You Play the Girl

by Carina Chocano

  The spin-offs, however, didn’t have quite the same “found” quality. They are much more self-consciously constructed. These shows were predicated on the ability of their members to have married “well,” and some of the later spin-offs have a more artificial, less anthropological feel.

  Across the various iterations, the “real housewives” flaunted their refusal to conform to the happy modern housewife ideal as though they were breaking the law by spending their days drinking, sparring, and shopping. They proudly showed off their incompetence in the kitchen (as when Adrienne of Beverly Hills washed a chicken with hand soap), or their disinterest in sex (as when Lisa Vanderpump joked about treating sex as a twice-annual gift to her husband), or their limited patience for parenthood (like Camille, who gave birth to her kids via a surrogate and employed one nanny per kid). Some, like Camille, made a point of treating their employees like beloved friends and their beloved friends like employees, whereas others, like Larsa Pippen, bragged to friends about their deep-seated nanny hatred and their compulsive need to fire them. Their lives were constantly being exposed as shams in the tabloids as they continued to deconstruct the feminine mystique on-screen and reconstruct it for the New New Gilded Age (Gilded Age III: More for Me). They hawked their lifestyle brands. When wronged, they became pure vessels for sorrow. They fell apart in public and wasted away in plain sight. They suffered exquisitely.

  Back in the seventies, when the women Brunsdon wrote about were busy creating a new idea of themselves, a housewife was something a middle-class woman had to resist becoming by default. Today, far from having to actively resist falling into the role of housewife in a traditional marriage, a young feminist (or even a not-so-young, not-so-feminist) woman is more likely to find herself outside of that role as a matter of course. There are twice as many women in their early forties who have not given birth now than there were in the mid-seventies. The “real housewives,” in many cases, seem to have become, to paraphrase Gloria Steinem, the women the men they wanted to marry would have married had not the whole enterprise gone bust.

  For women of this peer group, it’s the retro designation “housewife”—with its shades of housework and mothering stripped away, and its connotations of laziness and sluttiness dialed way up—that confers a perverse status and allows them entry into the televised Have-It-All Olympics. These are the Veblen housewives, the women whose job it is to make a performance of excess in the service of the status of their husbands, even when their husbands are less rich, or less famous, or simply not in the picture. Skills are not necessary, but shame is not allowed. Here’s how it works. A group of highly competitive, thoroughly confused women are pitted against each other in five events: wealth, youth, beauty/body, husband, and glamour career. In order to participate, a housewife must qualify in at least three of these categories. She does not need to have all of them in order to win, but it helps. Some categories trump others. For instance, wealth trumps beauty, and husband trumps glamour job. Kids plus husband trump job, too—unless the process of acquiring them leads to a show of one’s own. Every show features at least one aggressive instigator whose job it is to ratchet up the jealousy and paranoia and to keep the interpersonal conflicts coming. All you really have to do to be a “real housewife” is take pride in your privilege, your leisure, your profligacy, and your willingness to ratchet up the melodrama at every possible opportunity. You can’t win unless somebody else loses.

  As a product, this is not so terribly different from what previous “real housewives,” the descendants of Julia Child and, more directly, Martha Stewart on cable, were selling. The big difference is that it isn’t designed to make you feel bad about your incompetence, or lack of ease, or shortage of creativity, or crushing scarcity of time to do anything but get by with the bare minimum in the domestic sphere. A few channels over from Bravo, on the Food Network and the hipper, cuter Cooking Channel, a new generation of Nigellas is focused on the sensual and communal pleasures of home cooking—just as across the cable landscape, a new generation of crafters and gardeners and decorators and DIYers offers visions of what it would be like to spend one’s days ministering to domestic surroundings. These shows cater to a whole different set of fantasies: the fantasy that there is a gracious, lovingly created domestic sphere that needs tending to in the first place, for instance; the fantasy that there is time and energy left over after work, commute, and unglamorous chores to swan around one’s beautiful kitchen dipping one’s manicured fingers in bowls of chocolate or whipping up mini crème brûlées for unexpected guests; the fantasy that such a thing as unexpected guests who show up demanding crème brûlée even exists.

  The “real housewives” are nothing like these people. They are not gracious nor accomplished nor poised. They do not handle themselves with aplomb or display grace under pressure. They do not have housewifely tips to hand down, tips on getting the kids to eat their vegetables or saving on the grocery bill. They will never make you feel bad about your own lack of domestic perfection. What they’re selling is the idea that they have it better, or at least easier, than you do—even though they really don’t deserve it. This appropriation of the term housewife may be somewhat ironic, but it’s not at all apologetic. Whether or not they are in on the self-parody, their purpose is not to be emulated or admired but to be envied and despised.

  It’s interesting how pop culture has recast housewifery as leisurely and lucrative, especially given that the issue of unpaid gendered labor (a.k.a. “the second shift”) has not been resolved. On the contrary, it has been found, conclusively, to be the number one thing holding women back in their careers. A survey of Harvard Business School graduates in the Harvard Business Review discovered that women disproportionately failed to meet the goals they set for themselves in their twenties not because they’d “opted out” but because their husbands’ careers were prioritized over their own. Researchers found that “Harvard MBAs value fulfilling professional and personal lives—yet their ability to realize them has played out very differently according to gender.”2

  Upon graduation, more than 70 percent of male HBS grads who were Gen-Xers or baby boomers said they expected their careers to take precedence over their partners’ careers—and only 7 percent of Gen-X women and 3 percent of baby-boomer women said they expected their careers to come first. Women, overwhelmingly, expected egalitarian marriages in which both careers would be treated with equal seriousness. Their expectations were unmet. In the end, about 40 percent of the Gen-X and boomer women surveyed said their husbands’ careers ended up taking priority, even though only about half of them had planned on putting their own careers on the back burner. Child-care statistics painted an even more unequal picture: 86 percent of Gen-X and boomer men said their wives were responsible for most of the child care. Women Harvard Business School graduates with jobs said this was true to the tune of 65 percent of Gen-X women and 72 percent of boomer women.

  The entire Real Housewives franchise is predicated on the assumption that we bring a healthy dose of contempt for such people to the table. We aren’t just conditioned to not have any empathy for the housewife character, we’re constantly reminded not to. The Real Housewives are never deserving of our empathy because they aren’t real people, even as, somehow, tales of their desperation keep getting produced and dismissed. Or maybe the “real” modifier refers to their true, essential nature, and is intended to smear its own heroines as ornamental, parasitic, venal. Either way, they are built for hatred. And yet, ironically, as Laura Miller writes in a 2016 Slate essay called “The Resurgence of the Housewife Novel,” “to be so materially lucky that you’re not allowed to experience any discontent at all turns out to be just another way of being swallowed up by your social role.”

  The Real Housewives spin-offs (which I love! and recapped for years!) are arenas where ideas about how women should live—what they should do, how they should self-identify, how they should be judged—duke it out in the dirtiest, most extreme, most performative way poss
ible. And the “real housewives” themselves are the embodiment of all that is impossible to reconcile in women. Maybe the women’s willingness to turn everything we’ve been simultaneously conditioned to expect and to reject about the feminine ideal into a stylized performance for their own profit is progress of a kind—for them, anyway. For the rest of us, symbolically, it doesn’t help much. The people who make these shows aren’t stupid. They might even be evil geniuses, subverting the housewife mystique once and for all, crawling into its navel Matrix-style and exploding the myth from the inside. Or maybe they are unconsciously perpetuating the categories they’ve been made into prototypes of. Either way, they remind us that we’re a little screwed.

  What the Real Housewives creators—clever devils—did was professionalize the role of wife entirely outside the parameters of marriage: they turned wifeliness into a scalable, husbandless brand. More than the Martha Stewart–style domestic lifestyle gurus that preceded them—with all their tiresome skills and fussy creative endeavors—the Bravo housewives have turned the role of housewife into a job whose main purpose is to sell a ruinously expensive and hard-to-support lifestyle to a generation that is at once ideologically opposed to and functionally barred from such a lifestyle. They reinforce the already widely accepted idea that what you represent is much more important than what you do—and representing housewifely leisure has turned out to be a surprisingly lucrative line of work.

