Heavy Housewives Reality Show

I’ve gotten an email about this show from a few places. It’s well known that of all the reality shows I’ve met, I’ve found few that I’ve liked: the Apprentice, before it was ruined via celebrity infection, Gene Simmons Family Jewels because there’s no way in hell it’s showing the whole picture, and Clean House when it was still hosted by Niecy Nash and had the hot yard sale guy Alan. In any case, I always choose a fiction show over a “reality” show when I feel like I do have multiple compelling choices. I would not watch this show.

Not only do I almost never find the people that go on reality shows likable, I find the few bits of the actual “real” in reality shows usually snapshot aspects of social conditions that need to change badly. What’s getting me about this current Youtube clip is that one woman says she doesn’t have children because she’s “too selfish,” as though not having children is automatically a selfish decision. While that may be how she perceives herself, it feels like she’s saying anyone who opts not to have children is automatically selfish even though she can’t possibly know that because she’s not omnipotent.Her comments are going to impact the lives of other people that have chosen not to have children by immediately making their private matters subject to public – and by public, I mean completely fucked up – morality. The mainstream, in my experience, is only “moral” when it’s judging somebody else.

I get that the producers are showing fat women being themselves, and that these women exist in a social strata that may actually reflect a distinct fragment of reality. Certainly it reaches a more closely connected population than other reality shows do. From the few clips I’ve seen, there isn’t that sense of distance you get when watching, say, Mob Wives: you know you’ll never be able to relate, and ultimately TV is NOT about trying to relate despite claims from producers with no research skills and zero respect for their audiences. I could see encountering these women in my day-to-day life. That said, I don’t see their chosen attitudes and the personalities they are trying to project as something that in any way represents me. I am a fat woman, and I am confident in my appearance and in my life choices. But I would not call myself a diva and I do not embrace divas – first, I believe that title belongs to people like Celine Dione. It’s a conferred title, like “chef.” Second, diva is coming to mean “unpleasant and narcisstic drama queen” rather than “confident, self-aware adult woman who gets nothing is all about her or all about anybody else and, safe in that knowledge, rocks it.”

I think this might work better if it were not a “housewives” show. First, most women just aren’t housewives anymore. If they are homemakers, they’re not doing it Doris Day style with a vacuumed house and a kiss for the man when he comes home. Nobody really does that anymore, even those who like the idea of it. No one can afford to, and the ridiculous level of women addicted to valium in the 50s and 60s made it pretty clear that the whole imprisonment cum marriage routine so did not work.

Second, being fat is a wildly diverse thing – a whole lot of people in the United States are fat, and we’ve all got different stuff going on. I do believe we need something that isn’t “ZOMG, they’re gonna die!!!!” since it’s a rare day that street sweepers get clogged from the large people they must remove from the streets because they keeled over from sheer obesity. In that respect, it’s a step – god knows the Biggest Loser is horrifying enough.

If someone happens to watch it (who is NOT INVOLVED WITH THE SHOW) and you have a unique perspective, please share.