Late additions to Real Housewives casts seem to follow one of two models. First, there are the Brandi Glanville/Aviva Drescher types, i.e. housewives who are so spectacularly, pathologically polarizing and crazy that you don’t know how the show ever managed without them (until, inevitably, they are fired because there’s only so many borderline personality traits that even Andy Cohen can tolerate). Otherwise, there are the housewives who stand around awkwardly for a season or two being generally reasonable and storyline-free until they are kicked to the curb in favor of some freshly steaming mess of a human.
Jules Wainstein, the newest Real Housewife of New York, seemed at first to adhere more or less to the latter model. In her debut, she seemed notable mainly for her aversion to conflict, her mixed Jewish and Japanese heritage (complete with kashrut freakouts after mistakenly handling shellfish that even the Orthodox might have found frankly a little overplayed), and her extreme thinness, which she later wrenchingly explained to a sympathetic Bethenny Frankel as a lingering result of a battle with anorexia. In other words, Wainstein seemed nice enough. While she looked appropriately wounded, she was never quite adequately enraged when insulted to her face about her Hamptons house and her parenting style to generate the kind of multi-season conflict and score-keeping that a long-term Bravo contract requires. In other words, shalom Jules, or should I say, sayonara?
But all this went topsy-turvy with the recent news that Jules and her husband, vague financial success-story Michael Wainstein, are suddenly splitting up in what Vulture is calling “the most insane Real Housewives divorce of all time.” To make a long story short, Michael filed for divorce, Jules retaliated by revealing his affair with her close friend and claiming he created a home environment in which she did not feel safe. Her husband’s attorney pooh-poohed the allegations, claiming that no infidelity occurred, that Jules has had a history of making baseless complaints to the police against Michael, and that, in fact, if any abuse or physical feeling of insecurity occurred, it was Jules who was the perpetrator: “In the winter of 2012, Jules brutally and viciously assaulted her diminutive yet brave husband.”
Wow. Diminutive and brave. It’s pretty much they way you’d describe Frodo Baggins, or a Pomeranian who scared a predatory flock of pigeons away from the baby’s stroller at the zoo. I don’t want to think about the headspace of a man who would allow his paid representative to issue such a statement on his behalf but… It’s fair to say that any other permutation of Wainstein nannies, personal assistants, or personal assistants to nannies in the future are going to have a hard time expunging that particular phrase from their brains when they’re trying to decide whether they can bring themselves to have sex with him. (I’d also direct them towards his various condescending comments towards his wife and her ambitions to be something other than obliging arm candy, which would be enough for me.)
And as for all the other allegations, I mean, I tend to believe everything prurient I hear about celebrities simply because life is more fun that way, but nobody really knows what goes on in anybody’s marriage. Rather, I see Jules Wainstein as a kind of cautionary tale, a victim to the subliminal (if not overt) messaging that so many well-off Jewish girls in certain affluent suburban towns still internalize, even in this post-feminist era: be pretty, be thin, meet a nice Jewish boy who, even if he isn’t so good looking or exciting, will make a lot of money and take care of you so much so that you’ll never need to worry about anything again and your life will be perfect. Basically, a notion that could encourage a 23-year-old girl to make the kind of life concessions that seem reasonable to a woman in her mid-to-late 50s who has decided that safety and material comfort are the only things that really matter in life.
They aren’t, so let’s stop communicating that message to our girls, however subtly and unconsciously. It may be just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor man, as the old saying goes, but the poor one probably won’t undermine and embarrass you on national television. And he might even be a little taller.
Rachel Shukert is the author of the memoirs Have You No Shame? and Everything Is Going To Be Great,and the novel Starstruck. She is the creator of the Netflix show The Baby-Sitters Club, and a writer on such series as GLOW and Supergirl. Her Twitter feed is @rachelshukert.