Why do girlbosses fall in love?
Paige DeSorbo and the inevitable tragedy of the Bravo girlboss.
I knew things on reality television were going downhill in an irreparable way when Katie Maloney appeared onscreen during the seventh season of Vanderpump Rules wearing a shirt that said “feminist.”
To preface this, I’m a feminist. I was a Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies major at my university, and to this day it really chaps my ass that the new byline of the so-called cool girl is that feminism as we recognize it has no value. It isn’t popular (especially for women) to be seen being earnest about their beliefs, because admitting you have feelings about politics is déclassé, so out-and-proud feminists are both set up and punchline. It’s better to seem jaded until eventually you do become jaded.
Usually these people are referring to the concept that because all waves of feminism were flawed movements spearheaded by flawed people we should discount them entirely, and I don’t really buy that as a cogent argument for completely fucking off the core principles of the entire theory. Yes, we can all agree the pink pussy hats were cringe, but the arbiter of whether a movements principles are worthy of political acceptance and change shouldn’t rely on whether they can be classified as cringe. If you get “the ick” from people earnestly striving for equal rights under the law you should take that up with someone who can guide you through why you’re so miserable (lol).
So, to be clear: it was not popular to be a feminist for a very long time for reasons that I think are pretty horseshit, and at its face I think the “feminist” shirt is cringe but ultimately go girl because we can’t overstate how much people hate women. The shirt wasn’t really the issue.
I only say all of this because I feel like the ways in which we interpret feminism, especially in our relationship to current pop culture, has become deeply perverted. And this is something that I first saw screeching in on the wings of Katie Maloney’s shirt, and I have since seen it divebomb into myriad other reality shows.
What is wrong with Katie Maloney wearing a shirt that says “feminist” across her tits? you might ask. Well, because she’s Katie Maloney. When I saw Katie wearing that shirt her life flashed before my very eyes: going on Scheana’s bachelorette party after she knew Scheana had watched Stassi’s stolen sex tape, slut-shaming Lala for taking her top off on vacation, calling Lala a whore in the back alley of SUR, referring to other women as skanks, disparaging her husband’s penis, and generally only taking up for women that she likes in the moment.
And, once again, to be clear: all of this makes Katie stellar TV (or it did for about 5 seasons), because it needs to be said the attributes of a good person rarely make for good TV. Bad people have created the reality television genre, and - as my favorite podcaster Liz Bentley likes to say - if we start interrogating the ethics of reality television we have to stop watching it altogether. And I don’t want to stop, but I do want to complain about the ways in which I have been talked down to as an audience member in regards to how these stars are framed within their individual tableaus. Katie doesn’t need to be a good person, but we do all need to be on the same page about who and what she is. To do otherwise would be to trigger dissonance that transcends space and time.
Which is what happened to me when I saw her wearing that shirt and I had the horrifying realization that Katie, a bad person, wants us to think she’s a good person. Thankfully I have the gift of hindsight, so I was able to see this image and hold fast to my belief that just because Katie now wants us to look at her as a feminist does not negate any of the horrible things she’d done to other women.
However, this didn’t exactly hold true for the majority of the audience.
Season seven of Vanderpump Rules is the beginning of the end as far as the original formula of the show goes, and it passes as only just barely watchable. The cast is too savvy about hiding things from the camera, the storylines are getting too produced, and the central drama of the season revolves around the majority of the cast refusing to film with James Kennedy after he bodyshamed Katie. An unforgivable act to be sure, but no more unforgivable than showing a coworkers sex tape, sleeping with your best friends ex-boyfriend, or cheating on your girlfriend while an elderly woman is dying in a bed in the corner of the room. And yet this transgression served as the primary motivator to the whole cast for the most part refusing to film with Kennedy (who up to this point had served as secondary antagonist of the show), and as a result the season was widely panned.
James Kennedy was a bad person then and has since become an even worse person than we even knew, but his initial cancellation coming on the heels of a slight against Katie was odd to me. Or, initially it was odd to me. Katie, for all intents and purposes, played her cards exactly right.
Up until this point Katie had been reviled due to her past behavior (watch season 5 to learn more), but she cunningly took note of the way the audience seemed more interested in the past seasons storylines of women supporting women. The female side of the cast had banded together the year prior to support Brittany Cartwright as she navigated Jax Taylor cheating on her, and the whole season had a somewhat feminist and sex-positive bend (more on that later) as the group of girls seemed to become closer than ever in spite of the foibles of their male costars. Katie being bodyshamed by James was not planned by production and nor was it an acceptable thing to do, but Katie was able to spin it in real time to draw a dividing line down the center of the cast using feminist talking-points such as gender equality and body positivity. These are two noble things, but they are not immune from manipulation by people in these types of situations in which you need to draw a clear distinction between Good Guys (woke feminist girlbosses) and Bad Guys (retrograde bodyshaming misogynists).
Her spin was successful, and it only further heightened her supposed girlboss narrative when she parlayed the bodyshaming into successfully getting James fired from being a DJ at SUR and proceeding to take his dedicated Tuesday night party and re-branding it as a Girls Night. Sigh. They all looked so lame in their little robes.
Not long after that came the shirt, and her rebranding of herself from bad mean asshole to feminist girlboss queen was complete. Thankfully Katie is lazy, and her attempts at taking the throne of the show was half-baked at best. She sold us a story, and we bought it.
Reality shows only work when the cast isn’t in on the joke. Vanderpump Rules became unwatchable when the cast started trying to present themselves as good people, and most current shows on the Bravo network suffer these days because the cast is over-exposed almost from the moment a show begins to air. We can blame Scandoval for this only partially, as far before that dark day in reality TV history the casts of these shows began to feel like they could control the narrative. They shouldn’t be able to, but we also shouldn’t let them. And we have.
The “voice of reason” as a character used to have a real narrative use on these shows (Ariana Madix was one, as was Bethenny Frankel in the early seasons of The Real Housewives of New York), because we the audience used to be able to watch these people behave like savages and recognize that what we’re getting is a heavy, gelatinous carapace over reality. Some time in the past five to seven years we, the viewer, have lost the plot regarding what we’re watching and what it means. We take for granted that much of what we’re seeing has been carefully choreographed, even though it’s common knowledge at least since 2018 that scenes on reality shows are often re-filmed and discussed with producers in advance to ensure that the seasons narrative is being effectively transmitted, and that producers themselves are not immune to their own biases against certain cast members. The information that came out regarding the editors of Vanderpump Rules purposefully giving Scheana Shay a poor edit because she was disliked by the crew at that time was shocking at first, but seems to have been hastily forgotten in the interim years.
We aren’t immune to propaganda, and especially not on television. And if this was merely a case of a small faction of fans stanning against their better judgment it would be one thing, but there appears to be a collective agreement amongst the fandom for certain shows that there are perpetual heroes and there are perpetual villains, and for the most part these run a gendered line. Which isn’t a bad thing, as men are badly behaved generally and on Bravo specifically, but it creates situations in which I hear the screeching dissonance of the “feminist” shirt coming close again.
With this framework, I’d like to talk about Paige DeSorbo and Craig Conover.
I’m doing a lot of prefacing, but I do want it to be known that I actually like Paige a lot. There are elements of her personality I don’t vibe with, but that applies to everybody on TV. Generally I think she’s very funny and has a good birds-eye view of things, but even she is not immune to the curse of not really owning her part in situations. She waits to confront people until reunions, she saves her feelings for confessionals, and yes, I do think she’s cliquey with Ciara and Amanda. But these aren’t bad things, they're just things she does on TV because she’s on a TV show. As with Katie, the issue seems to be how the audience is reacting to what Paige is giving them in the moment and not what we really have to work with.
So what is Paige giving us on this season of Summer House?
She announced on a December episode of her podcast Giggly Squad that she and her boyfriend of three years, Craig Conover of Bravo’s Southern Charm, had ended their relationship. There was no cheating, no nastiness, no nothing according to this initial statement, but that narrative didn’t linger too long. It has since turned quite, quite nasty on both of their parts. Craig is a liar. Paige led him on. Craig was jealous of her. Paige cheated on him, he cheated on her. These little scraps of nastiness flew by day after day, sometimes quickly refuted, sometimes chewed over like the fat off a steak.
Being a consumer of any reality show these days often feels like being a detective. We know so much about the people we’re watching, we know where they go to dinner, to party, sometimes we even know where they live. Some of this information comes from what they themselves are sharing with us on social media, and a lot of this comes from secondary sources that for one reason or another become trusted by the fandom. It isn’t normal to know this much about a person’s life, to be presented with the access that we have to a persons family, work, trauma, and friendships, but it’s normalized to the point now that we analyze what people are wearing in TikTok’s to try and guess where they are and when they were there.
