Does the Beckham debacle prove there are no faithful men left? It may not be entirely David Beckham’s fault that we chose to deify him to such an absurd extent. The poor man and his wife came to incarnate Happy Marriagehood without ever having asked to adopt such a weighty responsibility in the first place (which isn’t to say they didn’t cannily play up to it — talk about being hoist by your own petard).
But the beatification of their union is the reason why every dinner party conversation in the past fortnight has included the “If David Beckham can’t keep it zipped, what hope is there for the rest of us?” question.
It’s something that has always puzzled me, actually, this touching faith in the unique purity and quasi-holiness of the Beckham marriage. He has a wife, yes, and two sweet-looking children, but then so do plenty of other people and nobody calls them the Saviours of Monogamy. And although we all assumed Beckham was so simple-minded he’d be delighted by his own deification, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that perhaps he might not have been all that pleased.
Men like to feel there’s some whiff of testosterone about them, the odd rough edge, the suggestion of danger — men (and women) have a reasonable desire to be seen as sexual beings. Turning Beckham into the nation’s favourite teddy — sweet, benign, pretty but sexless to the point of emasculation, with the omnipresent suggestion that he very much wore the sarong in his relationship — must surely have got on his nerves.
It’s always a terrible mistake, categorising people in this way, and doing so almost guarantees infidelity. You can’t think “aah, bless” about an adult man every time you clap eyes on him without eventually causing him to wish he could jump out of his box and give people a jolt. (Remember Hugh Grant, formerly everybody’s favourite stammering Hooray, and by extension unthreatening and rather sweet, until he got hooked up with Divine Brown.) Most men would rather die than be thought of as “sweet” and I can’t say I blame them.
But I do find the way of Beckham’s infidelity mighty peculiar. I mean, who has text sex? It seems a pitiful way of getting your rocks off.
According to Rebecca Loos, Beckham, once in the mood, would start a frenzied exchange of up to 30 frisky texts, two or three times a week. This is weird, no? Given that they both had phones, why not have an actual conversation — there is some kind of connection going on at least if you are talking to someone? And given they were both in the same city, why not actually have sex? Apparently, though, both parties found the idea of tapping the keys of their little phones dizzyingly erotic.
Maybe Beckham, Clinton-like, considered that texting somehow exempted him from the accusation of infidelity, except that since the relationship was also physically consummated, this doesn’t quite hold up.
It’s bewildering to me, the idea that text exchanges by phone should get one heated to the point of orgasm. And the idea that one of the most admired men in the universe should be lying there panting away with his hand down his shorts and the other busy with his keypad would be hilarious in the extreme if it weren’t so sad and grotty.
Anyway, now that Beckham’s proclivities are out in the open, we collectively seem to be going for the spurned-wife-in-denial, head-in-the-sand response.
The Sun and the Daily Mirror ran telephone polls last week asking whether, in the face of rather overwhelming evidence, their readers felt that Beckham had indeed played away from home. Sixty per cent of Sun readers and 65% of Mirror ones felt he had not.
Sky also ran a poll after screening its interview with Rebecca Loos; the majority of viewers still maintained she had made it all up. This approach, interestingly, has also been adopted by Mrs Beckham, who once said that her heart would break if her husband were ever unfaithful. However, the majority of the men I’ve asked about this say that Beckham’s remark to Loos about finding his wife’s emaciated body unsexy is the crucial clue: apparently she’s not the woman he married and this, whether you’re David Beckham or Joe Bloggs, is a turn-off. Which is a bit of a downer for all of us girls.
In France they see things differently. “Quel homme!” (“What a man!”) was the headline in Thursday’s Le Parisien. And you do have to ask yourself whether the French/Jimmy Goldsmith model — wife, mistress, no questions asked — is not rather a good one. It certainly makes for long marriages — marriages that endure, often with some degree of heroism, as they’re supposed to.
Before divorce became as easy to come by as a pint of milk, women closed their eyes to infidelity as long as their position as wife was not assailed, which — crucially — it seldom was.
The advent of serial monogamy, however, means that a serious affair nowadays turns into the next marriage, and I don’t know that this is a particularly good development. You’d have to have an almost unimaginably bad marriage in the first place to feel it was so dead it wasn’t worth saving.
On paper it’s easy enough to find the eyes-closed approach demoralising and doormat-ish, but actually I don’t find the chic Parisians who yawn and wave a bored, manicured hand at the mention of their husbands’ infidelities doormat-ish in the least: it seems to me to be the only sensible response.
Much has been written about Victoria Beckham’s crazed, rictus-like grin hiding palpable desperation over the past two weeks, but I can’t see what else she could do.
Being photographed looking stroppy or tearful — the Liz Hurley method — simply reinforces the idea that nothing in their lives is off limits. Being photographed looking happy, on the other hand — no matter how forced the grin — says yes, I know the cameras are there, but some things are off limits, so here, get a nice shot of me smiling and bugger off.
If Victoria can stomach the details of the relationship having been made public — and it’s quite a big and humiliating “if”, given the squirm-inducing nature of Rebecca Loos’s confessions — I have no doubt she’ll not only keep her man but also go on to have the marriage we imagined the Beckhams had in the first place: the kind that endures.
- Kevin White, a Whitehall mandarin who has been a civil servant for 26 years, says women are “unambitious” and obsessed with childcare, and that this makes them happy to stay in low-paid, family friendly jobs.
His wife, incidentally, is chairwoman of the Sheffield West Primary Care Trust in South Yorkshire and is said to be responsible for a £120m budget. The couple have two grown-up children.
I wonder what kind of primitive imbecile can say a thing like that. Obviously women are obsessed with childcare, because childcare is what enables them to go to work. And they want to go to work — despite the crippling cost of the childcare and the fact they are leaving their children — because they are ambitious. D’oh!
Now I am wondering whether Mr White is quite all there. If he isn’t, we must forgive him. If he is, he should explain himself, sharpish — and it had better be good.
