Barney Stinson: The Real Housewife of New York City

Upon reading The Rich Bitch by Michael J. Lee & Leigh Moscowitz (a few times), I got to wondering if there was a rich, crass, hypersexual, frivolous male counterpart to the shows like RHW and Keeping Up With The Kardashians, and how our society might perceive that man. I tried looking into The Real Househusbands, but the top searches were comedic spin-offs of the RHW: Real Househusbands Hollywood, a comedy on BET with Kevin Hart, Nick Cannon, Duane Martin, and other comedians; and Real Househusbands Philadelphia, a comedy that can be found on YouTube with comedians Tommy Pope, Tim Butterly, and John McKeever. Neither of these are in any way trying to convince viewers that what they are seeing is any form of reality, but are still more relevant that RHH Atlanta, so I didn’t even bother trying to do that compare and contrast.

As far as I could tell, there were no male reality stars that could compete with the popularity and energy of the heiresses and countesses of the Real Housewives empire. So, after about 4 minutes of racking through my incredibly short tv-series history, I could only really come up with one character:

Barney Stinson, of How I Met Your Mother.

Now, you may be wondering, how on earth could I compare Barney, the most legendary bro to have graced American television, to the rich and powerful not-really-housewives all over the country? I beg you to entertain me for just a moment. Aside from being fictitious in nature, Barney Stinson and female reality stars both:

1. Have obscene amounts of money at their disposal.
2. Ambiguous jobs that make them that obscene amount of money.
3. Are obsessed with youth and looking good (Barney owns nearly 300 suits, and is known to go all out for parties/birthdays for himself and his friends).
4. Talk about the opposite sex as if they are conquests (although Barney isn’t as explicit. But he does lie to women incredibly often in order to sleep with them, so it’s just as bad in my opinion.)
5. Have not always been the best kind of friend.
6. Get into crazy situations for the sake of making memories/being “legendary” (this circles back to the obsession with youth).
7. Aren’t housewives, but “businessmen/women” (whatever that means).

Now that you’ve humored me for a bit, I’ll start explaining why I think people enjoy Barney’s character.

Although Barney and the women of reality television have so much in common, they do have one major difference that I would also like to address: irony. According to Lee & Moscowitz, Bravo utilizes the “wink”, which invites the audience to, essentially, laugh at the cast of its hit series The Real Housewives. The show is edited in such a way that viewers are “let in on the fun” of these women’s problematic lives. The star of the show says they’ll do one thing, then in the next cut we’re shown them doing the exact opposite. You see similar techniques in shows like Keeping up with the Kardashians, The Bachellorette, etc.

The very premise of shows reality shows, specifically those centered around older, wealthy women, is to give all us common-folk a chance to say “I may not be rich, but at least I’m not crazy”. Reality TV, like most television, allows viewers to become the heroes of their own lives, but this time it’s at the expense of actual people. Millions of people are invited to watch groups of grown women, who perceive themselves as the epitome of class and status, make complete fools of themselves on national television. These women cry over trivial things, sleep with their friend’s exes, prowl on younger men, are the worst part of consumer culture and capitalism, and, for a moment, the viewers are better than those women.

But then we see Barney Stinson. His frivolous, ambiguous, and problematic nature is dramatic, of course, but we aren’t invited to shame or ridicule his character the way we are in reality tv shows. We take a light-hearted approach to a male character who is no better than those women in a lot of ways, but we scrutinize reality-show women casually and on a regular basis. Many would say Barney Stinson is living the dream: he’s flithy rich, has plenty of friends to go out drinking with, has a lot of sex, isn’t married, and has no children. He’s the perfect “bro”.

Reality tv is written in such a way to make viewers ridicule and dismiss the cast, and knowing that the most popular shows focus on women is a bit telling. The only reason we don’t hate Barney Stinson is because he wasn’t written to be hated, and the women of reality tv are.