the girlboss is building her empire
on selling sunset and the entrenched language of patriarchy
I started watching Selling Sunset pretty close to the time I quit my dead end sales job. Something about watching highly charismatic women hustling on TV to sell luxury homes in LA (and in the process, making their male bosses obscenely wealthy), felt relevant to the job I’d just left, where I worked in a woman-dominated, intensely emotionally laborious company run by men to enrich an already-billionaire owner.
Selling Sunset is the only “dramatic” reality show I’ve ever loved, and I think one of major draws of it is that the drama centers entirely around work, which I find a lot more fun to posture about than romantic relationships. The show follows a group of women real estate agents working for the Oppenheim Group in Los Angeles — gorgeous women selling gorgeous mansions. I love being the voyeur, getting a glimpse into the world of these soulless, shining, multi million dollar houses and the people who buy them. The show naturally feeds my obsession with Zillowing others’ houses and judging their worth.
The ladies each have different goals and priorities, but what they have in common is their drive to sell homes and earn their astronomical commissions in the process. The show aired in 2019, right around when the girlboss was torn down from her pedestal. Despite multiple pieces reporting that the girlboss died sometime between 2017-2020, she is alive and well in the show, and I don’t think she ever left our imagination, or at least her her lingo never did.
Selling Sunset is a rich text, and there’s about a dozen essays one could write about the architecture of the homes they sell, the plastic surgeries and self-optimization necessary for these women to maintain appearances and boost their wealth, the petty drama, the cartoon-villain outfits, but while we await season 8’s release, I wanted to write about a single agent, Bre Tiesi, and her character’s quest to “build her empire” and demand for better pay in season 7.
Do you have unhinged opinions on the show? Leave a comment below ♥️
Season 7 began shooting in January of 2023, and it follows the women at the Oppenheim Group as they are coming off the high of the wild real estate market of 2022, a year of exceptionally high number of homes sold at extraordinarily high price points. The identical twin brothers who run the Oppenheim Group, Jason and Brett Oppenheim, couldn’t be more proud of their agents’ successful year.
To show their appreciation for their agents, the twins announce a buildout of a brand new enormous office space for the agents, replete with everything that women with partners and children at home could dream of finding at their workplace: a fully stocked bar, a wall of Samsung TVs, a pool table, shuffleboard, jukebox, and DJ booth.
The buildout also comes with a catch: the twins inform their all-female1 agents that in order for Brett and Jason to cover the cost of the buildout (costing a whopping $1.5 million), the agents will have to work harder, in a recession economy, in order to maintain their place at the agency. “There’s no other brokerage spending money on their agents right now,” says one of the twins, Jason. “I’m asking you to work twice as hard. We’ve gotta overcome the high interest rates, the new mansion tax, […] overcome that we’ve probably lost 30% of our luxury volume in the last year.” (Season 7, Episode 4).
One of the agents, Crishell, makes a joke about this likely being a bad time to ask for a better commission split. Another agent, Mary, newly pregnant, asks for a nursery, which would be useful for four of the eight cast members with new babies, and Jason immediately shuts the idea down.
It is immediately clear that the previous years’ record breaking sales numbers don’t lead to any material gain for the women selling these multi-million dollar mansions. Instead, the agency’s owners translate their financial success into repeated demands for the women to work harder in a historically difficult real estate market. “These are really tough times and we need more from you to cover this expense,” says Brett, to a roomful of women who have never displayed an interest in shuffleboard (Season 7, Episode 4).
It’s a familiar scene as someone who’s worked in sales: you and your team do exceptionally well in a given sales year, but instead of receiving better bonuses or higher salaries, the goalpost is moved further out. You’re expected to work harder for less, and god forbid your employer gives you the leads you need to succeed at the impossible goal they’ve set for you. But hey, you get things you never asked for instead, like off-the-clock team building activities and open floor offices.
This news doesn’t mesh well with the show’s more combative character, Bre Tiesi. Bre, a newer cast member who positions herself as a sort of lone wolf who loves to hustle, says that she’s on the show to “build her empire” selling houses. Since she’s raising a new baby alone, Bre tries to negotiate with Jason throughout the season for a higher cut of the sales commission she receives from selling homes.
