I started watching Vanderpump Rules (primer linked) in January 2022 because of my former best friend, and when we stopped being friends, I stopped watching due to the circumstances of that termination (which could very much have been a Vanderpump Rules storyline in which I was completely right, just like Stassi Schroeder before me). However, earlier this year, in the wake of Scandoval (wherein one of the mains since season 1, Tom Sandoval, cheated on his longtime girlfriend, Ariana Madix, with their good friend, Raquel “Rachel” Leviss), I got back into it, got my new and dear friend into it, and I’m now almost done with season 7.
I’ve just been thinking a lot about like life and human behavior in the context of this show, so I thought I’d get my thoughts down in a newsletter.
Something very interesting is the way Stassi Schroeder is portrayed pathologized in seasons 1 and 2 of the show. For one thing, the show seems to frame her as the worst person ever for being cold to Scheana when Scheana starts working Sur when Scheana’s introduction on the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, of which Vanderpump Rules is a spinoff, is Brandy Glanville’s husband’s longterm mistress! That is, Scheana had an affair with a married man for 3 years, claiming she had no idea Eddie Cibrian was married when she 100% knew, and it was deemed “unfair” and uncalled for that Stassi judged her for it. I’m sorry but while of course the married man is more to blame, I’m not going to let the woman who knowingly sleeps with him off the hook, and it’s complete bullshit and fake feminism to expect anybody else to do so.
Moreover, in season 1, Stassi is convinced that her then-boyfriend, Jax Taylor, cheated on her, and in season 2, she’s convinced that her best friend, Kristen Doute slept with Jax, and she spends most of those seasons being called insane for even suggesting those things are true. But, the thing is, as all her friends keep on telling her she’s jumping to conclusions and her anger is uncalled for and even borderline delusional, she’s 100% correct, and the truth eventually comes out. I sometimes joke that I’m psychic (see: erstwhile friendship termination IYKYK) so this is very #relatable to me. I sometimes think about this profile of Jax Taylor and I’m like, HUH:
But as his ex, Schroeder felt the more poisonous end of Taylor’s impulsivity and untruth. Throughout the first season, she tried in vain to convince her and Taylor’s mutual friends that he’d impregnated a woman in Vegas. Though he actually had, Taylor gaslit Schroeder, persuading everyone that she was delusional. When Schroeder’s new boyfriend Frank Herlihy came forward as a witness of Taylor’s duplicity, the move backfired, swaying friends and viewers alike to see Schroder’s rebound as sleazy and untrustworthy. “When someone’s a really great liar, you believe everything. He would cry, he would literally cry. So how could you not believe a grown man who is crying?” she says. “Even my truth isn’t as good as his lie.”
I really think there’s something to be said for the fact that the Witches of WeHo (Stassi, Kristen, and Katie Maloney) get perceived as heinously cruel for saying (or even thinking) mean things, while other people do bad things and still have the gall to claim the higher moral ground which like, that’s complete bullshit. Like, Tom(s) and Jax cheat on every partner they have and get into physical fights every season; the only reason James Kennedy is on the show and is (allegedly) a “fan favorite” despite being extremely dull is because people LOVE watching men treat women badly without facing any consequences for it! But like, god forbid Katie and Stassi are ~mean when they’re wronged by people who claim to love them. Kristen, who cheats on her then boyfriend Tom Sandoval with his best friend (and her best friend Stassi’s ex) Jax, actually faces consequences for her actions. She’s slapped across the face by Stassi and is frozen out of the group for YEARS while Jax is instantly forgiven by Tom and their entire circle!
And predictably, I’ve always related to this phenomenon! I’m not actually meaner than the majority of people, and in fact I’m probably slightly nicer than most people, but I think I’m often perceived as meaner than I am because I’m very capable of being extremely mean even if I rarely employ the worst of my abilities, and I’m pretty sure people can tell I hold myself back like 97% of the time. Look at it like this: If we graphed Behavior vs. Perception of Behavior vs. Capability of Cruelty on a xyz-plane, from 0(very mean)≤ x≤ 10(very nice), 0(perceived as very mean)≤ y≤ 10(perceived as very nice), 0(incapable of cruelty)≤ z≤ 10(very capable of cruelty), I would say that most people are in the general neighborhood of like, (6,7,3) but I’m more of a (7,4,8).
At one point in season 6, Stassi’s like, “We live in this world where all of us women get shamed for calling things out, for actually bringing attention to it, and then we take it back,” and she’s right, in the way she means it but also in the sense that adulthood means taking ownership of your wrongdoing and a whole lot of adults, on and off this show, are fundamentally incapable of this. Holistically speaking, whenever you do something, right or wrong, you should own it! When you fuck up, do NOT claim that your actions were actually justified on some technicality or that other people hurting your feelings made you act like that’s just pathetic and immature. Your and my and everybody else’s feelings are fake, and words are wind, but our actions are real, and have material repercussions on other people.
The thing is, even though they’re all pushing 40 at this time, that is and always has been the mentality of the men of Vanderpump Rules. They claim they didn’t have control over their actions, whether that be infidelity or recklessness or out-of-control drunken antics, and that their wives/girlfriends spurred them do it by yelling or being mean/passive-aggressive or maintain that they were so drunk they simply don’t remember what they did, and they NEVER take ownership of their wrongdoing. In other words, they profoundly lack self-respect in the Didion sense.
As Joan Didion herself wrote in “On Self-Respect,”
“Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named correspondent.
In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and with United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for re-election. Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.”
When Jax first starts dating Brittany and continues acting like the exact same person he’s always been despite his claims to the contrary, Ariana says something that stayed with me: “These aren’t mistakes anymore, they’re pointed, choices. This is a pattern, a personality, this is who this person is.” The thing is, in the words of Hillary Rodham Clinton, we all have to live with the consequences of our decisions. When you continue ongoing patterns of behavior that impact others in negative ways, no matter how charming or handsome or manipulative you are, no matter how much they love you at your best, people will eventually hold you accountable for your actions, and they have every right to do it.
In March 2023, it was revealed that Tom, a Vanderpump main since season 1, had cheated on his long-term girlfriend, Ariana with another cast member, Raquel Leviss who Ariana was very close to. For the last few seasons, Tom and Ariana have had some hiccups here and there; Lala and Ariana hooking up in the backseat of a car when Tom was driving comes to mind as do their periodic arguments over next steps to take in their relationship (We argue in the kitchen about whether to have children etc.), but for the most part they seemed pretty solid, or at least as solid as one can get on a Bravo reality show.
Now, we can talk about the abject cruelty of cheating on your long-term partner with her close friend, literally in the house you both share, but also, how STUPID can you get? I’m not a cheater, and never have been and never will be, but I’m a very logical person, and I know that if I was cheating, I would do a MUCH better job of it than Tom Sandoval, and I don’t even have his experience in the act. My hypothesis is that he wanted to be found out, by Ariana and maybe the world at large because all attention is good attention right? Needless to say, this backfired on him personally and professionally, which he completely deserves.
Holistically speaking, I think there’s a real arrested development phenomenon happening on Vanderpump Rules. I’m several years younger younger than Jax was during the first season of the show, and you couldn’t pay me to act like he did in private let alone publicly. The crux of the show’s appeal is that these people in their 20s and 30s are simply put, irredeemably messy, and have no conception of “You don’t need to act on every feeling you have,” which the rest of us learned as teenagers. It’s a kind of unique and sordid spectacle, and I for one am curious to see what happens next.