Polly Vernon
A TRUSTED SOURCE (the internet) informs me that Jamie Vardy, husband of Rebekah, has just this minute unfollowed Wayne Rooney, husband of Coleen, on social media: a thoroughly modern expression of marital solidarity engendered by a ground zero event I’m calling ‘The Wagruption™’(you’re welcome). You know exactly of what I speak, but I’ll recap anyway, because it is just such fun!
To recall how Coleen Rooney baited the operative now officially known as ‘Rebekah Vardy’s Account’ by planting fake stories in her Instagram Stories, then waiting to see if they turned up on the pages of The Sun newspaper, which – they did! How she (Coleen) played a patient long-game on her sting, taking five whole months to deliver the findings of her arch-sleuthery to a hitherto oblivious world in an open letter, which, among other things, made the best use of… ellipses we shall probably ever know (when Coleen reveals the only element not blocked from her Instagram Stories account, and therefore most likely to be leaking the faux-facts on her personal life, was… Rebekah Vardy’s Account!)!
In all my years of being far more interested in Wag-life than I am football – a drab little game which only exists to facilitate the lifestyle, luxuries and complex psychodramas of those women who marry into it – I never dreamed of a plot development this clever, cunning, captivating! Long may it unfurl! May its tentacles reach deep into several ostensibly unrelated aspects of public life; may its ramifications be felt until Christmas!
‘But doesn’t it play unfairly into the problematic narrative that women are conniving bitches eternally pitted against each other because that’s the way the patriarchy likes it?’ asked my friend K, a man currently enduring a feminist awakening (he just watched The Handmaid’s Tale). ‘No,’ I replied, ‘it fairly plays into the narrative women are conniving bitches eternally pitted against each other, and I’ve no idea if the patriarchy likes it like that, I haven’t met it.’ The Wagruption is especially precious to me because I am bored to tears of current fashions for portraying women as either victims or brave, righteous, agents for change – and absolutely nothing more.
It started with Weinstein and has ended with a sense that, as a gender, we’re contractually obliged to act downtrodden yet unbowed at every opportunity, half-destroyed by past experiences yet determined to build a better world for our daughters, infinitely supportive of one another and like we’ve never known the dark side of a bitchy Whatsapp group, when honestly? I’ve got four on the go, right now. The Wagruption honours everything we’re meant to pretend women aren’t any more, specifically: sneaky, resourceful, double-crossing, funny, magnificent in our desire for petty vengeance, and stone-cold bitches to boot, and: oh God! I’ve missed that! I’ve missed us! Haven’t you?