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  Real Girls

  Ovid’s Pygmalion is a sculptor who carves a girl out of ivory, falls in love with her, and prays to Venus to make her real. The reason he goes through the trouble, instead of just popping out to the agora and meeting someone nice, is that all the women he knows in real life are whores. And it’s true: Venus has turned them into prostitutes as punishment for refusing to worship her. There’s a lesson in there somewhere: like so many love stories, Pygmalion stories aren’t about love at all—they’re about compliance.

  You can learn a lot about the longings and generalized gender anxieties of an era by the kinds of fake women it dreams up. In The Iliad, Hephaestus, the god of metalsmithing and technology, created, among other human-looking machines, two female automatons made of gold. In Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), a mad scientist constructs the evil-robot doppelganger of a beautiful labor organizer to destroy her reputation. In the sixties sitcom My Living Doll, a psychiatrist is entrusted with a sexy, artificially intelligent gynoid and programs her to be the perfect woman (hint: she is silent and completely subservient). In The Stepford Wives the same thing happens on a bigger scale. In Weird Science, nerdy teen outcasts program a 1980s power glamazon on their computer, who starts out scary and destructive but eventually helps them self-actualize. In the 2004 remake of The Stepford Wives, the husbands turn their wives into robots so they can play video games without being nagged. Scarlett Johansson’s voice in Her (2013) is a disembodied, artificially intelligent operating system that exists only as an iterative idea between Joaquin Phoenix’s head and the cloud, and it/she becomes so perfect that she surpasses him and escapes his control. In Ex Machina (2015), a young programmer named Caleb wins a contest to spend a week with his multibillionaire search-engine-creator boss, Nathan, at his isolated bunkerlike compound, where Nathan introduces him to Ava, a sentient AI in a female body. Eventually, Caleb finds out that Ava is a composite of his porn preferences and other online behavior, and that he wasn’t selected at random but was recruited to test Ava not for sentience but for the capacity to love. Ultimately, she surpasses her creator. She kills him, locks up Caleb, and lets herself loose upon a world full of men conditioned to feel something like a love response for their algorithmic porn preferences. She’s the fear, personified, automated, weaponized.

  So what else is new. Almost all movies about artificial women are Frankenstein stories, if they have any self-awareness at all. Some are cautionary tales, warning that perfection is inhuman, that it’s monstrous to play God. Some pity the monster—the girl. In Ex Machina, the AI robot is a princess locked in a tower, isolated and alone. She understands she’s not real, but she feels real—not just to the people who made her; to herself. She seems real to us, especially in contrast with Nathan’s inhumanity. In Westworld, a whole alternate world full of fake women created to cater to fantasies forged by violence and porn is created. All of the fake girls are perfect. The question they raise, though, is: perfect for what?

  Around the time I attended the academic porn conference, in the late nineties, a friend sent me a link as a joke. It was the website of a then new company called RealDoll that made hyperrealistic sex dolls that started at about $5,500. The dolls were fully customizable, like MINI Coopers. Customers designed their own dolls from a menu of options, including face and body type, breast size, hair (head and pubic) color and style, nipple circumference and hue, and number of functioning orifices. The dolls’ weight and height approximated human proportions (small, except in the breast area, where they tended to range from large to enormous), and they could be warmed up to body temperature by being placed in a hot tub. You could play around with the options and preview your doll online. So I did. I did it again. I couldn’t stop doing it. I completely freaked myself out. I felt like Joanna in The Stepford Wives when she walks into the room at the Men’s Association and confronts the dead-eyed, silicone version of herself staring back at her vacantly.

