Why I’d do anything to please my husband
Celia Walden
‘Miranda Kerr’s comments were provocative, primitive, off-message – and true’
There isn’t enough Pepto-bismol in the world to steady the stomach lurch prompted by the expression “slipping into my feminine”. And when I first read the comments Miranda Kerr made on marriage in an interview with Net-aporter’s online magazine,
The Edit, I was forced to do my breathing exercises until the page swam back into focus. “At work,” the 34-year-old Australian explained in a series of sentences that
I think we can all assume ended on up-notes, “I’m like ‘We need to do this!’ and, ‘This needs to happen.’ But at home, I slip into my feminine and empower Evan [Spiegel] to be in his masculine.”
So far, so stomachcurdling. And Kerr only fuels further feminist ire and derision with every subsequent word: the notion that in a domestic setting she should be “more gentle” and “lean back” rather than
“in” à la Sheryl Sandberg. The reminder that because men are “visual” creatures it’s important to
“make a little effort”. So that when her Snapchat billionaire husband of three months comes home, “I make sure to have a nice dress on and the candles lit.” And fine, you might not expect a woman who struts down the runway in stilettos, underwear and a pair of crystal-studded angel wings to be expounding Gloria Steinem-style feminist theorems, but this… this is outlandishly provocative, hilariously primitive and so off-message, Kerr might as well have come out and said women can’t map read to save their lives.
It’s also all true – at least in my opinion. And
I like Kerr very much for saying it. Moreover I think it’s brave in a way that stripping off on Instagram and going on about periods like fellow supermodel Natalia Vodianova in her “Let’s Talk About It, Period” initiative, isn’t. Everyone can walk down the street naked and discuss menstruation 24/7 if that’s how they want to spend their time, but it might get chilly and it will certainly become tedious. The truth is that femininity has been politicised to the extent that wanting to be feminine is seen as a weakness. I’d be laughed out of the pub for telling girlfriends that I love dressing up for my husband and still crave his compliments and admiration more than anyone else’s, even after 11 years together – mainly because it’s a revoltingly soupy thing to say, but also because the attitude that our mothers and grandmothers quite naturally espoused within their marriages is now seen as some terrible form of debasement and servitude.
Societal pressure today is such that women are encouraged to take boardroom aggression home with them and engage in some sort of marital headlock over who does the dishes, makes the supper, puts the kids to bed and picks up the dirty socks from the floor – all the while dressed in the most slovenly, asexual outfits they were able to dig out of the dirty wash pile. Well that might be equality but it’s not love, and those stupid tokenistic socks that have somehow come to symbolise everything that’s most unfair about the gender divide are not worth divorcing over. Hell, I’ll come round and pick them up if it helps.
Because here’s the tricky thing with marriage: since you’re supposed to love one another, it would follow that you might do the occasional thing to – whisper it – please one another. But that really is subversive. Next thing you know I’ll be donning a pastel organza gown and a pair of marabou mules, making a candlelit supper for the lord and master and “slipping into my feminine”.