Wives Gone Wild!

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Andrew Eccles / Bravo Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise doesn’t just showcase America’s funniest home catfights. It’s a post-feminist nightmare that preys on women’s shallowest, least-attractive qualities. And I can’t stop watching.

Even before the start of Bravo’s back-to-back episodes of the season finale of The Real Housewives of Orange County and second-season premiere of The Real Housewives of New York City, I was already transfixed, pinned at the edge of my living-room sofa as the coming attraction caused my heart to race:

“HOLY CATFIGHT!” screeched Bethenny Frankel, one of the New York posse, as she was broadcasted reading a New York Post Page Six banner item about the show’s feuding, arriviste cast members.

“To exploit your life is revolting but to explore your life is exciting,” Kelly Killoren Bensimon said. “I wanted the world to see I have a strong moral code. I just wanted to be authentic and genuine.”

Embarrassing as it is to admit, especially since I like to think of myself as a feminist—if not exactly in practice, then surely in principle—my particular reality-TV craving is for sit-dramas powered by a distinctly voracious strain of enmity-cum-amity between two-faced, fire-breathing, airtime-hogging females.

The current formula goes something like this: Trail a geographically specific coterie of attractive-enough extroverts with double X chromosomes and manageable personality disorders. (Read: OCD, histrionic, narcissistic, paranoid, borderline.) Toss a Cinderella- or Stockholm Syndrome-type victim into the mix and presto! The claws come out, the viewers tune in.

“Reality TV looks for someone who is a drama queen—feisty, forthright, a colorful character—at the same time, without so much pathology that they won’t crack up on the set,” confirmed Dr. Jean Cirillo, a Long Island, New York, psychologist who evaluates reality-TV participants. “They want women because they don’t resort to bodily injuries as men do. They choose a person who has exaggerated traits that everyone has to some degree, whether it’s sexual aggression or cattiness. Their conflicts make for a good story. If everyone was nice to everybody all the time, there’d be no plot.”

Ergo, Bravo’s winning soap triad: The Real Housewives of Orange County, which premiered in 2006, followed by last spring’s The Real Housewives of New York City, and this past fall’s The Real Housewives of Atlanta. (A fourth series featuring New Jersey housewives is in the works.)

Rejecting old-school notions of feminist solidarity, Bravo's she-beast housewives are constantly vying to stay ahead of their own pack, even if—no, especially if—it demands catfights, gossip mongering, and disloyalty. Without ever pulling a punch, they engage in actions that are as ruthless and harmful as physical violence, TV's unlady-like ladies’ alternative to professional wrestling’s simulated battering and theatrical chest-beating. More specifically, the housewives’ antics, both verbal and nonverbal, are diagnosed as “female relational aggression," a socio-psychological term referring to the specific way girls and women use relationships to hurt another, pitting individuals against each other, and forging alliances to deliberately exclude someone. A barbed tongue remains a female's most lethal weapon, instigating a war of words curdling with ridicule and betrayal.

No one knows this better than the media-savvy sextet of New York City housewives, or “skinny bitches,” as they called themselves, clinking Champagne flutes. In last week’s premiere episode, which filmed the cast mostly summering in the Hamptons, fangs were bared because Alex and Simon McCord, the show’s wannabe socialite couple from Brooklyn, had been written up in New York magazine, wherein Simon made a dig at one of the other housewives, Jill Zarin, implying she was déclassé because she was from Long Island. She, in turn, retaliated by getting Cindy Adams, the New York Post gossip columnist, to print the banner headline item that earlier prompted Bethenny's "Holy catfight!" alert. It said that Simon was a lush, prone to insults. Would the adversaries come to blows when they spied each other at the same East End party? If only!

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