Jane Austen and Basketball Wives

“Basketball Wives” is a reality show airing on the VH1 network that follows the lives of women who are or have been romantically linked to past or current NBA professional basketball players. For some people, the show is riveting drama.

I don’t watch much television. When I do, I’m much more likely to watch an actual NBA game than a show about the not-wives of those who play the game. Still, I found myself spending a few idle minutes watching the “Basketball Wives” reunion show recently, and the “Basketball Wives” phenomenon made me think of the novels of Jane Austen, in particular, “Pride and Prejudice.”

To me, Austen’s novels are as much a critique of the limited and confining choices for the women of her day as they are about romance and manners. Austen’s heroines are, with few exceptions (e.g., Emma), women from good families with no money, whose financial futures depend on their ability to marry a wealthy man. The male love interests in Austen’s novels aren’t prized for their looks. Their principal value is in their ability to provide a secure future for the heroine. Character comes second; looks, a distant third.

In Pride and Prejudice, the family is not poor. Their problem is that the parents have had five daughters and no sons. The mother is obsessed with making sure her eldest daughters marry well, because by law, her husband’s estate cannot pass to his wife or his daughters upon his death. Instead, the land will pass on to a rather odious cousin, whom the mother predicts will turn the family out and claim the estate as soon as the patriarch’s body is cold. If the girls do not find reasonably wealthy husbands, everyone, including the mother, faces desperate, impoverished futures. Although Mr. Bennet is not in any imminent danger of dying, Mrs. Bennet is smart not to wait.

Underpinning the book’s mockery of Mrs. Bennet’s crass efforts to marry off her daughters is the unspoken reality that she had no choice but to aggressively seek husbands for them. When the eldest Bennet girl finally becomes engaged to the wealthy Mr. Bingley, the reader shares in Mrs. Bennet’s relief. Mrs. Bennet exclaims,

“Oh! my dear, dear Jane, I am so happy! I am sure I sha’nt get a wink of sleep all night. I knew how it would be. I always said it must be so, at last. I was sure you could not be so beautiful for nothing!”

Beauty has always been a tradeable commodity. Like Mrs. Bennet has for her daughters, the “Basketball Wives” have income requirements for their potential partners. Mr. Bingley’s chief attraction was his income of “four or five thousand a year, and very likely more.” In the “Basketball Wives” episode I saw, one woman told a date that a man had to make “at least $800,000 a year” to support herself and her family.

Jane is perhaps more fortunate than the Basketball Wives, for while Mr. Bingley is described as being kind and loyal in addition to rich, the pro ball players are little more than walking paychecks. Their sole redeeming quality is their affiliation with the National Basketball Association. Whether they are nice, intelligent men or the worst type of dog possible seems irrelevant.

Not that the Basketball Wives deserve more. Unlike the eldest Bennet girls, who are witty and good-hearted, the Basketball Wives are portrayed as beautiful but empty, shallow and vain. They appear to offer the basketball players they hook up with nothing more than their presence as arm candy. Perhaps this is simply how the show is edited.

It’s interesting to me how Basketball Wives presents professional groupiedom as a viable career option, an aspiration as worthwile pursuing as becoming America’s Next Top Model or the next American Idol. It teaches that beauty has a cash value and that smart beautiful women sell it to the highest bidder before they reach their “sell by” date.

In the current economic climate, where a college degree and a pretty face will get you a job at Abercrombie & Fitch if you’re lucky, it’s not surprising that young girls are aspiring to be basketball wives. What the show doesn’t let on is that being an NBA wifey, let alone wife, is as unrealistic and rare a career choice for the average pretty girl as being the Knicks’ next starting forward is for the average 6′ 8″ player on his high school’s varsity basketball team.

I recently heard of a teen girl who aspired to be a basketball wife. She decided to train for her career by servicing her high school basketball team. Instead of fame and fortune, she wound up with nothing but a terrible reputation and heartbreak. She was lucky not to have gotten an STD or pregnant.

Sadly, the young girl I heard about isn’t the only one looking at the Basketball Wives as role models. I hope enough most young women, including my own daughter, are smart enough to know that they don’t need a Mr. Darcy or Mr. Bingley to be successful – and that being beautiful is neither enough to win a rich, handsome man of one’s own, nor to keep him.

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