On a cold April morning in Manhattan, Ramona Singer, a cast member of “The Real Housewives of New York City,” is teetering across a street in stilettos, shedding her coat to expose a short taupe dress paired with pearls. She had just left Tipsy Parson, a bar and restaurant in Chelsea, and is making a beeline to a tour bus plastered with the cast’s faces.

Ms. Singer, 59, the tiny blond entrepreneur whose outlandish personality, unquenchable thirst for pinot grigio and nasty divorce have led to an eight-year tenure on the show, poses against the bus, snipping at her handlers: “Where’s my lipstick?” “Did you retweet my Snapchat?” Then she ducks into a chauffeured black car and is gone.

Ms. Singer may not have been the type to stick around for a three-hour bus tour of 36 of the show’s filming locations, but I am. I’m one of the millions who enjoy this spectacle of wealthy womanhood held up to a fun-house mirror.

But I do have questions. So do my editors.

Why do I, and so many other women, enjoy something that plays on the worst female stereotypes? What does this show’s popularity say about us?