Cheeky Girls’ Monica Claims Boris Johnson ‘Kept His Hands In Pockets \[…\] To Avoid Touching Us’

Ah, Boris. Reserved. Conservative, with Cs both upper and lower case. It will be no surprise to devoted fans of our esteemed prime minister, then, to hear Monica Irimia of noughties sensation The Cheeky Girls describe his admirable restraint at a 2011 Charity Event. Speaking to The Sun yesterday{ =nofollow}, Monica explained how the politician, then eight years away from becoming PM, ‘kept his hands in his pockets all [the] way through during taking the photos with us, to make sure he didn’t touch us.’ Meanwhile, ‘everybody else put their hands over our shoulders, that kind of friendly pose for photos. Boris was the only person who tried to appear very distant and neutral. It gave me a bitter taste, the whole encounter’, said Monica.

I’d add all kinds of softening clauses, if there weren’t photos to prove it: deeply weird images. Boris performing abstinence – Monica and Gabriela on either side, with his hands practically stapled inside his suit like someone who needs to sit on them to stop a compulsion. Hey, you might say, isn’t this to be applauded? Aren’t we celebrating men who steer clear of presumptuous overfamiliarity, who refuse to add their raindrops to the accumulating flood of microaggressions that make it so exhausting to be female? Yes. And no.

This is nuanced, but I won’t be the only woman who reads Monica’s statements and exhales a tired sigh of recognition. I have absolutely no way of knowing how the exchange went between Johnson and Monica, but the story makes me think of an ex-boyfriend’s father pantomiming Hands Off when he kissed me goodbye.

Declaring (physically or verbally) your noble non-harassment of a woman does a couple of yucky things – first, it’s tediously self-congratulatory (aren’t I marvellous? I didn’t even cop a feel!). Second, it reinforces the objectification it appears to renounce. You know what else you don’t touch? Dirty things. Forbidden, dangerous things. There’s nothing like overcorrection to make you feel like an object (and a problematic one, at that). You become categorised as a temptation to be resisted. It’s a sneaky double bind, because the declaration is of their virtue as much as your troubling desirability. If you see a woman clearly, you see her as an equal – how would you pose with, say, Clive from accounts for a photo at the office party? I bet it wouldn’t be a recoiling performance of non-contact.

So: try really hard, now. If you’re still struggling, pretend she’s a bloke and touch her that way. Maybe ‘hands over […] shoulders’. Maybe ‘that kind of friendly pose for photos’. The distinction between not doing something and performing its not-being-doneness is crucial. Woven into the fabric of such a performance is the glaring message that It Is Squarely On Your Mind. When men declare that they’re not looking at your legs, they’ve found a way to verbalise that they’d like to.

Sometimes, what we don’t do speaks as much as what we do.

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