A new, summery Bravo scandal

If I didn’t know any better, I’d say network executives across the board have offered private payouts to the reality TV stars who can generate the most scandal - and now they’re all in a competition to out-scandal each other. Because how else do you explain the most shocking secret hookup since Scandoval currently unfolding, not even two weeks after the Taylor Frankie Paul debacle? No matter the network, no matter the show, reality TV is an absolute mess right now.

To catch everyone up, speculation about a possible romance between West Wilson and Amanda Batula from Bravo’s Summer House started making waves on social media over the last week. At first, it seemed like a wild conspiracy theory. Why would Amanda date West, who also dated and broke the heart of her best friend, Ciara Miller? Plus, it hasn’t even been three full months since Amanda and her ex-husband, Kyle Cooke, another personality on the show, announced their separation.

With curiosity piqued, fans-turned-internet-sleuths focused more on old seasons - and of course the current season which is currently airing despite filming having wrapped months ago - with a totally different perspective, now that this rumour was in circulation. They started sharing old clips, digging through old Instagram posts and looking for any clues that might help confirm or deny the allegation.

Piece by piece, the big picture turned out to be pretty damning. Fans found a photo of Amanda wearing a sweater that West was photographed in. And images of group dates and old clips of Amanda comforting West at the season nine reunion, instead of an emotional Ciara, emerged. And though all of this made the wild conspiracy theory way more believable, there was still no proverbial smoking gun.

But when Amanda and Ciara were supposed to host an Amazon Live together a few days ago and ended up doing so separately, that just about sealed the deal. And yesterday, things erupted when Amanda released a statement confirming that there is, in fact, a romantic relationship between her and West, which sent fans into a tailspin, with a wide range of different takes.

First, there’s the group who argue Amanda was never a girl’s girl but actually a mean girl, and some people have come out of the woodwork with their own anecdotal, unpleasant encounters with Amanda. Think old college classmates, old colleagues, people who heard the rumour and believed it in an instant because of what they knew to be true about her, which was that she was mean and starved for male attention.

The first half of this narrative about whether she’s a girl’s girl is just as tough to disprove as it is to prove. We’ve mostly seen her in a trio with Paige and Ciara. They spent their summers bundled under the covers and getting along fairly well, for the most part, so it’s tough to say. But starved for male attention? That claim has some legs, considering what she put up with to get and stay with Kyle up until this year. And hey, if you like attention you like attention – but the pursuit of it can land you in situations like this. We’ll come back to that.

Then there are the reactions coming in from past and present Summer House castmates, who, for the most part, are all #TeamCiara. Even Lindsay Hubbard made it clear she’s siding with C. And considering Lindsay and Ciara have had their own issues over that other mid, white man from the Bravoverse (read: Austen Kroll), that’s saying something.

Moreover, the recent unfollows and memes from the cast suggest this was news to them, too, and that they found out around the same time as the rest of us. That in and of itself suggests that West and Amanda knew this was problematic. If they had to keep it that quiet, they knew.

Now to the group of fans who are…indifferent. This is the group downplaying Ciara and West’s relationship, which we saw pick back up this season, to some extent anyway. These are the people who think this is the kind of stuff that comes with being on a reality TV show. And though it’s probably an unpopular take, there is a certain amount of truth to it. But we’ll come back to that, too.

There are a few takeaways. The first is that West made it abundantly clear that he fancies himself a broken woman. And that’s not to insult Ciara or Amanda or imply that they’re missing something, but it is to say that neither of these women are in the headspace they need to be to have a healthy and fruitful relationship and more importantly, to hold him to proper account.

The odd thing is, Ciara did a fantastic job of cutting him off completely the first time he broke her heart, which, let’s not forget, included the publishing of a full on article in the New York Times about why he wasn’t interested in dating her, despite sleeping with her after she made it clear she wouldn’t have sex with him outside of a relationship. But we’ve also watched her cave and let him back in this season. And it’s very important to note what was happening when he made his re-entry into her life.

