A wife is not a trophy
Trophies are placeholders for merit. They represent an accomplishment. We give them to kids for scoring lots of goals. In a particular Canadian trophy tradition, we pass around a chunk of silver alloy, sip champagne from its bowl, engrave it with the name of the winning team, and tour it around to be photographed.
Trophies also carry gruesome connotations. They are, literally, appendages of war and serial murder. We similarly associate trophies with the hunt, where an antler stands in for man’s command over moose.
Trophies are about power. They are collected by the one who has dominated the other. Not indicative of just any accomplishment, like adding superfoods to your diet or becoming more mindful, trophies announce that you had power over a thing that didn’t.
A trophy is also a thing we call women.
The trophy wife: the derogatory name given to a woman seen as having little to offer her male partner besides her physical attractiveness. Since women’s conformity to a narrow beauty ideal is paid such a premium in our culture, this woman is seen as a status symbol for her usually older, always wealthier, husband.
Unfortunately for modern women, the term has been bobbing around again — and not in ways we might like. In 2013, ABC Studios launched the apparently ironic “Trophy Wife” — a now-defunct sitcom starring Malin Akerman, who played a “reformed party girl” and third wife of a lawyer.
In a disquieting twist, in 2014, the term appeared in reference to Amal Alamuddin’s marriage to George Clooney. This time, we were meant to be happy about it. An article in the Globe and Mail announced the Clooney-Alamuddin wedding as “a revolution of sorts in Trophy Wife-ism.” The Globe noted that Amal Clooney’s proven intellectual agility and career success outweigh those of other famous women who have married famous men. After all, “Ms. Amal is fluent in French, English, Arabic, and perfect.”
In December, Kristen Houghton for the Huffington Post gave us “the new trophy wife,” which, she argued, “has taken on a new, more upscale meaning” since “men are finding the most attractive and sexually desirable women are not brainless beauties whose sole function is to look good and stay quiet, but women who are making good money and are in positions of power.”
Let’s break this down, shall we? While it might be tempting to get excited by the addition of “smart” to a list of women’s qualifications, this new and improved trophy wife only narrows the definition of ideal, marriageable femininity. First of all, to be a status symbol, a woman must be heterosexual and seeking marriage. Second, she must now be skinny, conventionally pretty, intellectually ambitious, and rich enough to afford Oscar de la Renta to be deemed trophy material. And while we narrow down the ideal, marriageable woman, dragging with us a host of assumptions about her desire and ambition, we continue to objectify her, in true trophy fashion.
The new trophy wife, as embodied by Amal Clooney, reproduces a climate where women should still aspire to be objects of male achievement through marriage. Barbara Walters perfectly conveys this notion in naming Amal Clooney the “most fascinating person” of 2014 and calling her marriage to George Clooney “one of the greatest achievements in human history.” While Walters’s tongue may have been in cheek — but who knows — I have a feeling Amal Clooney would list other accomplishments as her proudest. Like, I don’t know, advising Kofi Annan. Like graduating from Oxford and New York University.
Objectifying women is not the only problem with new trophy wife-ism. More to the issue is the fact that we are encouraged to see women’s expanding credentials as a step forward.
Back in 2004, Psychology Today announced the “rise of the power bride” — men’s supposedly new interest in a woman who can hold a steady job, or, their desire for a “high-octane wife.” The article argues that an unstable economy may lead to “peer marriage,” or marriage among couples with similar credentials, since single-earning families are less financially secure than in the past.
In the context of an unstable economy and the rise of dual-income families, our retention of the word “trophy” should tell us that the “peer” in “peer marriage” does not mean women and men are considered equals.
In a disturbing though unsurprising explanation of the Amal factor, anthropologist Stephen Juan tells the Today Show what a “really strong man” wants, accepting that now — thank goodness! — “wives can be beautiful, intelligent and have careers and opinions just as strong as their partner.” Can they? How encouraging!
In an age when misogyny is marked by domestic violence, murdered aboriginal women, and rape culture, our depiction of this new woman-trophy as optimistic is more disconcerting than funny. The fact that we see “progress” in a trophy who is changing shape — or, more accurately, lengthening her résumé — is grim. The new trophy wife, perched at the intersection of classism, (hetero)sexism, ableism, and an astonishingly narrow beauty ideal, is not about Amal Clooney. It is about our culture of objectifying women and positioning them as indicators of male success. Plainly, it is about the objectification of women remaining so normalized that we can hardly pin it down.
Author and filmmaker Jean Kilbourne connects objectification to violence in her documentary film Killing Us Softly. Examining gender, advertising, and popular culture, Kilbourne argues that when we objectify women, we subject them to violence because it is easier to reconcile violence against someone who is already dehumanized.
Amal Clooney’s rise to Hollywood fame has shown that we thirst for new representations of women. But we can’t help but view her “success” through the male gaze of the media. If only we were at the point where women could demand more from our culture than “It’s okay to be smart.”Read more at:orange formal dresses
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