It’s a well-trodden path: man is accused of something bad, their name gets splashed across the front pages, hot takes arrive on Twitter and soon thereafter, people start to look into the women in their life. It’s a fascination that Billie Piper - erstwhile pop star and current successful actress, who also happens to be the ex-wife of failed London Mayoral Candidate Laurence Fox - knows only too well. But it begs the question: why must we always drag wives, girlfriends, exes, mothers, daughters and sisters into men’s wrongdoing?
The latest candidate for public scrutiny based on the behaviour of their spouse is Deborah Bashir, wife of Martin Bashir, whose controversial BBC Panorama interview of the late Princess Diana has this week been labelled by Supreme Court Judge Lord Dyson as 'unreliable', 'devious' and 'dishonest' following an inquiry.
According to Google Trends data, following the release of the report’s findings after investigating Martin Bashir, searches spiked for 'Who is Martin Bashir wife' and 'Deborah Bashir', prompting tabloids to run informative news stories looking into her life and their children. A few of these articles noted that Deborah Bashir, a journalist, is a 'private person', owing to the fact her Instagram account is not publicly available, but neglected to mention that regardless of whether or not she lives her life in the public eye, her husband’s actions are not her responsibility. Nor are they a reflection of her own personal judgement.
Does their ability to remain in a marriage really tell us much about them at all? And does proximity to a wrongdoer make you guilty by association?
I’m not ashamed to admit that I have googled the marital status of prominent people in the past — if the internet has encouraged our curiosity as humans, wanting to know about the private lives of others is a natural extension of that. But at some point we have to interrogate this habit and ask ourselves why we do it. What exactly are we hoping to find out? Does their ability to remain in a marriage really tell us much about them at all? And does proximity to a wrongdoer make you guilty by association?
You don’t have to look far for evidence of women being blamed for the behaviour of men. It’s baked into the way perpetrators of violence against women and girls are often described in relation to women, as husbands and fathers, as though this somehow makes their awful actions harder to understand. Similarly, women in the public eye are often negatively perceived or judged by incredibly personal decisions they make about their private lives, particularly after news of wrongdoing comes to light relating to a spouse or romantic partner — ask Hillary Clinton.
The problem with all of this is that it rests on faulty logic: that a person can ever be held accountable for the actions of another or, even more dangerous, that a woman’s influence in a man’s life is somehow powerful enough to steer them on a morally respectable course. At this point in our voyage through time and space, we have more than enough evidence stacked up to show how people can act differently in public and private, or that lies and deceptions can exist within even the most transparent of relationships. And that’s before you even factor in how romance and love can obscure someone’s better judgement or manipulate their thoughts or feelings.
I have no idea of the dynamic that exists within Martin Bashir’s relationship with his wife — it’s neither relevant to this news story or any of our business as far as I’m concerned — but that the response of so many people to the news of yet another man doing something bad was to look into his wife is, to me, just another example of a wider trend of dragging women into men’s misdeeds. It’s an implication that guilt is somehow contagious.
Ultimately, just because your partner exercises poor moral judgement, it doesn’t mean that you do by being with them. Their actions aren’t a reflection on you. And beyond that, do we really expect wives and girlfriends to be on top of everything their partners are doing at every available moment? Most of us are too busy doing our own work and trying to live our own lives in a morally respectable way to have time to mother our partners and keep them on the straight and narrow.
At its most pernicious, this trend risks tarnishing the reputations of women who have worked hard over the course of their lives to establish themselves — often fighting against institutional sexism and a social system that works against them — only to be felled by a claim about someone they’ve shared a bed with.
Most of us are too busy doing our own work and trying to live our own lives in a morally respectable way to have time to mother our partners and keep them on the straight and narrow.
It would perhaps be less infuriating if men were held to the same moral standards as women but — spoiler alert — they’re not. I can’t even remember a time in recent history when a man’s career has been damaged by the actions of his wife or romantic partner — and I don’t remember Denis Thatcher being held to account for Margaret’s mistakes, or his professional reputation being damaged by his proximity to her.
We are all of us accountable for the things we do in this world and, by allowing women to absorb responsibility for some of the damage caused by the wrongdoing of men, we are simultaneously reducing the culpability of the guilty party. If we truly want to live in a world where men and women are considered to be real equals, addressing this glaring moral standard would be a good place to start.
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