Oh, She's Startin'

Not Here to Make Friends is a small magazine that’s obsessed with reality TV, in a good way. Its writers use shows like Dance Moms, Love Island, and, of course, the Real Housewives, as a lens through which they can view their own lives and the world around them, painting a unique portrait of contemporary society. We delivered the third issue to Stack subscribers in September last year, and I loved this story by Sophy Drouin, with its quiet power and disarming openness.

Watching Kyle Richards wander about her dream home alone, I cross myself.

“Please, let me not become that lonesome ghost; please let me not become Kyle.”

There are dogs, expensive furniture, objects everywhere, but her daughters are grown and her husband, Mauricio, is relishing his bachelor pad some dozens of miles away.

What was it all for?

I was compelled to watch The Real Housewives franchises by the director of a play I was in. She was trying to rouse my campiness, my clown, anything in me aside from “polite, docile woman acquiescing to it all,” and she was having great difficulty doing so.

An actor in training is a giant onion peeling itself, and what was laid bare for me was how brutally disconnected I’d become from my body and my joy. No matter how safe the room, or how silly and free everyone else acted, I couldn’t escape myself. I’d made my body a hermetic seal.

So, she gave me homework. Watch the closest thing to theater on television. “The Real Housewives,” she said, “will show you true action and reaction.”

Years before this play, before my director’s advice, before sealing myself, before I’d seen a single episode of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills or known what the interiors of Kyle Richards’ home looked like – my dad was alive.

Back then, I would call him to say hi, call him when I was lost, speed dial when a car salesman bullied me to tears trying to get out of the too-good deal I’d negotiated. When I had bad news he made it better; when I had good news he made it better too.

I’d call him when I was late for school feeling like a failure, call him crying on the service stairwell of a Midtown hotel when no legit acting schools took interest in my auditions. He made me feel like a dreamer, like I was on a path somehow, collapsed against a concrete wall between floors fourteen and fifteen.

And then he died. Not suddenly like a car accident but suddenly like he’d been hiding a terminal illness from me for a decade and one day announced that he’d decided on euthanasia as a prelude for spring.

When the day came to gather around him in his favorite chair at home, my knees found the floor and I took hold of his left hand as a doctor prepared to inject one medicine, then another, and then one more to usher him out of his earthly body. A few days before this, dad had said that we could have all that was his, “where I’m going, they won’t let me take anything with me.” 

Panicked and snot-teared, I’d begged him to take me with him anyway. I couldn’t imagine a world without his guidance and the boundaries of his love. But as always, he’d been right. When the medication stopped his heart, I did not dance off with him into the next place. He did not take a single thing with him aside from the warmth in his palms.

One of the first Real Housewives I watched was Heather Gay. An integral part of the original Salt Lake City cohort, Heather is in the process of rediscovering herself after leaving the Mormon church. Before her divorce and the show, Heather had done everything she’d been raised to do: she’d abstained, proselytized, wore the garments that kept her humanity from ruining her womanhood. But then she began to see the misogyny of Mormonism operating on her three young daughters. Their experience mirrored her own back to her and disrupted her religious resignation: Was it fair that their fullness of self had been curtailed? That they were held to different standards based on their sex, and if they committed adultery they were excommunicated and sent to hell, while husbands could absolve themselves with a little cash or a promise to do better?

What drew me to Heather was her honesty: She didn’t know what the right answer was. Was she wrong to place her intuition over her faith? Was it worth risking her marriage and her family for the sake of extirpating herself from an organization that sought to trap her in her biology? I’d been recently asking myself similar questions. For a lot of women, it seemed men were a type of deity. In my case certainly, I loved them, wanted to honor them, and would suffer anything for their approval.

Heather’s journey rendered me speechless. Hers might’ve been my future. Her sense of humor pierced through the fog of my grief, and I felt suddenly seen by this person on television whose experience rhymed with mine. We’d both been lulled into some easier form of life that offered belonging in exchange for service. As I got to know her during each episode, I began to blink awake. Acting required a relinquishing of protective mechanisms.

Actors have to be open to their scene partners so they can notice small nuances in expression, body language, a tone to which they can then mold their response so they can obtain what they want from the scene. But hunger had been smoothed out of me. When my acting teachers would ask me (my character) what I wanted in a scene, I could never come up with an answer. Nothing, I would think, I’m fine, I won’t be a bother. And yet here Heather was, fighting for her freedom to want, and desire, and crave, and experience her own body in any and all ways she wanted to.

I was hooked. I found myself watching women twice my age – exponentially wealthier, married either for a long time or a number of times – and feeling more kinship with them than with the protagonists of Fleabag or Lady Bird, characters I was asked to see as contemporaries. I found myself in a curious state, mesmerized, saddened, enraged, elated all at once.

