What do you call a man who stands there smiling and singing as his
scantily clad wife straddles a chair and shakes her rear end for other
men’s titillation?
I’m certain if I look through enough Jay Z song titles, I’ll come up
with the right name for his role in Beyoncé’s performance at the Grammy
Awards Sunday night. Rhymes with Goodyear. . . ? Well, how about I just
call him a poor excuse for a husband.
For years, these award ceremonies have pushed the envelope; Beyoncé’s
booty-shaking was certainly no worse than Miley Cyrus’s twerking or any
number of other performances by Madonna, for instance. But there’s
something particularly icky about doing it while your husband looks on
approvingly.
“Honestly, I didn’t want to watch Jay Z and Beyoncé’s foreplay,” says
Charlotte Hays, author of “When Did White Trash Become the New Normal?”
Indeed, the happy couple seems to have completely blurred the line
between what goes on in their bedroom and what happens on national TV.
So much for the woman that Michelle Obama has called “a role model who
kids everywhere can look up to.”
Hays says, “It wasn’t surprising to see Jay Z, looking pleased at his
wife’s hyper-sexualized exhibition on stage.” After all, “he’s made a
living singing lyrics that call women ‘bitches’ and ‘hos,’ so we
shouldn’t be surprised that he objectified his own wife on stage.”
It is a little bit surprising, though, coming so soon after Beyoncé
contributed to the recent feminist manifesto, the Shriver Report. When
she complains that “gender equality is a myth,” one wonders to what
extent her consent to sell sexuality has contributed to the problem.
The sophisticates will say that what we saw Sunday were just the
long-established stage personas of Beyoncé and Jay Z; why should their
marriage change that?
Well, for one thing, the happy couple have invited audiences to
admire their adorable family, with dad even joking about his daughter’s
sippy cups when he accepted an award on Sunday. So they’re suggesting to
audiences that this kind of public sexual behavior is compatible with a
loving modern marriage.
Which brings us to that odd mass wedding, sort of a Hollywood version
of those creepy Moonie affairs, as Queen Latifah officiated at the
joining in matrimony of 33 couples as part of the awards ceremony.
Asked about it, she said, “The weight of it comes down, because it
wouldn’t matter if you’re same-sex couples or heterosexual couples or
interracial couples, it doesn’t matter to me, this is someone’s life
committed to one another, and you want to make sure you do it right.”
Does that kind of commitment entail watching approvingly as your partner
shows off her bootyliciousness?
Feminists will argue that Beyoncé had a career before she got
married; why should marriage change how she performs? It’s a good
question. How does being married change a relationship? Or, in Beyoncé’s
terms, if he likes it, why should he put a ring on it?
It’s a question that François Hollande asked and answered easily:
There’s not much reason for men to put a ring on it at all, as far as
the French president is concerned.
Hollande just decided to trade in one girlfriend for a younger
version. His now-ex was mad enough, according to some reports to destroy
$3 million worth of property in the Élysée Palace, but you might
reasonably ask what she expected. A ring is no guarantee (as the first
wife of Hollande’s predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, learned), but it’s at
least a suggestion that there is a permanent future for a relationship.
Still, this may simply be the state of relations between the sexes.
Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, says
that women today have struck a kind of “grand bargain.”
He says, “Women get contraception and the ability to limit and space
their children, and the chance to fashion careers — things that sound
good and are often experienced as such — and in return men get to decide
just how invested in a relationship they actually have to be.”
The problem, he notes, is that “men prefer cheaper sex” — that is, they prefer not to be more invested than they have to be.
Of course, those who do make the investment typically prefer not to share the proceeds with a prime-time TV audience.
