Jada Pinkett Smith has been forgotten – it’s all about male swagger now
Did Will Smith stop for a moment to ask his wife if she wanted him to storm onstage? Did he wait to find out how she actually felt about Chris Rock’s terrible joke?
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You always expect the Oscars to be a spectacle: the red carpet, the ethereal, frothy dresses, the tearful acceptance speeches, often utterly lacking in self-awareness; the scandal, the snippets from the afterparty, the on-stage lamping of another A-lister because he said something about your “missus”. Sorry, what?
It happened – Will Smith (yes, the Will Smith) got up out of his chair at the Oscars – not a pub, not a working men’s club, not a packed carriage on a train, but the Oscars – and slapped comedian Chris Rock in the face because the latter made an off-colour joke about his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.
This is how it went down: Rock said something mean (and cheap) about Pinkett Smith looking like she could play GI Jane in GI Jane 2, seemingly in reference to her shaved head. In 2018, she revealed she had been diagnosed with alopecia, saying that when she started to lose handfuls of hair she “was literally shaking with fear”.
On hearing the bad taste quip, Smith stormed to the stage and hit Rock square in the jaw, before returning to his seat and warning him: “Keep my wife’s name out your f***ing mouth.”
Most people present seemed to think the altercation was planned, but Smith’s steely, simmering anger seems to have put paid to that idea. As for those of us watching at home? I’ll admit: as a woman, it made me eye-roll.
Why? Well, because so many women will have been in situations almost exactly like this (though swap out the A-listers and glamour for outside-a-kebab-shop at 2am) and rather than coming across as protective or romantic, to me it feels boorish and ungainly – even misogynistic. It marks women out as damsels who need a man to come to their defence with fists when women are quite capable of holding their own when it comes to verbal sparring, thanks.
If Rock had made some sort of physically aggressive move towards Pinkett Smith, then maybe I’d be thinking about things differently. But the idea that Smith’s swagger onto the stage at one of the most high-profile events of the year was warranted and that Pinkett Smith couldn’t be trusted to a) shrug off Rock’s comments, no matter how much they must have stung, or b) mount an acerbic comeback of her own, just doesn’t sit right with me.
It’s all a little too... “are you looking at my missus”; a townie scrap in a bad bar with polished lino floors and strip lighting. It’s smacking someone in the mouth because you assume women are defenceless, that they need protection; that the only way to solve an unpleasant situation is by drawing blood.
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It’s an age-old, pistols-at-dawn duel with men at the centre of the narrative, fired up by bloodlust; and it’s more than that, because it’s using a woman as an excuse to fight.
The actual woman at the centre of the headlines – and her feelings about it all – are forgotten, actually. Did Smith stop for a moment to ask his wife if she wanted him to storm onstage and make a spectacle? Did he wait to find out how she felt about Rock’s terrible joke? Is it not entirely plausible that Smith has, in acting the way he did, made a bad quip a whole lot worse?
As a woman, the idea that a man would fight over me (or for me) makes me feel uneasy and forces me into a position I don’t take to naturally, a role I have never asked for – that of the “damsel in distress”. It’s the stuff of fairytales, but it doesn’t make me swoon – it makes me feel a bit embarrassed. And I would never, ever want someone I love to get hurt because of someone else’s stupid and thoughtless words.
Stick up for us, by all means, but ask us how we want you to do that first. Don’t take away our choices or disregard them because you think you know better. If you do that, you’re just as bad as the person who disrespected us in the first place.