And look. I get it. It’s a reality show, it’s scripted, plot lines like this are played up for effect. I also get that some things are — as much as I hate this phrase — just not that deep. But something about Bre’s arc and her repetition of the girlbossy, un-self-aware phrase “build my empire” stuck with me.
Saying you’re out to “build your empire” inherently centers you as the emperor with subjects that you (by definition) rule over. It’s an isolating mentality that pits you against everyone else — you can never have co-emperors — and turns everything into a zero-sum game. It ignores an obvious truth, which is that empires famously fall. If we were all to build our own empires, where would that leave us? As the emperors of our solitary, weak empires, ruling over no one at all or people who wish for our demise, with no allies but only enemies ready to take whatever power we’ve amassed for themselves as soon as we show weakness. It’s a neoliberal attitude that burrows into the unsustainable framework of capitalism. There can’t be infinite growth, and everyone can’t be their own emperor.
The other, more immediate treachery of the phrase assumes that setting out to build your empire is more durable than relying on anyone or any job, but in reality by striking out on our own we’re actually even more susceptible to the brutal aspects of capitalism.
I imagine that the women of Selling Sunset know this truth too, since they are contractors, and not employees, of the Oppenheim group, making them essentially freelancers with no health, maternity, vacation, or retirement benefits.
The tired myth of the neoliberal feminist girlboss dictates that women should snatch what men have built for themselves within capitalism rather than imagine a new way forward. In doing so, “choice feminism” has managed to borrow the language of colonialist patriarchy, too. The language of the girlboss is tired and lacks imagination for a communal future, in which we’re not all emperors of our isolated, competing, weak empires but equals in a community where we show up for one another. Whether or not the girlboss is dead, I do think her phrasebook remains, because her lingo has taken root.
The choice feminism behind the girlboss and phrases like “build my empire” is a feminism rooted in capitalist success and individualism. It’s a feminism that sees increased atomization in our society, fewer protections for workers, uncompetitive wages, and decides that it’s best to strike out on your own, that it’s better to depend solely on yourself rather than work through the difficult task of building a community of friends and neighbors or even rallying your coworkers to face your bosses, together, to demand a bigger cut of the profit you made possible.
I don’t think that Bre is a bad person for having the attitude that she has. She’s playing a character and her character voices a question I ask myself often: can I afford [the likely loss of social connection in order] to singularly and aggressively pursue outlandish financial goals? Can I afford [losing out on the possible financial upswing] not to?
Living in an escapably capitalist system forces us each to be out for ourselves, clawing desperately at any possible source of income so we can secure a future in a country with ever disappearing social safety nets. I think it’s easy to step on each other in pursuit of getting our bag, and it’s easier to try and claim a stake in the patriarchal order that already exists, to claim space as a She-E-O or girlboss or career woman or whatever we want to call her, than it is to forge a new path forward.
At the end of the season Bre’s arc for better pay comes to a head in a scene where negotiations with Jason escalate into hostility — this man refuses to give her the money she needs to “build her empire” because doing so is in direct opposition to building his own.
Bre, like many saleswomen before her, finds out that the chance to get a bigger slice of the pie was never a possibility. The twins’ financial success was not going to trickle down to the women who brought them their money. Just as Bre had positioned herself as someone out to build her empire, so had Jason and Brett when they started their company, and Bre has to face the painful realization that she was their subject all along.
All that to say that I’m pulling the plug on finally buying a raised bed to start a small vegetable garden this summer (which I tell myself will bring me closer to my dream of living in a loosely-formed cooperative). If the crop succeeds, and you live in Boston, I hope that we can turn the harvest into a meal and have dinner together in the late summer sun.
The Oppenheim Group does employ men within their Los Angeles office, however, the show, Selling Sunset, only follows the lives of a few of the women realtors the company employs. Beyond owners Brett and Jason, and one long-time agent’s husband, Romaine, there are almost no recurring male characters on the show.
Wow now I want to watch the show! 😂 I am so familiar with this dynamic from being in sales. Ugh. 😑