The tedious double standard we haven’t fixed
IT was undignified, but it wasn’t unusual, as anyone who’s ever been to a nightclub toilet can attest. So why is Candice Warner alone still being publicly stoned for it, asks Caroline Marcus.
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WHATEVER you think of David Warner — and his scripted and insincere-sounding apology is rightfully getting panned — it’s hard not to feel sorry for his wife Candice.
The champion ironwoman’s reputation has been raked over hot coals in recent weeks culminating in revelations this weekend she is on the verge of a breakdown and blames herself for her husband’s troubles.
“I feel like it’s all my fault and it’s killing me — it’s absolutely killing me,” Warner said, adding she’s “a wreck” and “really not well.”
Yet detractors continued to pick her apart.
Instead of sympathy, keyboard warriors accused her of playing the victim and making the scandal about her, criticisms only fuelled by the presence of polarising, publicity-magnet Roxy Jacenko — a woman herself no stranger to dealing with the fallout of an aberrant husband, hers being convicted insider trader Oliver Curtis.
While Jacenko — whose company manages Warner — insists she was at the press conference purely as a “friend” offering support it was not a good look.
But Warner is plainly not responsible for her spouse’s alleged orchestration of the entire sandpapering swindle and deserves our judgment no less now than she deserved the sexist taunts in South Africa.
Hundreds of thousands of words have already been printed about what this transgression will mean for Australian cricket — heck, I couldn’t escape the coverage even on my Easter break in Indonesia last week, with the scandal making major news there, too.
But the whole sordid affair also highlights a different kind of injustice, proving double standards are alive and well half a century after the Sexual Revolution.
Proteas wicketkeeper Quentin de Kock kicked it off, living up to his name with slurs about the then Candice Falzon’s own actions in a Clovelly pub toilet in 2007, leading to the infamous stairwell stoush.
Some say the Australian cricketer started it by allegedly making derogatory remarks about de Kock’s sister, which would be equally unacceptable, but Warner shouldn’t pay for the sins of her husband.
The sledging reached fever pitch when South African fans turned up to the ground wearing masks of All Blacks star Sonny Bill Williams, the other participant in the drunken bathroom tryst.
Instead of being turned away, Cricket South Africa officials overruled security and ushered them in, even posing for photographs smiling beside them.
Warner says her husband would come home to find her crying, having spent the day suffering the ignominy of being laughed at and hearing Proteas fans belt out crude songs about her.
She spoke out at the time of the rest room romp about how the humiliation led her to contemplate suicide and it’s disgraceful she’s still being shamed over it 11 years later.
While the abuse was obviously directed at her husband not her, it speaks volumes about prevailing attitudes about women and sex.
Williams may have copped a little bit of stick at the time over his role in what was then dubbed the “Dunny Bill Williams incident”, but let’s not kid ourselves.
Men who sleep around are still back-slapped and called studs, while women who do the same are slapped with the “slut” label.
While Williams has been allowed to move on from the undignified, but not unusual rendezvous (as anyone who has frequented a nightclub bathroom will know), Warner hasn’t been able to shed her past.
If anything, Williams should have been the one left embarrassed over what happened — after all, he had a long-term girlfriend at the time, while Candice — was single.
The inescapable reality is that despite all the feminist movements, including the latest #MeToo campaign, women are still being judged by a metric not applied to men when it comes to sex.
That’s all the more unfair when you consider the likelihood women will have more sexual partners today than pre-Revolution, with both sexes putting off marriage and children until later in life.
Like it or not, hook-up apps like Tinder, Bumble and Happn have largely replaced traditional dating, only increasing the expectation on women to engage in casual sex.
Yet social mores haven’t kept pace.
That’s not to bash men; interestingly, research has found women are more than capable of being just as judgmental of their peers.
A 2013 Illinois State University study, which found the sexual double standard hadn’t changed in the past 23 years, also discovered students of both genders consider casual sex more acceptable for men than women.
It’s another matter as to whether the modern hook-up culture actually benefits women, who — at least on average — tend to prefer the security of a loving, committed relationship than empty, purely physical encounters.
But that’s something for individual women to reach their own conclusions about, not for others to weaponsise against them.
Caroline Marcus is a journalist with Sky News.
@carolinemarcus