David Justice, former MLB player and Hall-of-Famer and ex-husband of Halle Berry, was featured on the podcast, All The Smoke, hosted by former NBA players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson, recently, A clip from the episode, where David discusses what went wrong in his marriage, (which ended almost three decades ago), to Halle, is unsurprisingly going viral.
According to David, at the time, he thought because Halle didn’t cook or clean, he didn’t see her as motherly. However, looking back, he sees the error of his ways. He also stated that outside of that, they “never really had any major issues,” besides her filing a restraining order against him. While David may now realize he was being a bit unjust 30 years ago, by asking a Hollywood starlet to make sure there was a hot plate on the stove at night, his previous sentiments are still widely regarded as gospel. No matter how renowned, acclaimed or booked and busy she may be, a woman must still perform her performative wifely duties.
Why performative, you ask? Because men who are not wives nor have them, have been known to be able to perform these functions on their own, some even without having to outsource these tasks. Yet for some reason, upon marriage, they are automatically relegated to the wife even if she works outside the home the same amount of time as her husband and even if he may be better at them than she is.
Cooking and cleaning are essential to any functional household, but who performs the tasks themselves can also be a source of skewed power dynamics, most specifically when it comes to women. Where some men see the opportunity to help their partner and contribute to the fluency and efficiency of their home, others see it as an opportunity to humble their spouses and take credit for work they don’t perform, because they see marriage as a company where the CEO’s greatest requirement is that he have a penis, it doesn’t even have to work. Halle and David were comparably famous at the time of their union, but it was Halle who was penalized for not doing something they could both easily afford to outsource.
There is a particular obsession with humbling women who dare to gauge themselves on their own merits and accomplishments, women who dare to dream as big or bigger than the next man, women who are independent and who’ve found out that success doesn’t require them to peek from behind a man’s back to see it. The woman who wants to be a housewife doesn’t have to be convinced of a man’s power, doesn’t need to see it destroy her to know how strong it is; she’s already on board. The goal is to get the woman who doesn’t agree that she is less than something she can create.
That’s how you know how strong you really are, when you break the strongest ones.
Trevor Noah touched on this in his book, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood. “The way my mother always explained it, the traditional man wants a woman to be subservient, but he never falls in love with subservient women. He’s attracted to independent women. ‘He’s like an exotic bird collector,’ she said. ‘He only wants a woman who is free because his dream is to put her in a cage.’”
Women are expected to forgo their hopes and dreams to ensure their man has a hot meal, even if that dream is to win an Oscar. Women are taught that serving a man is some lofty goal, as if it is some badge of honor to be a maid in your own home.
The gag is, not every woman is convinced that the same god men cite as their directive for why women should serve, still gave that directive to the one with the smaller set of hands.
