The Dangers of The Real Housewives Franchise

 

Photo Credit: The Real Housewives Franchise on Bravo

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The Dangers of The Real Housewives Franchise

I belong to the generation that remembers what it meant to have a real housewife as a mother: Gen X. While a few of my friends’ mothers worked, most stayed home to raise the children and keep house as their mothers had before them. When it came time for me to choose my path in the world, I decided to follow in my mother’s footsteps. I dropped out of college to marry my high school sweetheart at 19 and support him in his schooling since that would sustain our family for the rest of our lives. After the wedding, we moved a state away, and I worked 40 hours/week to put him (my now ex-husband) through law school. It was the biggest mistake of my life (to date) for so many reasons.  

I certainly didn’t look like any of the women featured in the graphic above, and our lives weren’t easy by any stretch of the imagination. We started at the bottom, just like everyone else. We both worked full-time for 3-years post-law school graduation before even considering having a family. We thought we were being responsible by waiting until we were more “stable” to have a child. In our case, that meant bringing her home from the hospital to a starter home we owned. 

I was straddling three identities: traditional “housewife,” stay-at-home mother, and attorney’s wife. I wasn’t stellar at the first or the last one, but I strived to be the best stay-at-home mother I could be. It was just the housewifely and the attorney’s wife roles that I will admit I genuinely sucked at. On the one hand, I was taking my daughter to storytime at the library while at the same time dressing up to attend almost weekly weekend functions where I was expected to perform my role as the polished wife of an attorney at one of the larger law firms in town. In the Monday morning meetings where the partners at the firm would rate the wives’ performances at the weekend functions, I consistently ranked near the bottom.

Things changed for me in 2006 when Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Orange County series tore into the reality TV scene. It was difficult for me to find a community of women experiencing life challenges similar to mine, and I felt like this might be a solution. The show’s original producer, Scott Dunlop, based his show on the archetypal housewives of the 1980s that he encountered in Orange County, California. In his 2021 interview with Hailey Eber from the New York Times, Dunlop states, “The men would leave for work, and the women were left to run wild on ‘the ranch’ as they called it, playing golf and hanging out and shopping. They were all such unusual humans. Entertaining, but also kind of annoying.” And with this misogynistic perspective, an era and an empire was begun. To my chagrin, I had not found the community I was searching for. 

However, that didn’t mean I stopped watching each week, along with all the other women craving reality television content like this. Initially, women viewers didn’t question or bristle at being lopped into the category of mere housewives. Despite the curated content, including unrealistic storylines, highly edited, nearly accurate confessionals,  and "over-the-top bitchiness to draw people in" that ran counter to women’s liberation efforts, we were mesmerized. Ironically and unsurprisingly, throughout its many iterations (11 U.S.-based and 21 international adaptations), The Real Housewives franchise participants and spin-offs moved further and further away from what it meant to be a housewife to focus on the borderline fictional narratives of affluent women.      

It was 2010 when I began to lose interest in the series. I was jaded in part because I was going through a very messy divorce with an attorney, but I was also disgusted with the egregious ways that attorneys’ wives’ lives were portrayed. I had experienced salaciousness that would outperform any fictitious stories they were selling in The Real Housewives or one of its numerous spinoffs. I also had another priority in mind: my 6-year-old daughter. She was at the point where she was hyperaware of the content consumed in our home, and I didn’t want to normalize these characters’ behavior. Especially since she was uniquely positioned to be a part of the world portrayed therein.

Since my divorce, I have been especially conscious of the example I am setting and in trying to change the narrative of how my daughter sees her place in the world. Dr. Suzanne Leonard, author of Wife, Inc.: The Business of Marriage in the Twenty-First Century points out that because of women’s place in society throughout history, we have always had to negotiate our position in relation to men. She states, “The wife is our biggest icon of how we talk about women… It’s so problematic but calling (us) wives allows us to tell women’s stories.” For myself, I have remained intentionally single since my divorce. In the time since, I have finished my undergraduate degree, obtained a Master’s, and am currently working on my Ph.D. In my family, our stories will not be represented in terms of a man and marriage any longer.