  Until the moment I went on the RealDolls website, my image of sex dolls had been more or less fixed on what it was when I first saw the movie Airplane!, when I was nine. In my mind, a sex doll was a joke, a novelty item or gag gift. I imagined an inflatable pool toy. I was shocked and unnerved by the dolls’ verisimilitude. They looked so uncannily real yet unreal, only silent and completely inert. And yet creepy as the dolls were, nothing scared me more than the customer testimonials on the company website; these rapturous, highly emotional testimonials from satisfied customers thanking the company for finally solving their problems with women by providing them with an alternative to women. They loved their dolls so much. The dolls were everything the customers wished real women were, but weren’t.

  Last I heard, the company was diligently working on artificially intelligent models, like Stepford Wives. Maybe they will be official sponsors of the real-life Westworld, whenever that comes. A new world made just for them.

  Stories about men making artificial women have always been around, but they’ve started to migrate from fiction to nonfiction, and they’re not morality tales anymore, they’re wish fulfillment. The stories were fantastical and the debate was hypothetical. You could only speculate on the ramifications of choosing artificial women over real ones. Now you don’t have to. Afterward, I discovered a BBC documentary called Guys and Dolls. The film interviewed RealDoll owners who thought of the dolls as girlfriends. One of the subjects was “Davecat,” a Goth in his thirties who lived with his parents and his doll outside Detroit. Davecat explained that he had saved for a year to buy the doll. He called her Sidore, or Shi-Chan, for short. At first, his interest in her had been merely sexual, but he’d come to see her as a companion. He said his father had a hard time accepting their relationship, but Davecat tried not to let it get to him. To him, the doll was not a substitute for a real woman, she was better. He said that not only was she more beautiful than any real woman he could ever “get,” but she was exactly whatever he wanted her to be—nothing more and nothing less. “Shi-Chan is an anchor to me because I know what to expect,” he said. “With women, you don’t really get that.”

  In 2012, Davecat resurfaced in an episode of the TLC show My Strange Addiction. By now, he’d gotten his own apartment, bought matching rings with the inscription “Synthetik love lasts forever” for himself and Sidore, and started referring to her as his wife (which he said many of his friends, in particular his female friends, were very accepting of). He had also ordered a second doll to join them in a polyamorous relationship. Asked if he ever dated real women, Davecat replied that he ha
d had flings with “organic” women in the past but that he never felt secure in them. He took his doll out to dinner with a female friend. His friend was very accepting, and the waitress was curious and cool. Davecat said the relationship with his doll Sidore made him happy, and “if that’s what makes me happy, well, that’s what makes me happy. And I really see no reason to change.”

  In 2013, Davecat was featured in an Atlantic article sounding less weird and abject, and more empowered, like an advocate. He called himself a “technosexual” and described himself as “an activist for synthetic love and the rights of synthetic humans.” Throughout the segment, he referred to “organic” women as “organiks.” He chose his words carefully to reflect what appeared to be a slight shift in his position. He no longer distinguished between dolls and women but rather separated women into “organic” and “synthetic” ones. Not only did he not think of his “synthetic” girlfriend as a substitute, he preferred her silicone skin and slightly stilted movements. He wrote an e-mail to the interviewer:

  Now the important thing to remember is that gynoids and androids are like organic humans, but they would lack the qualities that make organics difficult to deal with. They would be pleasant, agreeable, non-judgmental, aesthetically and mentally pleasing, and more. In day-to-day existence, most people have to deal with at least one person whom they’d rather avoid at all costs. The way I see things, your spouse should be easygoing and a joy to come home to, to counteract having to deal with all manner of undesirables when you’re out and about. I think the best way to reach that goal is through humanoid robots. It’s like having your cake, and eating it too.1

  In 2014, Davecat was interviewed in Vice. He told the reporter that he preferred his relationship with his doll wife to “messy” human relationships, because “when you love an organic, you’re really loving two people: there’s the idea of the person that you fall with love with and then there’s the actual person—and at some point, the idea is going to disappear and you are going to bump straight into the actual person. You have to come to terms with the discrepancy between those two people. And for that matter, they’re doing the same thing with you too.”