Stop using Geri Halliwell’s display of loyalty as a stick to beat her with
You don’t hear Tammy Wynette’s Stand By Your Man much anymore – for obvious reasons. The late country singer’s 1968 hit may never have been officially cancelled, but even in her lifetime, Wynette complained that she had “spent 20 or 30 years defending” a song it took her 20 minutes to write.
Certainly today, little can be more “off message” than standing by your man. So the reaction to Geri Halliwell and husband Christian Horner’s “display of unity” at the Bahrain Grand Prix – after the humiliating leak of WhatsApp messages, apparently exchanged between the Red Bull team principal and a female colleague – was all too predictable.
The headlines were overt – “Not much sign of the Girl Power from Ginger Spice” – the dissent from women covert. “I mean it’s her business,” grumbled one female friend, “but why stay? Why do they always stay?”
First of all, they don’t. Second: it’s Geri’s business. We don’t know what really happened. These two have been together nine years. They have a son together; they’ve made a life together. And whether you’re a first, second, third or forty-fifth wave feminist (I’ve lost track of where we are now), isn’t the common denominator “it’s my choice”?
But while these progressive women will viscerally defend a woman’s right to choose what they do with their own bodies, whether to work or raise children or have “tweakments” or not, it seems we’re not so indulgent when it comes to the inner workings of marriage and what we should or should not be ‘allowed’ to put up with from our other halves.
I’ve lost count of the number of conversations I’ve either been involved in or overheard about deal-breaking male behaviour. “He should put out the bins!” one female friend cried, incensed, when I told her that this particular domestic chore fell under my remit. Similarly bossy females (paradoxically stuck in the 1950s) will also tell you that “he” should deal with the carburettor glitch or the home insurance forms. And when it comes to any form of male cheating, a wife’s role is similarly set in stone: she has to leave.
I’ve never understood this. If marriage is about one thing, it’s concessions. Whether it’s the bins or the flings, only you can decide what those concessions (or indeed sacrifices) are. Not society at large; not the group of women down the pub shouting: “you go girl!” And since it’s arguably braver and therefore harder to stay in a marriage, trying to work things out, why is there never any appreciation, let alone praise, for the women who do?
Instead, we blame them. We use their loyalty and their grit as a stick to beat them with. I’ll never forget when Hillary Clinton – in an interview in 2020 – recounted to me how baffled she was by the women who again and again in the run-up to her presidential bid vowed never to support her “because she didn’t do what I would have done”. Often this was followed up by: “But if Bill Clinton ever ran again, I’d vote for him.”
If that doesn’t expose our moralistic opinions on other women’s marriages as redundant, I don’t know what does.