I think in all likelihood this breakup goes both ways. On this season of Summer House we’re seeing a textbook presentation of a couple in the moments right before they’re going to break up: she wants him to support her business ventures and he’s concerned that her business ventures are going to undercut their relationship, he feels like he’s not able to be vulnerable around her and she feels like he holds to much back from her. What used to make them laugh now only conjures dead silences. A few episodes ago Paige made a joke about breaking up with him and you could see in both of their eyes they could see the gleam of the knife as it plunged closed and closer towards their shared heart.
People have primarily been on Paige’s side in this, which is obvious to those who know the genre. Nobody wants to stand on a side that has the cast of Southern Charm on it, least of all me. But there are layers to this drama. There always are.
Last season featured a breakup that was very much not textbook, even if the outline of its monstrous form seems familiar to those who know its patterns. Carl Radke and Lindsay Hubbard broke off their engagement mere months before their wedding after a summer in which they fought constantly, she accused him of relapsing, and the internet lost its collective mind. This breakup cast a long shadow over the current season, and no more apparent is this than within the fandom for the show itself. Because, reader, the dissonance between what we were seeing and what people chose to be angry about were not one and the same. Arguably, people were and are still way more angry that Carl chose to break up with Lindsay on camera than they are about the fact that Lindsay accused him of breaking his sobriety just to win a pointless argument, and personally that bothers me. Lindsay’s fans have always been way more unsettling to me than Lindsay herself, because Lindsay at least has displayed that she’s willing to apologize for her misdeeds, but this is a quality her fans don’t share. Everything she does is met with a chorus of “yes queen”, snaps, and a fair amount of shifting the blame, and this works in petty arguments but fails to hold much water when placed within the scale of a life-altering relationship breakdown.
One of the most famous - and polarizing - examples of this came towards the end of last season. Up to this point Carl had been struggling in figuring out where he wanted to place his energy in his career, and Lindsay had not had a lot of patience for it, which is her right. Carl, hitting the wall, breaks down and begs Lindsay to be “soft” with him, a choice of words that I’m certain haunts him to this day.
Perhaps it’s because I’m gay and women speaking to women is just different from the way in which women and men speak to each other, but if my wife asked me to be soft with her I don’t think I would take it the way that Lindsay seemed to. I would probably assume that there were some deeper emotions at play, as well as a fair amount of stress both from planning a career and planning a wedding and maintaining sobriety as well as dealing with constantly fighting with the person that you’re supposed to feel most comfortable with.
But that’s just me, and this is definitely not how Lindsay took it. She accused him of wanting a Stepford Wife (ugh), forcing her to conform to a gendered standard she didn’t agree with, and basically not really wanting to be with her at all if that’s what he needed from a partner. The mental gymnastics one would need to clear in order to hear an earnest request from your partner about the way in which they’d like to be treated and translate it as gaslighting is Olympian, but Lindsay was able to do it and she stuck the landing hard. And her fans backed her up all the way, because it’s not right for a man to tell a woman to change.
The gender dynamics in heterosexual relationships are endlessly fascinating to me, and the Bravo fanbase has served as a sort of petri dish. Because at its face, I do agree a man shouldn’t tell a woman she needs to change in order for the relationship to continue, and the same goes for a woman to a man. If you want to change each other maybe you should not be with each other at all, and should instead just find somebody who is closer to what you want. But where does gender take a backseat to the things you are allowed to request of your partner? A woman can ask a male partner for support emotionally because women are socialized to be more outward with their emotions, but it’s a lot harder for men to be emotionally available with their partners and thus harder for them to ask for the help they need. It isn’t a “poor men” issue, it’s an issue of having an equal partnership. And ideally, you shouldn’t be asking your partner for something that you aren’t willing to provide for them.
I bring this up because in this same season there was a parallel scene between Paige and Craig that - at least at the time - nobody thought much of but stuck in my mind hard and fast. At this point I was already fairly certain they weren’t meant to last because they had been together for a while but he still lived in Charleston and she still lived in New York, and neither one of them seemed to have any plans to move for the other one (Paige literally burst into tears at the thought of moving to Charleston). This on its own would have been an issue, but there proceeded a scene of them having a picnic by the river in which they began talking lightheartedly about some of their recent stumbling blocks. Craig had been emotional of late, and somewhat self-consciously laughed: “I guess I don’t want to be a pussy”, to which Paige replied, stone-faced: “yeah, I don’t want you to be one either.”