They were all back in the house, she was ignoring him, and his friend Jesse Solomon expressed interest in kissing her, so he swoops back in. And in the process, he scolded Jesse, insinuating Jesse was a bad friend for even thinking such a thing, only to go and do something objectively worse and far more conniving.

The second takeaway is that Ciara has to stop pursuing these mid white men. Not all white men, but the mid white ones who pursue Black women like her because it feeds their ego. Men like Austen - who quite literally called her a Jezebel on camera, which, by the way, is a very racially loaded statement - and West have no true intention of loving, marrying or pro-creating with a Black woman. So it’s puzzling that she would continue to grant Austen the privilege of even breathing the same air as her. Same goes for West Wilson, who has always looked to me like a hybrid of a mushroom and a long lost Mario brother.

I think the issue Ciara has, based on what she’s shared about her relationships with her parents, is that she is accustomed to having to fight and plead for love, so the dynamic between her and men like Austen and West feels familiar. Though there are thousands of men out there who would probably bring the earth to her, until she does the work to learn how love is really supposed to feel, she will continue to find herself heartbroken by the men she chooses because she keeps confusing comfort with safety. They’re not the same thing.

This brings me back to the point made by people who suggest this is all par for the course with reality TV. To a certain extent, yes. And that’s because of the proximity between the cast, the alcohol and the filming. And there are unique experiences like having to navigate tabloids and attending events together and being recognized on the street.

People on these shows are all having very niche experiences that not many people can relate to, so the bond that gets developed feels beyond intense. And sometimes that intensity gets mistaken for love or intimacy – but it is neither of those things. It’s merely a group of people sharing a rare experience together. Couple that with the mind state Amanda’s in, coming out of a years-long relationship with Kyle, and it makes sense that she’s wound up in this situation.

And that brings me back to my point about Amanda being starved for male attention. Kyle treated her poorly after she spent years helping him build his business. She put off her own dreams and shuffled around her own timeline. And when she did decide to start her bikini line, he retaliated by becoming a DJ. So understandably, she’s pissed.

And when you’re working through years of rage in the span of a few months, around people and around cameras, comfort feels like comfort whether its authentic or not. She’s looking for the closest thing to a warm hug, and this season we see how she might have found that in West after he had her back amid her issues with Kyle. But rather than seeking that out from her best friend’s ex, she could have turned to her friends. Like Paige. Like Ciara.

But perhaps the most important takeaway of all is how women are always at the centre of the blowback, even in situations where the man is equally or more in the wrong than the woman. The blowback will always be worse for her. It happened with Monica Lewinsky. It happened with Jordyn Woods. It happened with Rachel Leviss.

Though Amanda is obviously single after announcing her separation and divorce from Kyle, word on the street is that West was dating around. So there were women, maybe even multiple women. Yet the blowback is still worse for Amanda than it is for West. Why is that?

A huge part of it is because women expect to be disappointed by men. But our friends? Our women friends? We hold them to an entirely different standard. And in this way, we highlight the very sad but very present punishment that exists for women for being perceived as more moral and ethical than their f-ckboy partners.

Because West also betrayed Ciara, whose friendship he was just so keen on rebuilding this season. And West also betrayed his friend, Kyle, by going after his ex-wife. West also betrayed Jesse, whom he forbade from pursuing Ciara under the guise that he would be a bad friend if he did so, despite doing something so much more shady.

So what next? Amanda already lost the brand deal with Flower by Edie Parker on the same day she debuted it. Which suggests not even weed companies want to stick around to find out what can be leveraged from all the brand exposure they’d get from the hoopla. It’s being reported that cameras will not pick back up to film the fallout of this. And with there being a new spinoff show called The City in the works, maybe we’ll have to wait until then to see the aftermath of all of this. But my prediction is that whatever West and Amanda have going on won’t last all that long. It rarely does.

Attached - Ciara at the New York premiere of Your Friends & Neighbors earlier this week.