I don’t care that no one else cares! I am going to write a post for my own satisfaction about the Vanderpump Rules drama, and then loosely tie it in to universal social ideas, Indian film, and hating Ranbir Kapoor (all our favorite things).
I’ve been listening to a lot of “love con” podcasts, and in general this seems like a crime that is a bigger issue today. Or, is happening in a new and different way that makes it more obvious once your eyes are opened to it. Relationships playing out constantly on the record in today’s world, from texts to dating websites to phones that can record EVERYTHING, so it no longer becomes “he said she said” in terms of stolen money, false promises, etc. etc. It becomes “he said, she has documentation and becomes part of a podcast”.
(This guy conned Lana Turner!!! No one believed her back then so she just didn’t talk about it, but now there is a podcast)
In Olden Times, there was a legal concept of “breach of promise” which was a way of prosecuting Love Scams. If a gentleman wrote you a letter promising marriage and a future together, you could sue him if he didn’t follow through. Kind of odd way of going about it, but also kind of makes sense. In the past, among the part of society that could afford lawsuits, a promise of marriage could result in a lot of profit for a scammer and expense for the victim. The victim might have loaned money or asked relatives to loan money, may have spent their own money on items for their future home, may have moved towns or quit jobs or otherwise upended their life for a marriage that was never going to happen.
This whole concept seems to have faded away around the time that “letters” became less common, way harder to sue for breach of promise based on something someone told you on the telephone. And at the same time, relationships became a lot more free and easy, you didn’t have to leap to a proposal just to get a loan from a woman. And that was BAD. All of a sudden it became just sort of accepted that a man might pretend to be in love with a woman in order to gain an advantage. Sometimes sexual favors, but sometimes money, career advantages, all kinds of things. If he did and succeeded (say, flirted with the boss’s daughter until he got the promotion, then ghosted her), more power to him, that was smart and a good way to get ahead. If he did and failed (flirted with the boss’s daughter for a promotion, but she learned he was secretly married all along and broke up with him), no harm no foul, most of the time she’d be too embarrassed to tell anyone she was fooled and wouldn’t be believed anyway.
But now we have documentation again!!! Yaaaaaay! And there seem to be an awful awful lot of men out there taking advantage of women by pretending to be in love with them. I think this is a gender dynamic thing, and I don’t think it’s because of how women are trained to be submissive and tolerant and forgiving. I think it’s because men are trained to expect to be forgiven, to be able to get away with whatever they want, and that their needs and wants are more important than anyone else’s. In some of these stories it doesn’t even seem like the man started it as a “fraud”, he just reached a point where he decided his own needs were more important and made himself fall out of love with his latest victim.
Now, Vanderpump Rules! This is a total trash reality TV show. It started out following this close group of friends who all dated each other and worked together at the same restaurant. They were aspiring models and actors and musicians, very young, drunk most of the time, with horrible judgement, and chaotic lives. Oh, and no concern about trying to keep things from the camera, no posing, we got to go alllllllll the way in and see alllllll the mess.
It’s been on for 10 years now and this trash group of young dumb people has grown up (sort of). The biggest symbol of that was the couple Tom and Ariana. They got together in season 3 and have been together ever since. They never cheated on each other, they never had nasty fights, they had a lot of mature conversations and declarations of love and just sort of sane cuteness. And a few weeks ago it came out that Tom had been having an affair for at least 7 months with one of their closest friends, a much younger woman who Tom and Ariana had sort of mentored, even had her stay at their house for a bit after she broke up with her boyfriend.
This is hitting the Vanderpump Rules watchers community hard and even reverberating outside and I think there a lot of interesting reasons why this is. First, it makes you go back and watch all 10 seasons with new eyes. Not just that Tom is suddenly revealed as scum, but that all the men are. And, conversely, none of the women. They were positioned as this group of equally messy people. But Ariana has been a fan favorite from the start, never quite as messy as everyone else, something better than that. Now that we know she is with a horrible person, suddenly it makes you think about the other women on the show and if their messy behavior comes from the same place, crazy making relationships with con artist men. And it makes you wonder why we were sold a story of “crazy men and crazy women” instead of “bad men making women crazy”.