What was it about this supposedly vapid show that captivated my attention and spoke to my own increasingly complicated grief? Gradually, things became clear; these women were at once inspirational and cautionary tales for what to expect when men become the center point of a woman’s life. When suddenly the camera rendered them the focus, their pleasures, excesses, and dramas acquired a heightened authority. Heather helped me understand why society was in such a rush to write these women off as guilty pleasures: Because, without a man, a woman’s pleasure is always guilty.

By the time I got to Season 13 of RHOBH, I had grown pretty tired of Sutton. I didn’t particularly connect with her ways and her outbursts. This season was a doozy, and, rolling my eyes, I muscled through the episodes, bolstered by Erica’s cocktail-induced musings that had all the women chuckling under their heavy lipstick. Midway through the season, Sutton invites the women to Spain to spread her mentor’s ashes into the Mediterranean. I wasn’t certain I’d be rewarded for sitting through pharmaceutical commercials and a lot of yacht drama, but then it happens: Sutton finally speaks her truth.

In releasing these ashes, she says, she was desperate to also be free of the holds that her ex-husband and her father have had on her life. To be clear, Sutton is no revolutionary, she is selectively brave, but in her tearful, panicked eyes I saw the part of myself desperate to be free of the influence of men too. This, as I struggled to learn how to live with the first man I loved as a memory for the rest of my life.

In Sutton, I could begin to make out the weight of their grasp on our lives. She and I were blissfully unaware of the cost of that kind of safety until it was yanked away, whether by death, divorce or in her case, both.

It has been challenging for me to reconcile the pain of my father’s absence with my newfound sense of freedom. I long for my father’s love, the profound relief of his presence, his shelter, his fortitude. What I’d give to make him laugh again, have our eyes sparkle at each other.

But letting him walk through the world for me for such a long time complicates my memory of us.

I let pieces of myself disappear in the comfort of how perfect I was to him, and if something didn’t fit this picture, I cropped it out of the frame. It was my relief from the conformity girlhood demanded of me, and my refuge from the subtle contempt my girlhood encountered at most turns. When he died, the frame kind of cracked. I realized I could either glue it back right away, unchanged, or peek out from behind the glass and have a look at exactly what I might’ve cast away.

Just as my dad did for me, the men in Sutton’s life set her up to succeed in accordance with society’s standards. On the whole, we both benefited from that male interest.

My dad taught me to ride a bike, swim, snowboard, drive across snow and ice – he taught me the self he observed. But living for a man, no matter how great his intentions, is like living off fast food: You’re full but always hungry. The Real Housewives have carved out a space in which to explore a womanhood untangling itself from male preeminence, a womanhood testing its capacities. A new kind of alone.

The majority of the Housewives on RHOBH have separated or divorced by the time Maurico moves out, leaving Kyle to wander her home’s vacancy. By this point, she has stopped drinking, she’s working out everyday, and she has closed most parts of herself off from production. She’s not laughing much, not doing splits in the middle of a party, not whipping her hair to and fro, bronzed like a goddess in Mexico or Paris. In her pain, she’s not enjoying the spoils of her good life, and I can’t look away. Her friends’ insistence that she let loose again – they miss the old Kyle – rings familiar. It brings me back to our first family trip without my dad, when my sisters, mom and I went to Mexico for New Years’ Eve. I felt naked walking through the busy markets, no longer protected or accounted for.

“Let loose a little,” my mom would nudge me, “Have some tequila!”

She wanted to have fun, and she wanted me to have fun, but the security I felt belonging to a man was replaced by a compulsiveness in me, just as it appeared in Kyle’s life as she grappled with the new and strange world of an unmarried woman. It’s jarring when your shield dissipates, bringing all the authoritative boundaries guiding your existence along with it. I was comforted to see that this survival mode was not abnormal. In the wake of finding ourselves unchaperoned, it only made sense to begin controlling everything we could.

Compulsions like ours are rooted in a desire to be safe, and to be safe as a girl-woman is to be good. No more coffee, no more alcohol, no more fun, the bed made a specific way lest it reflect the mess of my life back to me. If I busied myself at a robotic, frenetic pace, cleaning and pruning my surroundings, I could keep the anger at bay, keep the self I’d buried a long time ago away from this precious grief, and prove that falling in line behind a man had been the right choice.

I had accepted that if someone touched me, it hurt all over, and that was normal.

Something I’ve come to realize in my father’s absence is that you don’t learn the language if you have a translator. In a blink-and-you-miss-it Beverly Hills moment, a debate as to whether Erica Jayne would or would not have known about her husband Tom’s criminal mishandling of money leads them to confess whether they know what’s going on in their own homes. Kyle, still married then, laughs nervously as she tells the women that she signs documents her husband gives her without reading them “all the time.” It’s no wonder Kyle believes Erica’s innocence: It’s deceptively easy and incredibly convenient to let the person you love handle aspects of life you don’t have a knack for, especially when your trust’s compensation is the life you always dreamed of.

