I don’t intend to watch Wife Swap. I usually fall upon it randomly, when House or Lost aren’t on. Then I watch it with a big grin on my face. Like I just settled into a sleeve of Ritz crackers and Cheese Whiz. It’s trashy. It’s fun.

Virginia Heffernan explains the premise of the show in the Times.

Why didn’t “Wife Swap” come along sooner? It’s such a simple idea: two married women with children change places for 10 days. You can have princesses swap with paupers, carnivores with vegans, obsessives with slobs. The twisted interior logic of a family is forced into public transparency, a full-on (if rigged) audit — and that’s fantasy for anyone who’s ever thought her family was uniquely bonkers. The series is cheap to make, and rewarding: the families either decide they like the new woman better (which is intriguing but rare), On Wife Swap, they exchange the women from two families for two weeks.

The women enter the homes of their new families and immediately start trash talking these families. Oh, my God. This place is filthy. These people are P.I.G.S. or What’s with all the dead animals on the wall. Sob.

Is this show good for women?

On the one hand, exchanging women like they are tribal brides is incredibly offensive. I’ll buy your wife for three goats and a cow. But only if she’s a neat one with a trim caboose.

On the other hand, the show exchanges wives and not husbands, because it’s the wives who really determine what happens in the house. The husbands seem pretty interchangeable and rarely get any air time. They mostly adapt to the rule changes, because they have already been following their wives’ rules.

Last week, John Tierney wrote a column on marriage that predictably ticked off a lot of people. He wrote,

Don’t be fooled by feminist rhetoric about women’s powerlessness. Yes, husbands may usually make more money on the work front, but wives still typically make the important decisions on the home front, like where the children go to school or how to spend the family’s money. Wives also (and Haltzman presents supporting data here on the gender gap in libido) tend to make the decision on whether to have sex.

Women are Kings of House on Wife Swap. In these rare glimpses into the private world of home life, we see women making the rules and the men jumping. Even in the most traditional, home schooling, millions of kids sorts of households, the women hold their own. No doormats anywhere.

Maybe we can write off all this power, with a shrug and a so what. These Wife Swap brides may determine who does chores on the weekends, but that isn’t real power. Real power is money, prestige and position.

Maybe. But it is sure fun to watch the husbands jump when the new bride cracks the whip.