A couple years ago, I pitched a story about how Keeping Up With the Kardashians is basically the same show as The Handmaids Tale, which was bought as a story about the role of reproduction on KUWTK. After a couple drafts, my piece was killed because of timing (Harvey Weinstein was dominating the news and it feels impossible that it’s only been a year and a half but it’s true). But a couple things have happened in the past week that have reminded me that I’m a a prescient genius, so here’s an updated version of that essay.
Keeping Up With the Kardashians has always been a show about breeding, and that’s why it works. As the family celebrated their first decade in the spotlight in October 2017, the next ten years were already fleshing out with Kim, Khloe, and Kylie all pregnant at once. The matriarchy Kris Jenner envisioned had fallen into place quite nicely.
Or, as Courtney Love put it:
Right now, I’ve become really ensorcelled by this Venusian fertility cult in the Valley. They’re beautiful women, all related to each other. [Ed note: Love is referring to the Kardashians.] I’m seeing all of these connections to poet warrior men and great jewels and all the wealth. It’s like, “Oh my god, you women did it. And you did it by doing the chores that courtesans used to do.” Fuck, it’s amazing. People insulted these women. They’ve done nothing but put these women down, and yet these women are laughing all the way to the fucking bank, as well they should. They’re geniuses. I feel like Camille Paglia should have saved it for them instead of wasting it on Madonna. No offense, Madonna, but what the fuck?
That the series exists at all is, in part, is thanks to Kim Kardashian West’s profile boost following a sex tape that the family, united, refused to treat as a source of shame. Kris Jenner has never shied away from her offspring as sexual beings: she has an evolutionary approach. The real issue? A breach of privacy rather than carefully packaged output. The species must reproduce and create content to survive.
Before creating new human bodies, the daughters had to learn how to become their own physical ideals with countless big salads in clear plastic containers, nude yoga classes, and lip fillers. Kim, in a moment of reality camp, even enlisted a doctor to X-Ray her ass on camera to prove its authenticity, to the extent we can trust a show executive produced by Kris Jenner. By the time Kylie was of child-bearing age, the process was streamlined to perfection. They shifted beauty standards and turned a profit with Lip Kits and taunted the FTC hawking waist trainers and Fit Tea on Instagram.
The formula complete, the proto-Kardashians began replicating their most valuable resource, their DNA. The next generation began with the 2009 birth of Mason Disick, which was later televised and edited to dramatic effect for the fourth season finale. But the true seismic shift can be traced back to an episode in KUWTK’s seventh season in 2012, a tour de force of reproduction as entertainment.
While Kourtney is preparing to give birth to her second child with Scott Disick, he explores the possibility of a vasectomy. (Kourt and Scott went on to have a third child together and she has maintained that she would like any future children to carry his DNA, even after they both moved on to relationships with other people.) Kim and Khloe, meanwhile, are taking measures to keep the family line running and visit a fertility doctor, panicking over whether or not to freeze their eggs. Khloe, then (publicly, at least) happily married to Lamar Odom and the subject of her womb was public debate, with viewers anticipating an addition to the family. The televised medical results were left as a tearful question mark, and later, she admitted the baby fever was a ruse. “I fake tried. I was married, but I knew the circumstances weren’t the healthiest, she later admitted on KUWTK. “So I just kept pretending I was doing it.”
Shortly after, Kim became pregnant with Kanye West’s child, and North was celebrity in her own right before the ink even dried on her birth certificate. West and Kardashian’s combined star power was irresistible and the family unit seemed more palatable to the general public than the polarizing personas they were previously notorious for. He also set the new standard for Kardashian sperm donors: unruly and frequently absent, but talented. Disick had two out of three going for him. Before long, Saint was added to the brood and the couple began selling chokers and West’s ludicrously popular Yeezy sneakers for infants.
Rob, a dude therefore a footntote in this family, ran in the opposite direction when he impregnated family nemesis Blac Chyna with Dream Kardashian, the first and potentially only grandchild of Kris to carry on the Kardashian family name. And we have to agree that the name is hers more than anyone’s now. The relationship went up in flames, and the Shakespearian drama continued to play out on social media until literally no one cared. Kendall is also something of an outlier, and her recent plotlines on he show highlight how wacky it is that, at 23, she has yet to reproduce.
In between pregnancies, the conversation never stopped, with plotlines buoying from screwball comedy to stark portraits of the realities women face, but rarely discuss in such a public sphere. Kris gets the egg freezing bug and wonders if she, too, should consider another pregnancy. Kim, feeling pressure from Kanye to get pregnant again, has a biopsy to to determine whether it was a safe option following her previous high-risk pregnancies and then casually relays details of the procedure to her family and camera crew over dinner.
But for Kim, the financial burdens that take many hopeful parents out of the running and leave others penniless and still childless are no issue. And so, like Kris, she was able to entertain every option -- biological plausibility be damned. Eventually, an surrogate came into the picture after various family members and even Chrissy Teigen had their names tossed into the ring.
While Travis Scott (born Jacques Webster) had only been dating Kylie for a few months before she became pregnant, and he’s a clear upgrade simply by virtue of not being Tyga. And, though the pregnancy may or may not have been have been accidental, Kylie asserted that she’d like to have kids by age 25 back in 2016. It must have seemed so old then, and it must still, now at age 21.
There was a third child in the apparent Kardashian pregnancy pact of 2017. Khloe’s relationship with Tristan Thompson finally seemed to offer the stable environment she required to start a family. You know, by Kardashian standards. Tristan did leave the mother of his newborn baby for Khloe. And then of course right around her due date, footage of him cheating showed up on TMZ. But Khloe tried to make it work for the sake of baby True. That also worked out great! No, of course it didn’t. He was caught cheating with Kylie’s best friend and my own personal Mary Magdalene, Jordyn Woods, and both of them were booted from the family’s good graces.
Which brings us to the events of this weekend. Kylie is apparently auditioning new #1 BFFs, including Anastasia Karanikolaou. Anastasia had a birthday party at a club, Bootsy Bellows, and of course Kylie was there. And so was Jordyn, who showed up with Jaden Smith!t And! Tristan Thompson was at the same club! Kylie and Jordyn apparently interacted cordially, so I’ll pretend they agreed that Enlightened is the most underrated prestige television show of the decade and went their separate ways.
For more on @StassieBaby, I recommend viewing her plastic surgery vlogs.
On Saturday, Kylie threw Anastasia the sort of lavish party she would have previously held for Jordy, because having one birthday celebration is for paupers. And the theme was…The Handmaid’s Tale.
Source: @KylieJenner / Instagram
“You know The Handmaid's Tale is my favorite show ever... so for Stassi's birthday ... welcome to Gilead,” wrote Kylie on Instagram. Gilead being the fictional version of America in Margaret Atwood’s novel where women who are not high status are raped and forced to carry the children of important men to repopulate the earth and are discarded once they can no longer reproduce.
The party theme was…not well received.
Source: @KimKardashian/Instagram
But, in a benevolent move, Kim released the first photo of her newborn, Psalm, at the perfect time to distract from Kylie’s Gileadean controversy. The timing was just right to ensure the next generation of Kardashian-Jenners will have an even greater safety in numbers advantage to dominate whatever our current era of social media mutates into. KUTWK will still be on the air long after Ryan Seacrest is an incredibly busy corpse. It’s my fear that The Handmaid’s Tale will be, too. The show, already past where the book left off, is about to begin its third season and we may be in for more, which just seems punishing. Atwood has also announced a sequel to the book, originally published in 1985, and whyyyyyyy?
xoxo,
offtrash