A Stream Of Consciousness That's About (And Not About) Vanderpump Rules
Alternatively, a post that's for me and my friend, Grace and nobody else
Last night, I came across Leslie Ye’s blog, which I find interesting even when I disagree.
As a lifelong (or well, since I was 14) blogger, I’ve always felt like the online blog is a lost art form. From LiveJournal (RIP my LiveJournal) to Blogspot (I used to have one) to Tumblr (I still have one…) to Substack (I have a few but this Substack is the only one I update with any frequency), the blog will always be a part of the greater Internet but I feel like of late, people’s attention spans have become limited to 280 characters. That’s why it always makes me happy when I see someone still blogging in its original longform, a stream of consciousness, in turns both organized and haphazard.
Anyways, on Ye’s blog, she writes about society with a focus on Bravo TV, highlighting the Housewives University, specifically Vanderpump Rules and its spinoff, The Valley. I first wrote about Vanderpump Rules almost two years ago, and in that time, my views have both changed and stayed the same. But, I naturally love reading what other people’s views are on the same show, and Ye’s post “Good Women” on VPR pre season 11 (the final season of VPR), got me thinking so I thought I’d break down some of the points in it, not specifically related to the show but in general.
I think there’s this overwhelming societal desire to pigeonhole women into heroes, victims, or villains with little room for overlap. But, even ostensibly neutral actors like me or Ye have their biases. I don’t love or hate any woman on Vanderpump Rules (I do strongly loathe all the male cast members as people) but I think that Ye absolves Lala and condemns Ariana in a way that gives me pause. I think Randall Emmett abused Lala and deeply wronged her and their daughter, but even at 25, I knew perfectly well that becoming the paid mistress of a man that’s married with children was a bad idea. I just find it a bit grating that Ye seems totally unwilling to grant Lala the agency to have fucked up by fucking a married man and insists on painting her as an unequivocal victim. To me at least, that’s glaringly one-sided.
Conversely, I think Ye is a bit too harsh towards Ariana, and it almost feels like she identifies with Ariana and is preemptively criticizing her in an effort to seem unbiased. Do I think Ariana treated Kristen extremely poorly in the past (they’ve since patched things up and are now close friends) and over the years wasn’t a “girl’s girl”? Absolutely. But, I also think it’s unfair to blame Ariana herself for the world both in and out of the show rallying around her but not Lala and other female cast members. I just really disliked this part of Ye’s post on the last episode of season 11.
Ariana set herself up to be idolized and projected on through Sandoval’s love; a better, higher love than her female compatriots were able to squeeze out of their partners. In turn, she was viewed as a better, more worthy, more deserving woman, an image her supporters deploy as sword and shield against anyone who dare disagree with her.
Ariana is responsible for Ariana’s behavior1, she is not accountable for everybody else’s reactions to her life, and I find it really inconsistent to punish Ariana and other female cast members with indisputable agency while defensively absolving Lala and other female cast members of theirs.
The part with Rachel/Raquel Leviss, who is notorious for carrying on a long affair with Tom Sandoval while he lived with Ariana, is similarly dicey. I guess a part of me is wondering why Ye not just sympathizes with a woman who did an objectively terrible thing, carrying on an affair with a good friend’s life partner, but seems to brush it off in the way she criticizes people for doing with other female cast members. The reality is that Rachel was horribly treated by James Kennedy (who was recently photographed with Andrew Tate and arrested for domestic violence a few months prior2), and quite frankly, I believe he abused her as well. However, that doesn’t absolve what Rachel and Sandoval did to Ariana, it doesn’t excuse it at all just because a lot more people sympathized with Ariana than Rachel. I sort of feel like Ye doesn’t take actions in a vacuum but rather bases her response to them on what the public opinion states, and intentionally takes the contrarian stance.
In general, I think a lot of women survey and evaluate fictional and real women’s lives based on what they think “good” women ought to do in theory rather than what women do in reality when pushed to the emotional brink. This phenomenon isn’t unique to liberal women but is exemplified in them due to a variety of sociopolitical factors related to guilt as a defense mechanism against expected criticism. For instance, in the case of VPR, Ye criticizes Ariana for being snide about Kristen’s appearance when Ariana was interested in Tom Sandoval and Tom was dating Kristen. Do I think it’s particularly kind of Ariana to say on national TV that Kristen isn’t attractive enough to date Tom? No, it’s cruel and immature (and inaccurate given Tom and Kristen’s relative appearances). But, as anybody who’s existed in society knows, it’s very normal for women to say stuff like that about the partner of your object of desire. That said, there’s a marked difference between ragging on other women’s looks in private texts and doing so publicly online, and especially on national TV.
While scrolling through Ye’s blog, I was thinking about the question she poses, “Who’s worse: A terrible man who knows he’s terrible, or a terrible man who thinks he’s really a good guy?” I dated two guys in college, and the first guy used to brag that he was above empathy, that he was an asshole by nature and cared about nothing but money. For a while, I thought he was bullshitting me but I eventually realized that he was being honest. He did love me but the end of the day, he’s never grown up because he’s never had to; he’s selfish and cruel in the way Peter Pan is, he’s never going to grow up, he’s never going to advance beyond the 17-year-old girl I was when we first met, and ascend into manhood. And yet, in retrospect, he still hurt me less than the other guy I dated during college. That guy seemed like an upstanding gentleman, Navy-bound, ROTC leader, and yet, he cheated on me very early on in our relationship, and I forgave him against my better judgment. He’s the kind of guy who wakes up every morning and looks in the mirror and says “I’m a Good Guy™” and seems to believe that’s enough moralizing for the day and neglects to actually follow through with his behavior. He fell in love with me because I’m brave and smart and determined, and he fell out of love with me for the same reasons, because I’m brash and arrogant about my own intelligence and dogged to my own demise. It didn’t stop him from reading my Substack for years after we broke up though.
I’ve never really thought of myself as a “good” person though, let alone a “good” woman. I think I’m smart, loving to my friends and family, too polite for my own good, but I’ve never once conceptualized myself as inherently good although some part of me has always aspired to it. I think that my main point of disagreement with Leslie Ye is that she and many of her contemporaries expect the permanent state of moral goodness from other women rather than the aspiration towards it. And I just can’t get on board with that mentality.
I really dislike how Ariana previously excused her brother, Jeremy’s behavior towards other women and as I state in footnote #2, it’s really sketchy that Ariana didn’t unfollow James until he was photographed with the Tate brothers, knowing full well everything he had done prior to women she considers good friends
This was the point at which Katie, Scheana, and Ariana unfollowed James. Notably not when he was accused of abusing Kristen, or Rachel, or Ally, but when he ruined their image
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