How Real Housewives Invaded CongressPolitical consultant/producer Andy Cohen has glamorized the cat fight - a step down from Clare Boothe Luce's The Women.By Armond White
Considering the reality-TV show that the U.S. Congress has become, last week's congressional melee between Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Jasmine Crockett can be traced to one cultural force: TV producer Andy Cohen. Cohen's world-renowned Real Housewives cable-TV series has altered the public role of women, as was proven by the fracas that began when Greene asked whether any Democrats on the Oversight Committee are employing Loren Merchan, daughter of Judge Juan Merchan, who is tyrannizing the court in the current Trump case in Manhattan.
The ruckus was not like TV's Jerry Springer Show, as Senator John Fetterman cluelessly snarked. It began with a political provocation equivalent to asking, "Who was your husband seen with?" The meeting shifted to evasions and personal insults that were decidedly more catty than parliamentary. It brought out a strain of feminine pique first unleashed when former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi dramatically, in full view of the cameras, ripped up a copy of President Trump's State of the Union address immediately after he delivered it.
Such gloves-off vitriol is characteristic of the sides-taking outbursts that have become standard under Pelosi. They parallel the melodrama that made a millionaire of 55-year-old Cohen, a leftist TV phenomenon who claims he was inspired by "strong, powerful women who dressed well with big hair." (Pelosi's stunt rivaled felon Teresa Giudice flipping over a restaurant table in Real Housewives of New Jersey.) He boasted to the New Yorker that his Real Housewives series offered a "great feminist tableau."
Cohen belongs to the line of popular feminist mountebanks - right behind Frida Kahlo, Gloria Steinem, and Madonna - who reshaped the way women express their anger. As the entrepreneur and executive producer behind Bravo network's Real Housewives franchise, which began in 2006, Cohen has limited the view of women's lives to brunch and shopping, concentrating on gaudy finery and petty jealousies. This form of narcissism relates to political selfishness. Cohen has normalized the catfight.
Cohen's franchise is now a global phenomenon: The Real Housewives shows span Orange County, New York City, New Jersey, Atlanta, D.C.,
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