Sometimes, out of contextual necessity, I’ll call my boyfriend my partner more often, in a Borat voice, I call him “my wife.” (The word “husband” has so far proved too stuffy-and the word “hubby” too gross-to really enter the pop-cultural lexicon. At a bar, watching a male friend flirt with a stranger, I observe that my cursed father has found himself a bride. Four of my wives are coming to see “The Fate of the Furious” with me, I think, selecting a block of seats at the theatre. And, once you’ve been around it enough, it is fairly irresistible. It highlights a ludicrous aspect of both heterosexuality and our more general desire to possess those we love. The word “wife,” charged with the frisson of a lime-green mankini, quietly exaggerates our dependence on fixed ideas of one another. There is also pleasure, often of an ironic sort, in calling someone by a name that connotes indelible connection. There is, I think, a low-level longing, in this era of atomization and instability, for that kind of kinship. Around the same time that “my wife” became funny again, teens started calling their favorite celebrities “ Mom.” Hot men became “ Daddy.” This way of speaking is indebted to queer communities and the informal family structures that ball culture invented and provides. Wife-veneration tastes a bit like imprisonment, even today.Ī lot of young people use familial terms non-literally. In public, Joe lavishes praise on Joan as compensation for erasing her. “The Wife” is about Joan Castleman, the long-suffering helpmeet to Joe Castleman, a famous author who builds his legacy by leeching off Joan’s literary ambitions. For a stretch, late in the last century and earlier in this one, literary fiction was overrun with titles that featured wives: there was Audrey Niffenegger’s “ The Time Traveler’s Wife,” Diane Ackerman’s “ The Zookeeper’s Wife,” Amy Tan’s “ The Kitchen God’s Wife,” Paula McLain’s “ The Paris Wife,” Téa Obreht’s “ The Tiger’s Wife,” Anita Shreve’s “ The Pilot’s Wife,” and, of course, “ The Wife,” by Meg Wolitzer, which was adapted into an Oscar-nominated movie starring Glenn Close. Now, decades after the suffrage movement, and women’s lib, and the sexual revolution, the abstract idea of “the wife” still looms large in our cultural imagination-and sanctimony, loyalty, and resentment orbit her like moons. “Battle-axe,” “boss,” and “ball and chain” were all close to the top. In the nineteen-sixties, a survey reported the most common joking terms used by men to refer to their wives. Structurally speaking, the wife was controlled by her husband, but, culturally, the joke was that she controlled him. Women responded in part by carving out their own forms of soft power, and thus the word “wife” took on additional valences. existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband,” as Sir William Blackstone put it, in 1765. According to the doctrine of coverture, which developed in the Middle Ages but aspects of which persisted into the twentieth century, “the very. A wife? In this economy?) The very word is freighted with a history that I would prefer not to join, one in which women have been asked to conceive of their systemic subservience to men as a pleasure and a calling-to make a badge of honor out of a badge of woe, as the Stanford historian Marilyn Yalom suggests in her book “ A History of the Wife,” published in 2001. So much so that, though I have been with the same man for the past ten years and hope to spend the rest of my life with him, I do not want to be his wife. Though I’m a straight woman who has-you hate to see it-organized her life around long-term, monogamous partnerships with men, I’ve always held the word “wife” at a distance. (I haven’t watched the movie in years, but I suspect that it would not entirely hold up in, as they say, the current climate.) It seemed perfectly suited to a man like Borat, who named his son “Hooeylewis” and didn’t believe that women should be allowed to drive. There was something about the word “wife” itself. It was funny to insert the phrase “ Borat voice my wife” into pop songs. It was funny to imagine saying “my wife” so many times that your actual wife divorced you. It was funny to imagine Bob Dylan saying “my wife,” or Al Pacino. But then, several years ago, it circled the Möbius strip of asinine humor and landed on the amusing side: “my wife” was somehow funnier than ever. For a while, it lived alongside Austin Powers one-liners about being horny as a ubiquitous cultural artifact that made most people wince. It might have begun with “Borat.” In that Sacha Baron Cohen mockumentary, from 2006, which was subtitled “Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” the protagonist has a particular way of saying “my wife,” which, after the film’s release, became an inescapable catchphrase.
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