Section:GDN 12 PaGe:5 Edition Date:190829 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 28/8/2019 17:30 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
- The Guardian
Thursday 29 August 2019 5
trophy wives
a pain to get to. They stayed in
Toronto instead.
Now, by contrast, it seems that
things have somehow got worse.
I woke on Tuesday morning to
Macron decrying the extraordinarily
rude behaviour of the Brazi lian
president, Jair Bolsonaro. To be fair,
the Amazon is on fi re; it would not
be unreasonable to imagine France
having made a suggestion about
the world’s lungs and Bolsonaro
retorting with some fresh idiocy.
But, in fact, the president of Brazil
had liked a post on social media that
suggested that his wife, Michelle,
was hotter than Macron’s, and
that this explained the diplomatic
tension. Bolsonaro did more than
like the post. He replied: “Do not
humiliate the guy, ha ha,” adding
that piquant stone-age layer wherein
a man’s virility is conveyed by the
hotness of his wife. It is like an
anxiety dream, hurtling so fast backto pre-civilisation, grabbing the
memory of Michelle Obama’s sass
as we go. ( As a coda, she managed
to sidestep that appearance of
charming helpmeet , somehow
convey ing with her presence a
mildly subversive purpose. At the
2013 G8 in Belfast, she persuaded
a bespoke performance out of
Riverdance. I rest my case).
The spectacle of domesticity that
came with bringing the wives along
used to humanise the men: without
the wives, they were suited, stern
and interchangeable. With a wife
attached, you could imagine them
having an aperitif, maybe laughing,
understanding the human condition,
possibly even seeking to enhance it.
That was the theory, anyway.
For Donald Trump, however,
having Melania in tow seems to
further dehumanise him , because
she looks so unhapp y. We have
seen her grinning in disaster zones(recently, holding an infant who had
been orphaned in a mass shooting
in El Paso, she looked like she was
posing for a Christmas card ), looking
catatonically bored everywhere
else ( the State of the Union address
is understandably tedious, of
course, but even in North Korea ,
which would surely pique anyone’s
interest, she looked as if she was
watching a shopping channel).
Commentators have started
to invent romantic fantasies for
Melania – fi rst she was in love
with Barack Obama after being
photographed laughing next to
him at Barbara Bush’s funeral. Now,
thanks to a photograph at the G7 in
which she is turned away from her
husband and seemingly about to kiss
the Canadian prime minister, Justin
Trudeau , she is in love with him, too.
These fl ights of fancy illuminate
just how much we see women as arm
candy. Melania is beautiful, ergo she
must embody love; she cannot love
Donald , ergo she must love someone
else. They convey something,
too, about our current feeling of
global political impotence. In the
face of a man such as Trump – who
thinks he can nuke a hurricane and
criminalises toddlers –
we retreat to the fairytale
and wait for Prince
Charming to save his
wife, and by extension,
all of us.
In the 90s, political
wives embraced their
decorative status with
a certain irony. The
decidedly unskittish Hillary Clinton
and Cherie Blair seemed to say:
“You want us to act like Guides?
We’ll give you Guides. In the
noughties, post-Seattle, when these
summits became sites of anti-
globalisation protest, there tended
to be a social justice agenda bolted
on to the wives’ presence, so they
would journey en masse to a
worthwhile project that had been
carefully fi lleted of any problematic
politics. “The wives of the G8
leaders have a schedule almost as
busy as their husbands,” ran one
nauseating strapline in the Daily
Telegraph in 2009, when the women
visited the site of a devastating
earthquake that had hit L’Aquila in
Italy a few months earlier.
Earthquakes are potentially a great
PR opportunity, since you cannot
attribute them to global corporatism.
But in this case, it did not work, partly
because the Italian press described
their meeting beforehand as a “pink
power lunch”, but mainly because
there is no erasing the slam-dunk
sexism of the enterprise, and all the
attendant misogyny that permeates
the coverage surrounding it.
The way to change things is
simple: they have to stay at home.
It may not be the wifely thing to do,
but wifeliness and dignity, in a world
summit context, cannot coexist, if
PHOTOGRAPH: AFP/GETTY IMAGES indeed they ever can.Black women’s hair is treated
as public property – to be
commented on by everyone
Yomi
Adegoke
L
ast week, I joined a club of black British girl
bosses who have decided to go bald. From
the founders of Black Girl Fest – the fi rst arts
festival to celebrate black women and girls- to gal-dem magazine’s Liv Little, shaving
off our hair has become the busy black
woman’s equivalent of Steve Jobs wearing the same polo
neck and jeans combo every day, given how long our
hair can take to prep. Black women’s hair is known for its
versatility (the recent viral #DMXChallenge , which saw
countless video montages of black women fl awlessly
rocking various diff erent styles, attests to this) – so a
shaved head is easy and eliminates an overwhelming
range of choice.
Since my afro was large and healthy when I shaved it
off , the assumption was that something must have gone
wrong: traction alopecia from the tight hairstyles black
women endure is a common reason for a drastic cut.
Many women do a “big chop” to be rid of hair damaged
by heat and chemicals. A bad breakup is often assumed,
or a quarter-life crisis (as my dad still suspects). These
are all valid reasons, but mine was far less interesting - I simply decided to cut it because I thought it would
suit me (pictured below, right).
This proved diffi cult to digest for the men at the
barbershop I visited with my
boyfriend, at whom most of the
questions about my decision were
directed. Was he “ OK with it”, the
barber asked. I explained that my
boyfriend had picked the shop
and was paying for the cut (as well
as the manicures we’d be getting
after, like a caricature millennial
couple). No barber had ever asked
my boyfriend what his girlfriend
thought of his haircut – whether
he was rocking a skin fade or high
top. My barber, it turned out, had
shaved his own wife’s hair after she
began to experience hair loss, but
another female client had had a far
less tolerant husband, who “hadn’t
touched her since”, he said.
Even when it is absent, black
women’s hair is an incessant
talking point (so much so that poet
Ruth Sutoyé curated an entire
exhibition on the experiences
of black women who shave their
heads ). Our hair, or lack of it, is public property , to be
touched and commented on by just about anyone. It is
perceived to be making a statement beyond appearance:
weaves emulating straight hair are seen as an exercise
in white supremacist self-hate, afro s are seen as radical
political statements, as opposed to the result of letting
hair grow naturally. “How about, at your next TV opp’
you show us your natural hair?” one hair-care brand
tweeted me and Elizabeth Uviebinené, the co-author
of our book Slay in Your Lane last year. The request was
even more peculiar, given the fact that I had regularly
worn my natural hair. But when you are a black woman
in the public eye even the regularity with which you wear
a hairstyle must be dictated.
Here is a tip of my own: if unsolicited commentary
about a black woman’s hair doesn’t include an off er to
help with the several hours of deep conditioning and
detangling that comes with “wash day”, then save it.
At the barbershop,
my boyfriend was
asked whether
he was OK w ith
my haircut
Wifely presence,
from left: Akie Abe,
Małgorzata Tusk,
Jenny Morrison,
Brigitte Macron,
Melania Trump
and Cecilia MorelRELEASED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws