There are many things that belong firmly in the past, and I think we can all agree that The Crystals’ 1962 song “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)” is one of them. So it’s a bit of a stretch that the president of France is asking the world to accept his line about the incident everyone is talking about: she shoved me in the face and it felt like “joking” around.
But that is what Emmanuel Macron would have us believe about the moment – caught on camera as he and wife Brigitte were about to leave their plane, having touched down in Vietnam – when his spouse raised both hands to his face and pushed him sharply away in full sight of cabin crew.
This autumn, I will have been married for 30 years. I sometimes lose my rag with my husband, but the worst I’ve ever done is yelled and stormed out of the room with a dramatic flounce. And that’s when no one was watching.
There is something profoundly, viscerally troubling about any kind of angry gesture directed towards a person’s face; a part of the anatomy that is so nakedly vulnerable at all times.
I was a child in the non-PC 1970s when parents still sometimes smacked their children’s bottoms as punishment for the worst misdemeanours, including my very kind mother. Even so, I remember Mum telling me that when an adult struck a child anywhere near the face, it was “the worst form of bullying and humiliation one person can inflict on another”.
Yet it appears that “shove-gate” may be finessed away as a moment of harmless marital horseplay. The sole reason that it can be downplayed, as far as I can see, is that it’s an example of woman-on-man anger.
Think back to that grim moment in 2013, when photos emerged of Charles Saatchi with his hand around Nigella Lawson’s throat while she looked visibly distressed and on the brink of tears. No one was surprised when their marriage ended shortly after that incident. Indeed, most of us would have been disturbed if she’d stayed with him after such a public display of rage and contempt.
And yet, there seems more willingness to think the French leader might tolerate a little light rough-and-tumble from his spouse. I suppose it’s just about possible that a hand pushed right into the face is their version of “stop it”. But I’m not sure I can buy Macron’s explanation that he was “simply joking with my wife, as we do quite often”.
It seems far more likely that the moment of lashing out is being minimalised because Macron would look less statesmanlike if it transpired that his petite wife was in the habit of pushing him around. There are still lingering laws of machismo that state that men are stronger than women, so they can brush off a slap or a shove as a butterfly-flutter – never mind the wounded soul.
It would also draw attention once again to how the couple’s relationship started, and the power imbalance involved in a teacher romancing a former pupil 25 years her junior – someone she’d first met when he was 15.
I should point out that I am generally very relaxed about age-gap unions. I have to be, given that my father was 27 years older than my mother. But it would be unworldly of us to ignore the fact that women can be as predatory as men in pursuing much younger partners (especially in a school setting), albeit they might do so in fewer numbers. Or that, in some of those relationships, the woman can exert an alarming level of control – and this might be the whole point of the pursuit. I know two midlife men who suffered at the hands of abusive, older female partners.
Of course, all this is speculation, and I freely confess that I might be wide of the mark. Maybe some French couples do playfully push one another in le visage, and it’s all a form of hot foreplay. But if none of us believed light strangulation was fun for Nigella, I don’t see why we should believe a shoved face is a joke for the French president.
