I used to have a friend who was forever fiddling with her husband’s hair in public — patting it down, tidying up the parting, as though he were a scruffy three-year-old. You kept expecting her to spit on a handkerchief and rub his face clean. I was always appalled by what this seemed to say about their relationship, namely that she was a mummy-wife.
There are a lot of these about. Their self-appointed role in life seems to be to treat their spouses as though they were small, mildly irritating but endearing children. This doesn’t seem to me to be what adult partnerships ought to be about; I find such relationships quite disturbing.
This same friend also spoke for her husband in restaurants. “He doesn’t like spinach, do you darling? He prefers carrots.” You sensed she had to restrain herself to desist from asking him if he wanted to go to the bathroom after a couple of glasses of wine.
Such relationships may be unsettling, but that doesn’t mean they’re unusual. I remember watching the television coverage of the US election back in November and noticing how a smiling Laura Bush seemed to be holding George W’s hand. In fact she was patting and stroking it reassuringly, and I remember thinking to myself that she was a mummy-wife too (and, as such, diametrically opposed to Teresa Heinz Kerry who, like Hillary Clinton, is the antithesis of the mummy-wife, being more of an alpha-male husband).
As it happens, Laura Bush has the highest approval rating of any first lady in living memory: it currently stands at 71%. Her popularity outranks her husband’s by nearly 20%, and 55% of Democrats like her, even if they loathe her other half. Her fans don’t consist solely of conservative evangelicals. Furthermore, nearly four-fifths of Americans recently told pollsters she has “improved the image of the office of first lady”.
To put this in context, Hillary Clinton’s approval rating as her husband went into his second term was a mere 47%. So just what is it about Mrs Bush, a former librarian with more than a dash of Stepford about her, that makes her quite so appealing? Does every man secretly yearn for a mummy-wife, and — please God, no — do women actually yearn to become one? The obvious, somewhat demoralising lesson to draw from these figures is that nobody likes a smartypants or, rather, that any noticeably intelligent and opinionated female consort is seen by the majority of people as an albatross rather than an asset. See also the almost universally loved Norma Major v the rather less popular, cleverer Cherie Blair.
This doesn’t mean Laura Bush is dim. By all accounts (and not unlike Mrs Major in her time) she deliberately hides her brightness under a bushel. And America loves her for it.
She is pretty, neat, smiley, unruffled. The causes she has espoused during her tenure as first lady — literacy and education — are uncontroversial. Everything about Laura Bush indicates that her primary role in life is as a faithful wife and mother. If she has any opinions she is careful never to articulate them.
Like the spookily passive, “perfect” Bree in Desperate Housewives, she doesn’t have a hair or a thought out of place. The difference is that Bree’s husband finds his wife’s perfection claustrophobic and is practically broken backed with misery as a result, whereas neither George W nor his compatriots can sing Laura’s praises highly enough.
It’s perplexing, but the fact remains that we can make as much fun of these women as we like — it’s hard to know where to start, with their immaculate cream cashmere, stay-put hair, benign smileyness, or their overgroomed, mask-like complexions. But all the sniggering in the world doesn’t alter the fact that, for a sizable majority, such women are the dreamt-of ideal.
I can see that they have their advantages: unargumentative, unstrident, always photogenic, never loud. You’re unlikely to find a Laura Bush type knocking back the Bacardi Breezers all night and then passing out on the pavement, or putting cream crackers in the children’s lunch boxes because she forgot to buy bread. That aside, though, it’s hard to fathom out the appeal without resorting to words such as “subjugation”.
For Mrs Bush there is at least a big White House-shaped prize to reward her blandness. But what about the other women who make a virtue of blending into the background so well that you barely notice they exist? Were they born that way or is their entire way of life the result of a cynical, conscious decision to play the meek little helpmate to full effect? The sad truth of it is that playing meek works. Those women do get noticed — by men. Anyone bewildered by how some apparently unexceptional-seeming women make a career out of collecting romances with desirable men should bear in mind that anyone can do it.
It’s just that few choose to, because it’s exhausting and demoralising permanently to present oneself as a grinning ninny.
In order to reel in any man, all a woman has to do is pretend he is the most fascinating man in the world. So dazzlingly intelligent that our tiny brain recoils in awed bewilderment; so devastatingly interesting that we can’t sleep at night for remembering the genius of their conversation; so absolutely remarkable in the sack that (blush, simper) we have never known the like of it.
I’m not for an instant suggesting Laura Bush is as manipulative as some of her sisters — and clearly she isn’t interested in scalp collecting. But it would be doing her an injustice, I think, to assume little Laura, meek and mild, sprang out fully formed saying “never mind me”. Hers was an informed choice, which has paid dividends. It would be a mistake to dismiss or patronise the Lauras of this world: there is always a heart of steel under the fetching little blouse, and the unfortunate truth of the matter is that, more often than not, such women win their prize.
- Enough two-year-olds are being diagnosed as clinically obese for it to have become a matter for concern, according to a pair of professors at University College London, who carried out a study into 100 obese toddlers. They found that many of the children already had health problems normally found in adults, including high blood pressure and insulin resistance syndrome, which can lead to diabetes.
“You only need a child to have a tiny amount of excess food every day from birth to result in an obese child by two,” Dr Russell Viner said last week.
“A tiny amount of excess food” translates very nearly into “sweeties”. I was thinking about this the other day in Sainsbury’s. In the baby food aisle there are dozens of different puddings available, and a large proportion of these contain chocolate.
My baby has a heart condition, which means we need to be especially careful but, I was thinking, is it really a good idea to get any small baby used to the taste of chocolate rather than to the taste of, say, bananas? Aren’t baby food manufacturers behaving irresponsibly by manufacturing products that contain high doses of sugar and chocolate? And does there need to be a full-blown epidemic of baby obesity before they recognise this?
