We are getting rid of cable.”

 

I was on the phone with my best friend, and the moment those dreaded words came out of her mouth, I knew both of our lives were about to change.

 

“You’re joking, right?” I tried to sound casual. She laughed and said she wasn’t joking around. I was shocked. How could she make such a monumental decision without my approval? After everything we’d built together?

 

“What about…?” I could only whisper it. “The Housewives??”

 

“Come on,” she snorted. “I’ve been telling you we might do this. You know it’s time for you, too.”

 

“I don’t know who you are anymore.”

 

I now fully understood the betrayal she felt during the summer between 7th and 8th grade. My boobs had decided to suddenly blossom, leaving her mosquito bites to sweat out the rest of the summer alone, trapped inside a Hello Kitty training bra.

 

The stakes were a little lower this time, but she was shattering one of the few pleasures we had left, as well as destroying one of our mutual dirty little secrets.

 

I don’t remember exactly when we discovered the Bravo network, but it was around the time our kids were still little. Diaper pails, breast pumps and large plastic toys seemed to take over every square inch of our living spaces. Life was a blur of sleep deprivation, temper tantrums and never having enough time to take care of adult shit. Our most pressing daily concern was getting everyone under our roof from point a to point b without the infliction of mental damage. At the end of these God-forsaken days, our exhausted minds and bodies craved peace, quiet and stillness. The loud, overbearing Real Housewives of (insert any city), with their constant bickering and shrieking, were the perfect antidote.

 

The first few seasons provided glossy escapism; leaving your brain at the door was almost a prerequisite for watching. Their lives revolved around attending fancy dinners and cocktail parties, going on ridiculously extravagant vacations, and getting blasted and yelling at each other. Their improbably spotless houses were larger than football fields, and they appeared to pop out of bed every morning well-rested and perfectly styled, with nary a crease in their silky pajamas.

 

Most of them had children, but the disgusting and monotonous aspects of motherhood were handled by nannies. There was never anything the slightest bit real about any of it, but that was the point. We didn’t want to watch a show that reflected our lives back at us. We didn’t want to follow complicated plot lines or invest in a show that might eventually disappoint (on the flip side, we KNEW the housewives would let us down. That was part of the appeal.)

 

However, we were also secretly mortified. No one else knew the extent to which we obsessed over each season; how we researched the private lives of these Stepford Housewives. We laughed at the show’s blatant sexism, but secretly pondered if by watching, even just for entertainment, meant we were somehow advocating it.

 

Occasionally, when I was knee-deep into a particularly misogynistic and vapid episode, I would catch a glimpse of myself, almost as if from above. Who had I become? What would my former women studies classmates think? I could picture the look my dad, who had been an ardent feminist, would have given me if he found out I watched this kind of show. It would have been the same sad/defeated/disgusted crumpled expression he used to give my sister and I when we asked one of our ignorant geography or history questions. (As a parent, I now recognize the many, many layers of meaning this expression can hold.)

 

Another problem arose when the: “So what have you been watching?” question inevitably came up in conversation with other people. I’m not sure how my best friend handled this one, but I eventually landed on: “Oh, I don’t have time for tv,” which had the dual effect of not only evading the question, but also momentarily fulfilling the part of me that had always wanted to be the kind of person who said things like that.

 

Thankfully, over time, rather than having to actively participate in breaking this addiction, we were sort of naturally pulled away from it. Once our lives grew busier outside the home (she went back to work full-time and I began working part-time), we were no longer able to catch every episode. Although I tried for awhile to get us back on track, and was truly sad (pathetic) when she let go of it before I did, once I had some distance, the more I was able to see how truly awful this series is.

 

Each season would follow a predictable pattern: one of the ladies would be chosen as the target. The others would then pick her apart, usually by exposing one of her dirty little secrets (which were usually a lot dirtier than an addiction to bad reality tv.) The targeted housewife would then go out to lunch/dinner/drinks with one of the other women, in an attempt to manipulate her way back into the group. They would pout and sometimes cry as they picked at their salads-with-no-dressing, and they never, ever ate from the bread basket. Throw in some bad plastic surgery, a physical fight or two, and that was the entire arc of the series.

 

In our defense: we now see the appeal was not so much the show itself, but the time it afforded us to spend together (albeit over the phone.) As new moms trapped in our separate dwellings, we had to find different ways to spend time together. We landed on The Housewives during those early, hazy days of motherhood, a time when our brains were not functioning at maximum capacity. Looking back, the irony is not lost on us that it was our desire to hold on tight to our bond that kept us engaged in a show that is extraordinarily anti-friendship and anti-woman.

 

The truth is, no television program, reality or otherwise, could attempt to capture the rich complexity of female adult friendships. In particular ones like our own, which are filled with years and years of learning, laughter, support and debauchery. Also: if anyone ever dared to create a show about REAL women, housewives or otherwise, it would have to include scenes of women who are—shocking, I know—not afraid to eat from the bread basket.