As girls and women, it’s incredibly appealing to be protected. And for good reason: Women are not respected in this world.

We talk about progress, but progress is further evidence that we have not and are not equal to the ruling class: men who pride themselves on not watching reality television “garbage” while riveted by other men throwing each other a ball across a field. Men have created the world we live in, and it’s no wonder to me why they want to minimize the validity of the Real Housewives: They’re scared of them. Never before have we been able to watch a real woman lose everything and then try to build herself back up brick by brick. Erica didn’t hide her struggle. She lost everything and she got very close to losing even more, and yet only a few years out of her marriage she is happier than ever. She is designing her house the way she wants it, buying herself a car with her own money, living her life on her own terms, in real reality.

As a good girl, you learn to distrust whatever comes out of an elder woman’s mouth; she’s either bitter or crazy. Now the Real Housewives have come along and finally given us a medium through which to witness the likely outcome of life as an American housewife, and learn from it. Baring it all, they’ve invited us into our futures and the realities of grown up kids, husbands rebelling against their own mortality, and the challenges of making new friends. These women, whether they know and intend it or not, are giving us what men wish we didn’t have: a whisper network screamed at the top of their lungs. So it’s no wonder to me why most men seek to minimize the validity of the Real Housewives: they are a testament of the wreckage of lives lived for the male ideal.

The Housewives have shaken me out of a stupor with the loudness of their pain. Over time, their shame dissipated to reveal their search for a real self. One can see the direct correlation between the women holding each other accountable – sometimes to a fault – and then “blowing up” their personal lives as the seasons go on. Being allowed to finally scream and vent and not be stepped on (and have a great time) seems to have unleashed them from the constraints of politeness and the demands of female decency.

My introduction to The Real Housewives came at an auspicious time in my grief and has also supported my navigation of early wifedom. How do I avoid the pitfalls these women fell into? Can I avoid them? And what surprises will take their place if I do? I find myself thinking these questions as I fold my husband’s boxers. I make a neat square of them, tucking one side in, then the other. I build a pile, tidy proof that I’m worthy. A recent conversation between PK and Dorit comes to mind. He says, “I used to be your number one. And what I want from a marriage is, even above the kids, in a real marriage, spouse comes first, right? You were very socially vibrant, busy, always with me, and you’re not that anymore. And the reality is you came to me a very, very different girl. It was me that was the global entrepreneur, it was me that had built the businesses, it was me that brought you with me, and you make me feel less than.”

How many times have women been put down for prioritizing things outside of their home? I’m not in their marriage, but my overwhelming sense of this conversation is of PK trying to get Dorit to crouch down so he can take his place back on her shoulders.

My husband never asked me to fold his boxers or do his laundry. It started out with me just putting everything dirty in the wash all at once because it made sense. And then I didn’t have a job when we moved to New York, so I took on a bit more, hung up some clothes, washed our floors, because it made sense, right, for me to do my part in the household? But then I did get a job – in fact three jobs and one and then another year passed and I found myself there still, by our bed, losing myself in all the neat piles. Suddenly, I’m Dorit, Erica, Kyle, Sutton – I’m toiling away in the name of love while my husband works away, his oxygen mask firmly placed while I fumble breathlessly making sure he’s comfortable. As I place the pile into the drawer and push it shut I wonder, where does love end and servitude begin?

The Housewives and I have been making our way out of the shadows. I don’t care whether they’re “real” or not – the truth isn’t in the exaggerated plot lines; it’s in their eyes, the cracks of their voices that catch them by surprise. It’s in the newfound perspective on a life lived in service to the male ideal. It has hastened my realizing that my life, my self, and my pleasure are not rewards to be bestowed for good behavior.

Instead of folding boxers, I am making my own security net. I no longer look for an intermediary to solve my problems for me, and suddenly those problems don’t seem like problems anymore; they’ve taken on the form of Life, a grand one that I don’t want to hide from, but live.

Sutton said, “Let. The mouse. Go.”

I was the mouse, and I am letting myself go.

Not Here to Make Friends is a slim, annual magazine that takes a critical look at today’s most popular reality TV shows, using them as a prism through which to view contemporary society. It’s clever and funny, and well worth your time even if you say you never watch reality TV.

Sophy Drouin is a multidisciplinary artist from Québec living in Brooklyn. Her writing has been published in magazines such as Not Here To Make Friends and 86Logic, and she recently completed production on her first short documentary, Se Greffer À La Terre. She co-runs Late To The Party Press and has many projects on the horizon - look out for Club Vidéo coming along in February, a short film screening series featuring some of the most exciting independent filmmakers in and out of NYC.

Bio for Dafna including https://dafnabarzilay.com/illustration