The fans were silent on this scene, and yet in the full picture of the season the two of them go hand in hand for me on what’s wrong with heterosexuals on Bravo. A man asks for his partner to be tender with him and is hence dubbed a misogynist, but a woman tells her partner she doesn’t like him when he’s vulnerable and it’s simply taken as a given. Women on Bravo (and generally) seem to walk a fine line between wanting men to be completely evolved creatures that support them unquestionably, but who are also traditionally masculine men. It’s a nice thought, but I don’t know how realistic it is.
Straight women, do you like men? Like, literally, do you like them or are you pretending? Subscribe and lmk.
There had been a few instances before this where Craig had been outwardly emotional and Paige had either brushed him off or explicitly told him to get over it (him crying over missing his mother’s birthday “gave her the ick”). Whether she was right or wrong is less to me than the overall takeaway that Paige’s values within her relationships have always followed this same traditionally gendered line: men should be stoic, strong, direct, and women can do whatever they want. This is the impression because despite this tendency to rely on tradition in her romantic relationships Paige herself is modern in her views on women. She has a successful business that she takes very seriously and a career modelling that she treats professionally, she’s informed in what she says and stands in her convictions, she supports her female friends with all she has and even comes out to defend the women that historically she’s had issues with (like Lindsay). There’s a lot to like about Paige, and yet her relationships continue to stay stuck in these harmful patterns in which men have to be one way and are worthy of derision if they can’t meet that standard.
But this isn’t a problem for the fandom, who primarily react to men and women like cavemen. Men are all sloppy underachievers in desperate need of a revamp, and women are slay girlboss queens until they’re involved in cheating scandals in which case they’re dirty whores. Because, truly, cheating is worse than murder on Bravo. There are people who have already forgiven Jen Shah, Erika Girardi, and Shannon Storms Beador for endangering the lives of humans, animals, and defrauding burn victims and the elderly, and yet will be harassing Tom Sandoval until the day that he dies.
Women on these shows are a tender thing, as the origins of Bravo as a network are shades of gray. The first original programming Bravo produced didn’t hit gold until The Real Housewives of Orange County, and even then it was mainly an excuse to laugh at the female stars. It was a year before the recession and we were already more than willing to laugh at the tackiness of the rich, their petty dramas, their lack of warmth and depth. Make no mistake, Bravo only became popular through misogyny, because of a horde of people that wanted to laugh at these women and their troubles and their passions. Some of it was funny, but some of it was only funny when seen through a funhouse mirror. And it bears acknowledging, just because it started this way doesn’t mean that Bravo has not also produced authentic moments of female empowerment, or facilitated hard but necessary conversations not just from their casts but from their fans, or showcased women supporting one another in the face of immense struggle and trauma. There’s nuance to everything, and it stands to reason that some of the fan reaction is an explicit act of defiance against the misogynistic origins of the network.
Fans of these shows love these women, and they love nothing more than women supporting women on shows that historically have centered women being adversarial to one another. The Taylor Swift 2015 brand of “feminism equals friendship!” can only be blamed so much for this tendency in the female audience to lean on terms like “girl’s girl”, to side-eye female characters who lean more into hanging out with their male castmates (Lindsay was a victim of this for a long time). As such, the Bravo fanbase and its relationship to women on these shows is a complicated one, and moreso in recent years it has become the norm to characterize the values of reality stars along a feminist or social justice line in order to distinguish them as separate from their more badly behaved co-stars. Look at Ariana Madix in the wake of Scandoval, who had every quasi-feminist quote she ever uttered turned into a quippy mug, or - indeed - Katie Maloney’s shirt. If the fanbase likes a women it gets deemed an act of feminism. Nay, an act of female bravery.
The only real roadblock to that line of thinking is who it’s coming from. There were seasons where Ariana wasn’t as liked and her feminist leanings were deemed nagging, and there have been many characters across the network who were too ambitious in what they were attempting to do within the confines of an already established show (Eboni from The Real Housewives of New York is a good example of this). But the audience has consistently liked Paige for a very long time, and she only grew in the esteem of the fanbase after Lindsay and Carl’s breakup. She’s confident but doesn’t put too much out there, and in truth a lot of her true feelings are held very close to her chest until such a time where they can be valuable to her. She’s infamous for waiting to bring up issues until reunions, and at those reunions as well as her confessionals there are moments where she’s clearly rehearsed what she wants to say for maximum impact. Because of this it can be hard to say exactly where Paige lands on anything, and especially so in matters of feminism and social justice. It isn’t a prerequisite to be “woke” to be seen as the face of the Bravo girlboss, but it undercuts a fair amount of her self-proclaimed empowerment to know that she liked some of Ivanka Trump’s posts and that despite craving independence she cannot seem to stay out of relationships.
