultural form. But I say it’s the perfect medium for our uneasy time in which we mostly ‘perform’ the people we want to be. This phenomenon of watching, being watched, and watching ourselves being watched is often called ‘specularity’ and it has been accelerated by the emergence of a surveillance society that sees technology as a solution to all problems.
The metanarrative structure of these episodes are a newer feature of televisual consumption enabled by social networking technologies and the ease with which consumers can now produce and reappropriate content screened on air. The fans respond to and remediate events, but so do the housewives who engage in a case of ‘inception’ - they watch themselves play themselves in real-time. They often retell or reinterpret events at this airing and identify differences in the filming of events and subsequent reconciliations or developments to explain their behaviour.
Pre-production takes place, then filming – in which the commentary of the cast is frequently stifled by NDAs or other legal means for intellectual property protection. Still, during filming there can be real-time news that disrupts this – whether these are arrests, breakups, new flames, or anything else the mainstream celebrity outlets will report on. There can also be fan or production leaks, alongside new ‘fan investigations’ or colloquially known ‘deep dives’ to examine characters in greater detail. Finally, the series airs and the housewives view and respond to the programme in real-time. Contemporary subjects – whether that is the real housewives on network television – or our own friends and family and their Instagram grids – are caught up in the ‘act of representing themselves.’ People now cultivate a representation of themselves that is both shared and public.
Another neoliberal feature of the real housewives is how the women leverage their personal brands by aligning themselves with movements of ‘female empowerment’. Frequently housewives conduct seminars or pay-to-attend events with the aim of supporting inter-female networking or personal development. This ‘girlboss’ rhetoric underpins a need for self-entrepreneurship – to see your own identity as another economic product to hawk on the free market – which some see as an opportunity afforded by digital capitalism, and others see as desperately sad and worrying. It inarguably epitomises the priorities of popular fourth-wave feminism that focuses on the importance of visibility, explicit expressions of empowerment and the perception of authenticity in self-presentation.
Many scholars have argued that popular media forms tend to sell a narrative to women where female empowerment or fulfilment is closely linked to consumption and material success. Although the show is, in my opinion, a more built-out exploration of the human condition, it is true that consumption activities are a recurring theme throughout. The women go on luxurious holidays, engage in planning parties, high-end beauty treatments or cosmetics procedures, and also on shopping trips where their ‘final check out sums’ are usually flashed on the chyrons at the bottom of the screen.
Because the women showcased are from a certain privileged economic bracket, it feels more morally acceptable to mock them or regard them negatively. Television has often been characterised as feminine and banal, two qualities that the real housewife quite unashamedly puts front and centre as its unique selling proposition. And many fans do not accept the centrality of consumer culture to the show’s narrative at face value – watching it with an ironic and critically engaged (or perhaps just critical) perspective.
Did our desire for reality TV arise out of a yearning for authenticity? Or did it come out of our voyeuristic tendencies?
In a world of artifice, financed by credit and inhabited by face-tuned creatures, we ultimately discover that there are very real, warts-and-all life lessons to be learned. These are older women who have refused to become wallflowers and instead maintain a joie de vivre and maniacal self-belief which, whilst a little self-indulgent at times, feels increasingly scarce in a media system designed to destroy our confidence and keep us subdued, particularly as we progress beyond our 20s. I argue that we should celebrate these women for defying convention, whilst understanding what their flaws and missteps can teach us about our own fulfilment & priorities in life.
What I love about The Real Housewives franchise is that it can be read as a criticism of the American dream as much as it can be a vehicle for its proliferation. I don’t believe the media class, particularly not today, is creating something that embraces the American dream as unironically aspirational. I think there is always a sense of camp, a knowing nod to audiences who watch the show with a more critical perspective, that aims to expose this for the myth that it is. After all, if we want to define camp in Susan Sontag’s words as ‘a love of the unnatural, artifice and exaggeration’ then it is quite clear that the direction, production, and promotion of The Real Housewives franchise aims to espouse this sensibility.
To me, The Real Housewives show the struggles of women in a post-feminist, late capitalist world who either embrace the domestic sphere and are patronised and sidelined for it, or who reject it and are often reproached by their husbands for it. It is evident that women still struggle to have it all, even at the elite echelons of society. Traditional views of suburbia and upper middle-class life collide on screen with the exciting potential for women to become economically independent of their husbands and ‘self govern.’
It’s interesting to consider whether, as cultural studies scholar Richard Dienst suggests, televisual culture has become ‘friendlier’ and more attuned to the nuances and genuine dilemmas of everyday life, or if we are simply anaesthetized to it as a format and accept its products at face value because of this. Should we entertain a sort of ‘technohope’ or maintain a healthy scepticism that recognises the dispersal of this content is inextricably linked to concentrations of capital? Are the desires of the masses reflected by these popular products created by a media elite or are they created by the media elite?
The global spread of The Real Housewives, as well as innumerable podcasts that have sprung up to meticulously recap every episode, proves that there is an appetite for this content. For bravo, these continents are just new markets to explore and ultimately exploit with a proven format. It will be interesting to see how international franchises respond to an established formula and to what extent they will reflect the local goings on, concerns, priorities and upper-middle-class cultures of the given countries, or whether it will expose a growing anglo-American homogeneity in what ‘wealth’ and ‘success’ looks like for women of a certain age.
Whatever you think of the Real Housewives franchise, its growth is not slowing. Instead, it is expanding into new continents at an incredible rate. Ruskin told the western world that a great nation would produce great art – and if you don’t consider the real housewives to be great art (which even I would hesitate to say), then perhaps it is a good time to consider what it is telling us about our world. I think it is warning us about something: about America, about womanhood, about the seductive sadomasochism of medicalised aesthetics, about the inherent duplicity of people caught up, as we are, in a world where we are watched and watch ourselves.
But at least it’s warning us of this by leveraging humour and the seductive qualities of spectacle; a deterrent is still a deterrent, even if it’s dressed from head to toe in designer.
References
Brzenchek, A. and Castañeda, M. (2017). The Real Housewives, gendered affluence, and the rise of the docusoap. Feminist Media Studies, 17(6), pp.1022–1036. doi:10.1080/14680777.2017.1283342.
Cox, N.B. and Proffitt, J.M. (2012). The Housewives’ Guide to Better Living: Promoting Consumption on Bravo’s The Real Housewives. Communication, Culture & Critique, 5(2), pp.295–312. doi:10.1111/j.1753-9137.2012.01126.x.
Maltby, R. (1989). Dreams for Sale: Popular Culture. Harraps.
Psarras, E. (2020). ‘It’s a mix of authenticity and complete fabrication’ Emotional camping: The cross-platform labor of the Real Housewives. New Media & Society, p.146144482097502. doi:10.1177/1461444820975025.
Sontag, S. (2018). Notes on ‘Camp’. London, Uk: Penguin Books.
Van Cleave, J. (2010). Disciplining the American Dream in ‘Reality’. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 17(2), pp.185–187. doi:10.1080/10749030902818402.
