Ariana Madix Is a Woman Vindicated

The narrative around sex—or rather, the lack of it—is particularly hard to watch. “I feel like I'm someone who craves intimacy outside of just penetrative sex,” Madix says. “And that was something that I was deprived of for so long. As women, we might bring something up a bunch of times and then we just stop. That's where I was at. I was like I cannot keep nagging this man to want to come home and spend time with me.” 

I nod, and then she says: “The way that so many men act like they are entitled to your body and entitled to sex because you're in a relationship with them. I am not your Fleshlight. I spelled out what I needed, but hello. It's a two-person situation.”

Madix wasn’t able to confront Leviss in person that night, as she was in New York for Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live, but she did send her a succinct text message—“You’re dead to me”—before calling her up and demanding answers. “She was somewhat emotionless,” she says of her former friend’s reaction, a word that’s become synonymous with Leviss during the last 97 days. “And I was devastated.”

Public humiliation is the lifeblood of reality television. If fans wanted prize-winning narrative arcs or themes worthy of Shakespeare, Sophocles, or Goethe, we’d have The Sopranos or The Wire or even The Simpsons on loop. No, we want table flipping, we want catchphrases, we want proposals and retracted proposals, we want Scary Island, we want shocking exits. We don’t so much want jail sentences, fake cancer diagnoses, or real-life monsters, but we understand those are often byproducts of a genre that exists without scripts. We aren’t watching idols or finely drawn characters dreamed up in the writers room. These are real people who, as we love to point out, signed up for—gestures wildly—all of this. Maybe we won’t admit it, but we enjoy feasting on the bones of other people’s poor choices. Even the people who try to do the right thing on reality TV are often considered jesters, jokes, sad sacks. Almost everybody appears to have an unquenchable thirst for fame or infamy and it shows. But Ariana Madix, as fans of Vanderpump Rules will surely attest, always seemed a little bit different. More content being her actual self, less me, me, me! 

Madix was born in 1985 and raised on Florida’s Space Coast, a 72-mile stretch along the Atlantic Ocean that’s home to orbital-launch stations like Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center and describes her upbringing as “pretty great.” Her late father was a commercial roofing contractor, and her mother is a project manager who deals primarily with space-related companies. “My parents both worked really hard,” she says. “We weren’t rich by any means, but we certainly had the best that they could have given.” Growing up as a ’90s kid, Madix became infatuated with horses and begged her mom for lessons, something she says her mother never got growing up and wanted to give her daughter. At the age of six, she started riding and also got into theater. “Horse girl, theater kid. Those were the two things,” she says. She was also an exceptional student—the phrases “big overachiever” and “teacher’s pet” get thrown around—excelling mostly at math and science. By high school she was in AP classes and had added cheerleading to her list of extracurriculars. “I think my senior year, I was in eight or 10 different clubs,” she says.