The Real Housewives is one of the biggest and glitziest reality franchises on TV. But just who are its many stars; how much money do they make; which of the international offshoots, from Hungary to Cheshire, are worth watching – and how much of it is real? In an extract from his new book, The Housewives: The Real Story Behind the Real Housewives, Brian Moylan explains why some feminists love the series, why others hate it and what it really says about race and class in the US today. *** In her book Reality Gendervision: Sexuality and Gender on Transatlantic Reality Television, Brenda R Weber remembers talking to a lawyer at a university function. The lawyer told Weber, a professor of gender studies at Indiana University, that he worked on cases involving the eradication of toxic sludge. He then asked what she studied. She said that she researched reality television. “So we both work in toxic sludge,” he replied. Any fan of reality television, and the Real Housewives specifically, can imagine the look on his smug face. It’s the same face you get from people at parties who say things like: “I don’t even own a television.” Because of those reactions, we couch our love of these shows as a “guilty pleasure” or admit that we know that they’re “dumb” or “silly”, but we love them anyway. I think it’s time we stop doing that. People that think the shows are harming the world or making us more stupid or setting their favourite cause back 20 years are probably wrong. So wrong that many academics seriously disagree with them. The next time you’re eating hors d’oeuvres and staring down the nose of a jerk who just said, “What is a Lisa Vanderpump?” here are some arguments you can throw back at them to prove your passion is just as valid as anyone else’s. June Deery, the head of media studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a frequent author on topics relating to reality television, says that high culture “gets put into the masculine zone, the more powerful, the more elite, the more respected”. Conversely, “feminised art forms like gossip, celebrity and popular culture” are looked down on, including reality TV. Whatever your taste in television, dismissing Real Housewives out of hand while greeting Breaking Bad as serious art plays into the sexist binary that infects our very world order. A love of reality TV – even something as macho as Deadliest Catch or Ice Road Truckers – is a tiny stab in the heart of the patriarchy. However, some feminist scholars have their own critiques of the franchise. In 2013, feminist icon Gloria Steinem said, “It is women – all dressed up and inflated and plastic surgeried and false bosomed … it is a minstrel show for women.” Still, there are plenty of feminist interpretations of the show. Roxane Gay, public intellectual and author of Bad Feminist, got her own chance to hit back at Steinem, saying, “I think that the Real Housewives franchises allow women to be their truest selves. We see the mess, we see their amazing friendships and everything in between. When women are allowed to be their fullest selves, [it is] the most feminist thing we can do.” Gay even added that she once personally challenged Steinem about her view on the Housewives when she ran into her at a fundraising event, a conversation I would have paid money to witness. The role of consumerism on The Real Housewives is another area that’s open to interpretation. Many have accused the franchise of promoting conspicuous consumption, and to those critics, I can only say – you’re totally right. I mean, one episode of RHOBH sees Erika Girardi and Dorit Kemsley drive Pagani cars at a dealership in Beverly Hills. The cars start at $2m. The money these women spend is not just supposed to give viewers a vicarious thrill, but also to signal that rarefied quality: class. “One of the things that’s interesting about the Real Housewives franchise is how often class is an actual topic,” says Deery. “They talk about things like, ‘is it OK to be a gold digger or should I have my own career?’ As the show goes on, they have their own income and, more importantly, they have a brand opportunity – the media exposure can be translated into dollars.” That sometimes translates into elevated status, thanks to a country where class more often equals money than in a closed system like Britain, where class is determined by breeding. There might also be some class distinctions that not all viewers are keenly aware of. “Real Housewife of Potomac Gizelle [Bryant] comes from a very old money, prestigious sort of Black lineage, but none of those things are legible, I think, to Bravo’s white audiences,” says Racquel Gates, a professor at the College of Staten Island who wrote about race and the Real Housewives in her essay Keeping It Real(ity) Television. “They don’t know what Hampton University [Bryant’s alma mater] is, right? None of that stuff is legible even though it’s very legible to me and a lot of other African American viewers.” It’s not only the representation of class that might be above some non-Black viewers’ heads, but also the problems with representation on the franchise’s shows with predominantly Black casts: Real Housewives of Atlanta and Real Housewives of Potomac. RHOA’s sixth season, which aired in 2013 and 2014, featured a now-notorious altercation between Kenya Moore and Porsha Williams. Kenya pulled out a bullhorn and called Porsha a “dumb ho” across the couch, which led Porsha to drag Kenya to the ground by her hair and punch her. Porsha’s lawyer remembers it, too, since it led to official assault charges. Kristen Warner, an associate professor at the University of Alabama and author of ‘Who Gon Check Me Boo’: Reality TV as a Haven for Black Women’s Affect, describes the “frantic discourse about Black women acting like the stereotypes and how we just keep being angry and fighting with each other … but white women do it, too. [What about] Teresa Giudice and Danielle Staub? She shoved that table at that girl and pulled that woman’s hair. How are we not reading them in a way that we are reading ourselves as sort of doomed to always fit these stereotypes?” Warner sees arguing against negative portrayals of Black women in reality TV or searching for good portrayals there as somewhat futile. It doesn’t matter, she says, if Michelle Obama decided to join Andy Cohen’s stable of women, people will still think negatively of Black women, reality television and especially negatively of Black women on reality television. But there is an alternative. “We might as well come to Jesus on it and figure out a way to grapple with our insecurity and discomfort with the fact that white people will think badly of us,” Warner says. “I would rather indulge the pleasure of watching these women on-screen doing things I can’t do because I’m supposed to be professional. I’d rather watch them do it and live vicariously than try and fret.” Sociological excavation isn’t the only benefit of a steady diet of trashy reality television, says Weber. “I think [the Housewives are] making attentive viewers better, critical, more critically engaged in what they’re watching,” she says. “[Thinking about the show and reading the Twitter discourse] is doing intellectual work that the show alone doesn’t.” So the next time someone at a party has something to say about your passion for the Real Housewives, just let them know that you’re actually an amateur media critic and feminist critical theory observer. They’re just some asshole who thinks they’re cool because they don’t own a television.