Confessions of an Anthropologist on a Reality Show Bender

Martinis, Metrics, and Methodology.

Once a year, I descend into the chaos.

It begins innocently enough—an episode of Real Housewives while folding laundry. Suddenly, it’s three days later, I’ve formed deep parasocial attachments, and I’m googling sexy vacation AirBnBs. Then, just as abruptly, I retreat—ashamed, overstimulated, and existentially wrung out.

But I’ve come to realize something: this annual binge isn’t a lapse in judgment. It’s fieldwork.

These shows—filled with screaming brunches, staged friendships, and manufactured crises—aren’t just entertainment. They are a funhouse mirror of American cultural values: distorted, yes, but rooted in real desires, anxieties, and performances. And most crucially, the women on screen are not fictional characters. They are real people, playing curated, caricatured versions of themselves—employed to embody extremes we recognize, judge, and secretly fear.

And their reactions? Their vanities? Their meltdowns in Grecian villas? Those are real enough.

Surveillance & Spectacle

As an anthropologist, I can’t help but dissect the layers.

These women live under permanent observation, their every confession and confrontation edited for narrative impact. But they also internalize the camera. They perform themselves into being—an exhausting, self-sustaining spectacle. And yet, in moments of contradiction, the curtain slips. A glance. A hesitation. A fractured alliance. That’s where the humanity leaks out.

That's the ethnographic gold.

What We Think Matters

The most anthropologically interesting part? The contexts they think are important.

Whether it’s fighting over table settings or social status, these women are locked in rituals of meaning-making. And while it’s tempting to scoff—who cares about a seating chart?!—the truth is: they do. And so do we.

These conflicts, however shallow they seem, are symbols. They’re about respect, hierarchy, identity, belonging—all the things humans have always built cultures around.

We may not cry over someone being demoted to “friend-of-the-show,” but we do understand what it means to be excluded, diminished, or dethroned. Reality shows exaggerate these stakes until we can’t look away.

A Broader “Normal”

Perhaps most importantly, these shows offer a bizarre, overdrawn but strangely illuminating sketch of what our culture now accepts as normal. Botox at brunch. Psychic mediums at dinner parties. Women simultaneously expected to be glamorous, business savvy, emotionally available, strategic, and eternally youthful. It’s not satire—it’s society, airbrushed and aggressively captioned. And in their contradictions, these women reveal the contradictions we all live under.

Selling Sunset and the Glamour of Transaction

If Housewives is about emotional performance, Selling Sunset is about aestheticized ambition. It’s not just a real estate show—it’s a fable about beauty, capital, and control, dressed in couture and backlit by infinity pools.

Every scene is a staging ground: a sunset listing, a baby shower brawl, a brokerage meeting in full glam. The stakes are always high, even when the dialogue is laughable. But beneath the polished surfaces, Selling Sunset performs a deeper truth: that femininity, success, and belonging in late capitalism are all performative, and they are all for sale.

The women of Selling Sunset work in a world where image is everything. Even competence must be curated—heels, filters, lighting, brand. It’s easy to dismiss the show as empty. But it’s a stunning case study in how women are expected to monetize every aspect of themselves to survive elite spaces.

And like all rituals, it’s deadly serious to the participants.

Confessional Closing:

So yes, once a year, I binge until I’m dizzy. Then I retreat—usually back into more academic articles and critiques of neoliberal personhood. But what lingers isn’t the fights or fashion. It’s the feeling that beneath the rhinestones and ridiculousness, these shows are telling us something.

They’re saying: this is what our culture thinks women should be.

And when we cringe, it’s because some part of us recognizes the script.

We recognize the high-stakes performance of femininity—not because it’s foreign, but because it’s uncomfortably familiar. The expectation to be composed, desirable, resilient, and profitable is not confined to the screen. It echoes through PTA meetings, Zoom calls, and online dating profiles.

Reality TV doesn’t invent these scripts—it amplifies them until they become impossible to ignore. And if we squint just a little, we might realize we’ve been performing variations of the same roles all along. Maybe there’s no “cure” for cultural myths this deep—they’re too woven into our systems, our screens, our selfies. But humanity isn't promised an antidote. What it offers is a flashlight.

When we bring awareness to the rituals we perform—who they benefit, who they burden, what they conceal—we begin to reclaim authorship.

Maybe that’s the quiet rebellion: watching not with guilt, but with curiosity. Laughing, but also noticing. Naming the scripts, even when we still play them.

And maybe there's no cure—but certainly, a clarity. Once I begin to recognize the script, I can decide when to follow it, when to subvert it, and when to write something entirely new.

That’s not escape. That’s agency.

Stay curious until we meet again,

AP