Whatever feminist thought that Paige appears to exhibit seems to be primarily class-based, as opposed to any real striving for the rise of intersectional feminism. The average feminist would hopefully take it as a given that all women are inherently equal regardless of their proximity to wealth and power and as such are deserving of the same privileges and rights as anybody else, but the modern girlboss feminist has a different take. Indeed, it appears as though a certain subsect of women who preach about empowerment learned everything they currently know about being equal to men from Ariana Grande lyrics.
This new interpretation of feminist thought places importance on monetary equality over anything else, as though we have successfully eradicated misogyny by becoming rich. Effectively this tells women that they can only be recognized as equals if they manage to reach an upper echelon of wealth that for most is never going to be accessible, but the aesthetics of this ideal are doubtlessly attractive to those for whom this lifestyle doesn’t seem impossible to attain. And make no mistake, Paige certainly comes from a world in which this lifestyle would not only appear attainable but would be very easily within reach if she worked just a little harder than the average model. This attitude explains certain things away entirely, such as her backhanded threat to Kyle Cooke that he was lucky she didn’t buy his company and sell it, as well as her belief that Craig should prioritize moving to her place of residence because she is “the breadwinner”. For women who see money as the arbiter of equality it stands to reason that they would continue to see things along a gendered line, since they don’t seem to integrate any other serious feminist theory into their thought process, and that this tension would cause understandable hardship in relationships with men. You now have your bag, you have your hustle, you have your man, but you can’t be happy about any of it in a way that feels authentic to you because money is not actually an equalizer between genders. Men will always have an advantage, and unless you integrate actual feminist theory into your dealings with them this is not going to stop pissing you off.
I do not envy straight women this task. It seems rough, and I mean that sincerely.
And yet.
The women of Bravo have always prioritized financial dominance in place of any actual change or attempt at equality, because in all likelihood the majority of them look down on feminists as “man-haters”. This is why younger casts are more exciting, as they actually trudged through the waters of female empowerment, but even this misses the real point of why women should be empowered at all. To them women should be equal to men because girls just want to have fun and make that money the same way as men, but it stops just short of any political implications. It’s safer that way, and it allows them to wriggle sideways out of any relationship to actual activism on behalf of gender equality by centering their brand of feminism to instead be about empty catchphrases like “supporting women” or being a “girl’s girl”. The last time anybody watching Bravo heard someone refer to themselves as a feminist would probably be Lala Kent, who espoused “new-age feminism” that boiled down to asserting that women should be able to suck dick for a Range Rover and not be called names about it because it hurts her feelings. And, yes, that is a mean thing to do to somebody, but it also is not the cornerstone of a movement. And thinking this way certainly never stopped Lala from calling women bitches and whores when she didn’t like them.
We have allowed these people to pull a joke on us. We let them look through the TV at us and tell us that they were good, principled, feminist people, and the unfortunate thing is that a lot of people believed them. I don’t know why or how, but they did and they do. They are now taking this situation in which two adults broke up because they wanted different things and they’re making it into an effigy for the plight of the girlboss. The girlboss who preaches the hustle but loves bed-rotting, who doesn’t meaningfully support equality but decries her lack of support as misogyny, and digests the criticisms of her relationship by her partner as simply him being threatened by her success.
This is why Katie Maloney’s shirt managed to fill me with so much dread, as this particular shade of feminist discourse is a swamp through which we all need to wade now. And I’m tired of watching a horde of bozo’s miss the point of something I spent thousands of dollars learning on a college campus in the middle of nowhere next to a cemetery. Maybe instead of buying bags, or whatever, some of these people could shell out for a night class at DeVry and figure out what exactly it is that they’re trying to say.
The girlboss as we now recognize her is as toothless as a splat of pink jello. She stands for nothing but her own success, and her perceived success is just the endless fight for more money under a capitalistic system. She has no political beliefs beyond the belief that she has the right to whatever she wants, and if you don’t support her right to have whatever she wants then you don’t support women. And if you don’t support women you mind as well be storming the capital, girlfriend, am I right my queens?
