Vanderpump Rules, Selling Sunset and the Complexities of the Reality TV Woman

Words: Colette Fountain

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Vanderpump Rules features a cast with the types of characters that viewers have come to expect from 2010s reality TV. We have Scheana, the new girl with a “salacious past” accused of being a “husband-stealing, fame-whoring piece of shit”. She rivals Stassi, the “mean girl” overbearing girlfriend, accompanied by her minions Katie and Kristen.

The woman who lends her name to the title, Lisa Vanderpump, is tasked with maintaining order. Having been a television icon for over a decade, she has learned to pick her employees based on the criteria demanded by reality TV, not the hospitality industry.

Shows like these are my guilty pleasure, consumed on the sofa with my housemates, glass of wine in hand. I feel conflicted about them. They are not to be discussed on dates, or in high society, for fear of revealing myself to be just as shallow as the women I fear I may be mocking. But at the same time even calling these shows guilty pleasures feels belittling, like entertainment marketed at women cannot be true entertainment. This criticism is rarely levied against their male-targeted counterparts: Survivor, Clarkson’s Farm, The Apprentice.
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I share this shame-fuelled love of reality TV with other feminists, like Roxane Gay and Deborah Frances-White. In Bad Feminist, Gay writes, “If reality TV has any connection to reality, it is that women are often called upon to perform their gender.” She is right that in a lot of cases, to be a reality TV star is to become a stereotype. It is to bleach your hair, spend hours perfecting your physique, and inserting silicone, as the cast slowly morphs into lookalikes of one another, inevitably forming Plato’s ideal of the reality TV woman.

While their husbands enjoy the spoils of their earnings with a slew of hobbies, these women attend Botox parties, spas, and sample sales. Despite earning their own money, they are shown as frivolous: too financially irresponsible to invest in stocks or bonds, instead buying Birkins and Chanel. Despite these investments often retaining their value better than men’s do, a handbag has always symbolised shallow materialism more than a Rolex watch does. Frequently in these shows, then, women need men to be responsible on their behalf, reducing them to the role of trophy wife, or financial submissive. In Selling Sunset, for example, Jason is called in to sell homes the women are struggling with – like Davina’s $40 million mansion – or to make sure that Mary is running a tight ship with the renovations he has supposedly entrusted her with. 

In Vanderpump Rules, however, Lisa flips the script. She is an old-school girlboss. While her restaurant SUR is co-owned with her husband and another couple, the show depicts Lisa as the driving force. She has kept her own name, she comes up with menu ideas, and she ultimately decides who she employs and fires. This responsibility is still restricted though. The very nature of the show is that the staff will prove to be unmanageable, once again setting women up for failure through depictions of shoddy business decisions. 

Lisa is there to be managed, in turn, by her husband through her position as his “trophy wife”. It is Ken who steps in to discipline James Kennedy after Lisa is unable to rein in his misogyny, Ken who approves Lisa’s idea for a sushi menu. Interestingly, the phrase “trophy wife” is described by Merriam-Webster’s dictionary as having a “disapproving” tone, though that disapproval is almost guaranteed to be aimed at the trophy wife herself, in another attempt at insulting women for perceived immorality, and riding men’s coattails. 

But when women do show themselves to be professionally capable, viewers are suspicious, too. Selling Sunset, for example, has been marked by viewers questioning the women’s legitimacy, because it seemed too incredulous for women to meet societal beauty standards, and be intelligent, and successful. Jobs like those held by the women on Vanderpump Rules and Selling Sunset are often seen as passion projects for trophy wives - a meaningless pastime husbands allow their wives to have to keep them occupied while they do the proper work. 

The same judgement has not affected the likes of Graham Stephan, an Oppenheim Group influencer who’s credibility is untarnished by his financial YouTube videos. To rework one of my favourite Little Women quotes: “just because my [hobbies] are different than yours, it doesn’t mean they’re unimportant.”

The women of Selling Sunset are haunted by their pasts, even within the contexts of their office. Bre is unable to shake her reputation as one of Nick Cannon’s many partners, judgements on Heather for her life as a Playboy model also follow her, and Christine is “gold-digging” when she marries her tech entrepreneur fiance, despite her own accumulated real estate wealth. 

All I do when I watch reality TV is criticise. I judge Scheana for obeying the disgusting music producers who ask her to make “pornstar” sounds as she pursues her music career, I judge Lisa for the revealing outfits she expects her staff to wear, I judge Stassi for demanding respect from Jax. I judge them for conforming with beauty standards and seeking individual empowerment instead of the empowerment of women as a whole. I judge myself for watching the show just to judge them, which I feel is betraying my feminism.

I see all of these double standards for women in these shows, and yet I can’t turn away because it feels like I know the women on TV. Despite the constraints of reality TV, they offer some of the rawest depictions of womanhood. Reality TV doesn’t afford them the luxury of performativity. Instead we cry with them when they suffer a miscarriage, we feel their anger when their boyfriends cheat on them (even if the anger is often misdirected), we know the pain of ending a friendship. These women are modelled off the women in my own life. They are flawed and complex and three dimensional, and on closer inspection they do not neatly fit into the categories reality TV demands: gold digger, trophy wife, slut. 

We follow these women for years, and have seen them grow up under the shadows of their male co-stars. Like Stassi on Vanderpump Rules, we have had boyfriends that have told us to shut up, or have faced the struggles of balancing career success in relationships. We can relate to their suffering, recognising them for what they actually are: oppressed, frustrated, belittled.

All of this continues to remind us that the plight of womanhood doesn’t end, even in the glossy, edited world of reality TV, and that the insults levied against women in real life will persist on TV. Women can never win – reality TV is a stark reminder of that, and that’s why I can’t look away.