Why being hailed as ‘wifey material’ isn’t the compliment you think it is

Those in the latter camp might be briefly lusted after, but it’s those in the former group who are much more likely to be awarded the ‘accolade’ of wifey material. And, what more could a woman want than to be deemed desirable because of how closely she resembles a cartoonish version of womanhood?

And what happens when women dare to deviate from the script written for them? Think about the treatment of past contestants like Megan Barton-Hanson who was piled upon for expressing and acting upon her sexual desires. Denby has written about this phenomenon before, and tells me that assumptions around 2019 contestant Maura Higgins – namely that she was sexually experienced and available – impacted her perceived desirability, in other words, she “wasn’t seen as wifey material” by other islanders. Quite the opposite, she was shamed.

So the rules of the patriarchy are: be sexy, but not free in your sexuality. So logical. So great.

“A lot of this comes down to the sexualisation of women,” explains Denby, but it’s also about what kinds of sexuality we are comfortable with women expressing. If your ‘wifey material’ girl wants to get intimate with you – fine (as long as it’s not too soon, that would be ‘slutty’). She openly has sex with other people? Not so fine. “The whole thing just screams double standards,” says Denby.

In a world where wifey material is a compliment, ‘maneater’ is the ultimate insult. It’s a label that Denby says was piled upon women in older series. It may have fallen out of popular discourse – a brief R.I.P shoutout here to Nelly Furtado’s namesake song – but its undertones are woven into the language we continue to use.

“We like to think that this sexual double standard has gone away, but we’re still perpetuating it, just in diluted ways. Rather than call women ‘maneaters’ like they used to, we’ve now got wifey material. People might be well meaning – but it’s still the same attitude,” says Denby.

This double-sided element is something that Amelia Morris, a media and communications lecturer at Exeter University, has spotted too. “‘It creates this good versus bad girl dynamic and plays into the narrative that women have sex to get into a monogamous relationship but men should have sex to play the field until they are ready to commit to someone who is ‘wifey material’,” she explains.

So, when did we decide that ‘wifey material’ was a compliment? And why? According to independent film-maker Nina Menkes, it’s because we’re encouraged to identify with the perspective of the male gaze in nearly all of the culture we consume. In other words, what’s depicted as desirable is defined by heterosexual men, because sexuality (even on screen) is embedded in patriarchal power. Depressing, right?

‘Under the male gaze, the man is the subject looking at the woman, who is the object’, says Menkes. For her recent documentary, Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power, Menkes reviewed 157 cinematic classics to show how women are represented on camera. “All the films reproduced this certain way of looking,” she says. And constantly seeing a specific version of femininity and womanhood naturally leads us to absorb it. “It defines perception,” adds Menkes. “It teaches women not only how to look at others, but also how to behave themselves.”