I was reading a BBC report about Mark Zuckerberg’s new statue of his wife and this sentence stood out:
The figure's striking colour and towering size sent the internet buzzing with comparisons to the Avatar characters and jokes about Zuckerberg's identity as a so-called "wife guy".
“Wife Guy” was a new one, so I read on to find out what it meant. But there was no further information in the article. I went to Urban Dictionary, which told me:
WIFE GUY A man whose entire personality revolves around being a married man and perfect partner to his wife. He will constantly name drop his wife, praise her, or champion the sacred unity of marriage even when unprompted. While seemingly genuine in nature, the “Wife Guy” is usually a known cheater who uses his devotion to his wife as a cover for his misdeeds.
Person 1: Can you believe Fred was cheating with Alice? He was always talking about his wife Muriel with such love!
Person 2: Nah, the dude was a total wife guy, I saw him on Tinder last week.
This seemed a bit spicy so I looked around a bit more and found, to my surprise, an entire Wikipedia entry for wife guy:
On social media, a wife guy is a man whose fame is owed to the content he posts about his wife. The term has been applied more broadly to men who use their wife to upgrade their social standing or public persona.
My ears started to burn. The only thing worse than finding out there’s an internet meme you don’t know about is realising it might have been used about you without your knowledge. I thought about all the times I’d talked about Victoria recently: the Linked In Post, the radio ad libs, the casual references in restaurant reviews. I sent her an email:
This is all good fun but I wonder if there’s a more sinister side too.
One of the defining features of internet culture (and judgment) is that nobody is safe. One week you’re on the side of the goodies, calling out problematic behaviour; the next week you find yourself the target of the goodies because somebody’s had a hot new take that people like you are the problem.
Look at the saga of the Australian breakdancer Raygun. Day one she’s a global joke - a rare monocultural moment where everybody is laughing at the same thing. Day two we shouldn’t be laughing at her, she’s a gender studies academic and we’ve fallen into the trap of judging her performance literally. Day three we’re back at her again because she’s a white woman appropriating breakdancing culture and taking the place of a more deserving competitor on the global stage. Day four who are you to speak for black culture? Stand aside and let somebody from the actual breakdancing community have their voice heard - this guy says she earnt her place fair and square. Day five Rayguy speaks, she’s been bullied to an unimaginable extent - what sort of monster makes jokes about a stranger on the internet?
The lesson isn’t that, as a participant in this culture, you should have got it right the first time. The lesson, I think, is that internet shaming culture is inescapable - no matter how you behave, they will eventually get you.
“Wife guy” - despite being objectively pretty funny - could be another example of this. Everyone agrees women have been sidelined and invisibilised for too long, and that men need to be part of the solution. Wife Guy could be a nifty way of making sure that even men who try do the right thing and platform/venerate their partners can still be mocked and destroyed online if necessary.
Still, I might give it a couple of weeks before I post the new statue I commissioned of Victoria.
“Anything can be mocked” is quite freeing. Just be yourself, because even if you try to conform to some kind of “proper” behaviour someone will laugh at you or denigrate you. So f**ck ‘em. Just do you.
It’s such a green flag when someone is clearly proud of their partner and family. I’ll come to the ribbon cutting when you unveil your statue of Victoria!