This is reality TV, and it is their real lives, but it’s also edited and the editing is where the story is told. From the start, the men of this show got the “hero” edit and the women got the “crazy” edit. We saw the men be charming, be at their jobs, have talking heads explaining their emotions. We saw the women accuse them of cheating, have emotional meltdowns all over the place, yell and scream and make a fuss while the man was calm. If you step back from the edit and look at the facts, you realize the women on the show tended to have more stable work and financial lives than the men, tended to give more and be more loyal to the relationships than the men, and on the other hand the men were LYING THE WHOLE TIME!!! They convinced the women they were crazy, and the makers of the show went along with that.
This is another case where we have excessive documentation. It’s not just the show itself, these are reality people, so they all have podcasts and instagram and “vlogs” and lots of other ways of presenting themselves to the world. With new eyes, all of a sudden long time viewers are digging through alllllllllllllll this stuff going “whoa, it was always there right in front of us and we just didn’t see”. Why didn’t we see?
Well, let’s go back to Ladies vs Ricky Bahl. This is a fun conman movie about a guy who courts and gets engaged to rich women in order to get their money, and then they all band together to take them down. I’m not even gonna say it is an unethical movie, taken by itself, our hero has lots of justification for his actions and never REALLY hurts anyone and so on and so forth. But the idea is still that his special skill is “love conning” women. And that is, well, “normal”. Like, something every man would do if they could. Bachne Ae Haseeno goes even further on this idea, Ranbir truly destroys these women by pretending to love them and then abandoning them in the worst way possible. And sure, that’s fine, it’s what any boy would do.
I think the world has come a long way in the past few decades as relates to abusive relationships. Actual physical abuse is not tolerated at all in Western popular culture, you would not have jokes about a man hitting his wife EVER. And Indian pop culture is getting there as well, we’ve even got movies like Thappad now. But I feel like we sort of have to go back to go forward in terms of gaslighting and love scams and cheating and all that other kind of behavior. There’s a balance between “women are strong and independent now and it’s not the end of their life if a man loves and leaves them” and “women are fragile creatures and a false promise will destroy them”. Somewhere along the lines of “yes, my whole life isn’t destroyed, but part of it is, and that part has value, and it is wrong for you to twist me around like this”.
I’ve heard this kind of behavior described as “toxic men” or “narcassistic” or “love scammers”, but it all seems to get down to someone who just sucks the life out of you. He doesn’t beat you, he doesn’t yell at you, but he gets you so turned around with confusing stories, he makes you feel so small when he cheats on you, and he constantly demands your emotional support, breaks in to every part of your life. But he doesn’t do anything “wrong”. He cheats, but he asks for forgiveness and won’t do it again. He says one thing one day and something else the next but maybe you just aren’t remembering right. And if he is really sadder than you, than of course you should put away your sad and attend to his.
(Ugh, Kunal Kapoor in Dear Zindagi! I can’t BELIEVE the film ended up “forgiving” him for what he did)
I just feel like, at this point, we can blame the men. It’s not that women were trained to be emotional caregivers and naturally fall into that role in a relationship. Yes, that’s also true, but when it goes to such EXTREME levels, that is a man enjoying his ability to manipulate the gender roles.
In the case of Vanderpump Rules, it wasn’t just manipulating the women around them, it was the whole system of entertainment structured to reward their bad behavior and punish the women. Infamously, half the cast was fired a few years back over an incident of racism. Not saying they shouldn’t have been fired, but how was being racist worse than a man pouring his drink over his girlfriend’s head on camera? How is that where the producers draw the line?
With Ladies vs Ricky Bahl, it sort of reflects the blindness of society to this problem. The film is presented as a whacky impossible fantasy story, not as something that actually happens to women every day.
And finally, with Ranbir, I think this is the thing that is slowly becoming apparent to more and more people, and which has been apparent to those of us on DCIB for a long time. He’s not abusive, he doesn’t yell, he doesn’t hit, but he minimizes the women with him, makes them feel like they are in the wrong, makes them feel like his feelings matter more, and he does that because he has been raised to believe that is the way to behave. It’s not illegal necessarily, or even immoral, but it is yucky.
(I keep going back to this. Katrina got SO MUCH HEAT when these photos came out, and Ranbir got none. And he didn’t so much as issue a statement in support of her)
