This week on our favorite show, Rich Women Doing Things, the rich women did things. They took their friend to a self-defense class at a dojo in the Valley and it was somehow not Cobra Kai, which seems like a miss. They all had Thanksgiving gatherings and helped feed the poor, which means that the poor producers and camera crews had to miss out on being with their families so that they could get 30 seconds of footage for the episodes. (Maybe the crew is Jewish and doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving. Wait, that’s Christmas. Nevermind.) They held a party at their new house that is still under construction and made them all sit outside in the mud — but to make it better, they handed out fur coats to each of the attendees like party favors. Oh, the rich.
But mostly what the women did this week was do shit we had already seen. This week on Housewives Twitter has been a bear, and it’s starting to become a familiar pattern. Bravo releases some “Sneak Peek†clips onto social media. We dutifully watch them all. Then the fans get worked up into a tizzy about how awful the women are and parade their moral superiority through the virtual streets like they’re Lady Godiva, a woman who smothered herself in chocolate and found herself in every mall in America.
This week, the clip they showed was Kyle telling Sutton that her miscarriages weren’t real and that she had never seen them before. There was also the clip of Erika telling Garcelle’s 14-year-old son to “fuck off.†There was also the clip of Kyle saying that Erika saying that was “not funny, but it’s funny.†Twitter started popping off, saying this was Kyle’s downfall, that we’ve finally seen her be a dark person, and that she was being “canceled.†Some even accused her of giving Sutton the bruise she had on her shoulder when she pushed her. (It was there when she and Diana sat down; I went back and checked.)
I’m not trying to say that these things are right or good. In fact, most of them are pretty bad. But we here at the Housewives Institute would like to urge all our members not to take Bravo’s bait. They know what they’re doing, and that’s getting us all riled up so that we watch the episode. But remember, what we’re seeing is taken out of context and an isolated moment. Like a Tucker Carlson segment about the war on Christmas, it is edited to illicit maximum outrage. Take Kyle telling Sutton that she “never heard of†her two miscarriages before and insinuating that they weren’t real. This is, of course, bad. Why would Kyle have heard this? Why would anyone? And why is Kyle taking Diana’s side in a fight when she was clearly in the wrong?
The easy explanation is that Kyle was drunk and shouldn’t insert herself into the drama not knowing what was fully going on. Now, if we had all waited to watch the episode, we would have seen that Kyle had dinner with Sutton immediately after and apologized both for getting involved in a fight that wasn’t hers and for making those insinuations about Sutton’s miscarriages. She engaged in bad behavior, but none of you should be surprised by this. She is a Real Housewife, not a UNICEF ambassador. Being an asshole is the third qualification for the job after owning those earrings that read CHA and NEL on each lobe and the willingness to have vaginal rejuvenation on camera. She then realized her mistake and immediately apologized. Sutton forgave her; everyone moved on.
I’m just saying we shouldn’t jump to conclusions. For instance, what Erika said to Jax was horrible. He’s just a 14-year-old kid at his mom’s birthday party. Erika was also drunk, but that’s no excuse. That would be embarrassing if she told an adult to “fuck off,†but that she did it to a kid is even worse. What the clip didn’t show was her relentless pursuit of Garcelle’s older son, Oliver, going so far as saying that she would have a threesome with him and his wife. Everyone loves to flirt, especially when they’re drunk, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but continuing to proposition someone who is not interested makes her look like an evil version of some Jennifer Coolidge character. That was the worst part, and we hadn’t even seen it yet.
So, yes, Erika was drunk, she tried to pull off a joke with a kid, and it didn’t work. Not cool. Now that we’ve watched the full episode, we also see she thought he was older than he is, and when Crystal corrected her, she knew she fucked up. I wished that as soon as she arrived at Sutton’s mud-pie party, she had gone up to Garcelle and said, “I heard I said something rude to your son, and I’m sorry.†Instead, she’s going to wait for Garcelle to bring it up, she’s going to be drunk again, and it’s going to be horrible. (P.S. I am loving Sheree, and I will be making a “Here is to setting a bitch straight†GIF for all of us.)
As for the last clip of Kyle and Mauricio laughing about what Erika said to Jax, that’s also not great. (Some on Twitter were telling Netflix they should cancel Mo’s upcoming show because of it.) As Kyle said in her Instagram apology, she just heard about it in the context of all the funny things Erika said when she was drunk. I could see how someone else could retell this story so it didn’t seem that bad. Even when she’s talking about it, she says, “It’s not funny, but it’s funny,†so she knows it wasn’t great, but maybe didn’t know it was as bad as it was.
Now that we’ve seen the whole episode, Dorit’s reaction to her surprised me. She’s also laughing, but Dorit was there. She heard Erika’s tone. She even told her at the moment that it wasn’t cool. Why are we not all piling on Dorit for laughing at it with full knowledge of how the moment went down and its implications?
What I’m trying to say, for the TL;DR crowd, is that I want you all to have your opinions. I want us all to be passionate and argue about these things and vilify these women so that we can deify them a season later. That’s one of the things I love most about this fandom. But can we please just wait until the episode has aired before we start canceling people’s Netflix shows?
We should be talking about something that united all RHOBH fans last week, which is how much we all hate Diana. She’s so smug and smarmy and totally a motherfucker and soulless, just like Sutton said she was. She makes it even worse when recounting the story for Rinna, saying that when Diana talked about her one miscarriage, Sutton tried to “raise you two miscarriages,†like it was a poker game. Sutton can be harder to read than a teenager’s cracked phone screen, but how did she walk away from that conversation thinking Sutton was trying to do anything but empathize with her?
Then she doesn’t show up to Sutton’s party and didn’t even send her a text to tell her she was sick? Classless. I love how she’s on the phone like, “Oh, when the doctor gives you bed rest, maybe you actually need it,†an episode after she was like, “Fuck bed rest, I’m going to that party.†If Sutton is the bacon-eating vegetarian that she is so obsessed about, then Diana is the partying bed-rester, like she’s the grandfather from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and just got out of her shared full-size for the first time in three decades.
Or maybe we should be talking about Teddi Cougar Mellencamp, who keeps inserting her brand new neck into the show even though she’s been fired. She’s like the new Brandi Glanville, but you don’t even have to say her name three times; she just appears at any event Kyle throws. I have two questions: Why is she always around and what did she do with Faye Resnick’s body? Is she in the same place as Glenn the party planner who hasn’t been seen in seasons?
If we’re looking for more things to unify us, can’t we all rally around the fact that Lisa can’t think her mother is every bird. She sits down at Diana’s and says her mother is a hummingbird. Okay, but in Mexico, she was clearly something else. Look, I’m sorry, but she can’t be all birds. You can pick a robin, a blue jay, a cardinal, a seagull, a bearded tit, a corn bunting, a grasshopper warbler, a honey buzzard. You can have a hoopoe, a jack snipe, a barn owl, a magpie, a razorbill, a grouse. Heck, you can even have a winnigig, which is a bird that I just made up and it floats overhead like the whisps of your dreams, like the flyaway strings on a hem of a dress you’ve worn too many times. The winnigig is not ugly or fair, it is not big or small, it just is, and it is always with you like a smell or a house you once visited as a child or the soft, soft hands touching your face when you were ill. We should all have the winnigig, and we should love it because when it calls you will never hear it, but you will feel it in every hair, in every cell, in every atom as they all hum together as the flesh sac that is you.