Here is a short list of things that you might just, conceivably, trick your partner into doing: opening a door that has a bag of flour balanced above it; adding salt to their tea; that game where you hold your finger and thumb into a circle shape and then shout ‘aaaaahhh’ when they look at it. You’ll notice that I haven’t included ‘ejaculating into your vagina and impregnating you’ to the list because, well, that’s not really a trick; it’s a choice.
I bring this up because a new advert from Crown paints - which explores the novel combination of Busby Berkely-style choreography and undisguised misogyny - has decided to re-tread that oldest of paranoid bigotries; that women sleep around, get pregnant and then trick men into thinking it’s theirs. It’s in Euripides, it’s in Thomas Hardy, it’s in every soap opera and now, disappointingly, it’s being used to sell paint.
In the advert, a group of singers, all dressed in yellow, sit on a big fluffy banquette and sing-rap a little story about a millennial couple who met at at rave. A woman with a high ponytail sings to camera that: ‘Now there’s a baby coming and they don’t know what it is.’ To which her hilarious fluff companion adds, with a cheeky behind-his-hand-eyebrows-raised-oi-oi-expression-of-faux-humour that ‘Hannah’s hoping for a girl, Dave’s just hoping that it’s his’.
Sorry, what? Dave’s just hoping that it’s his? Zoom out and - oh look - the people are all actually reclining on a big paint roller. Presumably about to be crushed into a smear of wet bones and sloppy organs against a wall when Hannah starts painting. But what was that they said about Dave hoping that it’s his? This man kneeling on the floor painting a footstool despite not having moved a tray of paint off the surface he’s supposedly trying to paint, genuinely suspects his partner of being pregnant with another man’s sperm? That’s the funny joke?
Let me add my voice to a thousand other online women - including the comedian Jenny Eclair - by saying, bollocks. Specifically bollocks, in fact. Because - and it’s so easy to forget this when you’ve spent too long swimming through the Lynx-scented water of sexist culture - pregnancies happen thanks to sperm, not just wombs. Shooting sperm from your testicles into someone’s body is an act of potential impregnation. People with wombs cannot, through guile, cunning or dishonesty, create a baby in their uterus without the presence of sperm. And most - but by no means all - people who thrust sperm into someone’s vagina are men and they do so during sex. Pregnancy is caused by sperm. Paternity uncertainty is caused by sperm. Abortions - when they happen - are caused by sperm.
As I pointed out in my first book, The Panic Years, of every single man I have ever had sex with, not one of them had ever taken the whole responsibility for not getting me pregnant. Oh sure, some of them asked if I was ‘using anything’ or ‘on the pill’ but most of them didn’t do that. When it came to the moment of ejaculation, they did so without caution, concern or care, despite being taught, probably since primary school, that this is how babies are made. So if Dave is uncertain as to the father of his partner’s child that’s either because he is an amoeba who doesn’t know how pregnancies happen or because he’s been ejaculating into his partner but simply doesn’t trust her. The key fact is that he’s almost certainly been ejaculating into his partner. Wow, it turns out you can write the phrase ‘ejaculating into his partner’ so many times that it starts to sound more like chewing than real words. But anyway, we know he has probably been ejaculating into his partner, or undergoing fertility treatment, because otherwise he would be certain that the baby wasn’t his. If he and Hanna hadn’t had penetrative sex to the point of ejaculation for a year, or hadn’t been undergoing fertility treatment, and she was now six months pregnant, he would know it wasn’t his. But clearly they have, because he’s only hoping that it’s his.
At least he’s hoping, I suppose. That shows some sense of responsibility and willingness towards fatherhood and maturity. Not like all those men who claim that a woman just got pregnant to ‘trap’ them into a relationship. Ah yes. The trap. That lovely trap that involves nine months of discomfort, a likely loss of income and your own possible death (giving birth - by any means - is one of the most dangerous things a human body can do). We hear rather little about the men who ‘trap’ women into pregnancy by simply refusing to use contraception, don’t we? But perhaps that’s a discussion for another time.
This unfortunate Crown advert ends with Hannah doing a rather reckless stretch towards her Velux window, standing on a white carpet, without a dust sheet, while holding a wet roller. And then the natty little slogan comes up: It’s not just paint. It’s personal. Yes. It is personal. It’s personal to me. As a woman who has been pregnant and as someone who is now raising a son, I find it personally offensive that we are using a form of prejudice and sexism that has resulted in the death of women for centuries - namely, that they are cuckolds and liars, who trick men into impregnating them or lie about the parentage of their child - in order to sell yellow paint. I’m bored of twee sexism. I’m bored of pastel-coloured misogyny. I’m bored of plinky plonky hand drawn bigotry. It’s boring. And it’s boorish.