In the middle of the World Cup, I was on BBC radio, arguing with Fiona McIntosh, a Grazia magazine columnist, about the Wags who, at the time, were the wives and girlfriends of the England football team. At the moment, the Wags have become the Swags (Summit Wives and Girlfriends, for G8).
I was expecting some nice banter. She was going to say, ”We’re covering the Wags because it’s a bit of fun, and people like to read about it,” and I was going to say, ”Yes, what a lot of fun; that Coleen’s a pretty young thing, isn’t she, I’ve written about her myself, loads of times, but still, isn’t it a bit retrogressive, the way we’re talking about them as adjuncts to their menfolk …”, and she was going to say, well, whatever she might have said.
I got as far as my adjuncts number, and McIntosh said, ”No, a lot of these women are entrepreneurs in their own right,” and instead of being pleasant and answering this pleasantly, I saw red. Because they are not famous and they are not on the cover of Grazia for being ”entrepreneurs”.
We do not look at their dinky handbags and their accessorised bits and bobs and say, ”I wish I could be an entrepreneur like she is.” We don’t do this massive-scale, nationwide eavesdropping to see what business plans they might be talking about.
Posh (Victoria Beckham) is, apparently, ”a very intelligent woman, creating a brand”. My arse! It does not matter which sunglasses she gets him to sponsor and what magazines she tells him to be in. All this is so much PR bilge, so many euphemisms for ”they spend money, they encourage the spending of money. How very now of them, how very helpful; wouldn’t you be proud if they were your daughters.”
None of this could possibly matter less: what matters is that they are in the public eye for sleeping with men. They are famous because of who they are having sex with. That’s all that’s going on here! Nothing to see, folks. If you want modernity, if you want the fruit of the women’s movement in all its 21st-century ripeness, may I direct you somewhere else. All that’s going on here is that some beautiful women are having sex with some rich, sporty men.
All gender prejudice proceeds from this crucial notion: ”You, love, you bring the high-quality sexual attributes, and calculate carefully how you dispense them. He will bring the money.” Every idea, from women not enjoying sex and only doing it for the money, to promiscuous women being sluts because they’re giving it away too cheap and lowering the market value for the rest of us, to women trying to trap men, lure them into a commitment when they’d rather play the field, every tinny, narrow, inauthentic cliché about men and women, all the trite business that starts in the sitcom and ends with women getting paid less for the same work and then raped on the way home, every stitch of this ugly straitjacket comes from this central idea: you bring the pussy (make him beg, mind); he’ll bring the wallet.
With the wives and girlfriends of your older public figure, the coverage is even worse, even more coarse and patronising. Here is the caption from the London Daily Mail newspaper — ”First there were the World Cup wives and girlfriends. Now meet their G8 counterparts, pictured here taking a stroll in the sun in St Petersburg . . .” In what respect is Cherie Blair, leading lawyer, the ”counterpart” of 17-year-old Melanie Slade (England teenage soccer star Theo Walcott’s girlfriend)? Oh, of course, they are both getting laid!
Scratch any worldview in which the women are stripped of three dimensions and operating only as satellites to their menfolk, and you will find them ultimately portrayed as bitches. Well, naturally — they have nothing to trade but sex. Of course they are animals.
The problem is all of this sounds like a tirade against the women themselves. But the problem isn’t the women themselves. I don’t care whose money they spend and couldn’t give a toss that the (rumoured) total shopping bill for the World Cup was a million squids.
The problem is not the women themselves, the problem is the way they’re presented; the people who present them in this toxic ”Go sister! Net that man! You can do it, with your pretty ways, and also your breasts!” slither out of the argument by pretending to respect these women as individuals. This drags you into a mudfight where you must discredit the Swags or the Wags themselves in order to overturn the concept. That process, incidentally, is known as the ”waglash”. I am not interested in the waglash. I am only interested in the creators and peddlers of waggery. They should be ashamed. — Â