Where was Vicky Pryce's ladybro when she needed one? And Rihanna, get with your girlfriends – respect female friendship
The emails between Vicky Pryce and Isabel Oakeshott tell the tragic tale of a noble institution debased. Not marriage. I am not a mug, and while Chris Huhne and Pryce have produced a spectacular eruption of spite between them, I know perfectly well that the end of a relationship is routinely the site of blood-letting and limb-hacking – not always, but often, and especially when long-nursed resentments and competing ambitions are involved.
No, the institution most soiled and taken in vain by the Pryce/Oakeshott alliance is one that's largely underrated. We don't have much of a vocabulary to describe its joys and sadnesses. We don't celebrate its landmarks or regulate its passing, but it matters so much. I'm talking about friendship – female friendship in particular, because if Andrew O'Hagan gets to extemporise on the joys of fraternity this week, I would like to speak up for Team Girl.
Running through the emails, as Pryce and Oakeshott nudge their respective agendas forwards, is a horrible parody of friendship. The idea of a trip to Greece together emerges over and over again. "We could perhaps go away somewhere nice for a few days, to work on it in complete privacy and in relaxed surroundings," writes Oakeshott early on in the correspondence. "You look like you need a break, and I certainly do."
Oakeshott's probably not wrong about this. Pryce is mid-bitter divorce at this stage, and nurturing a "grand plan" of revenge against a man who, while definitely giving all appearances of being a self-involved berk, is also still the father of her children. Now would be the perfect time for a good ladybro to swoop in with some astringent wine and a takeaway, and scorch out the break-up lunacy with a few hours of drunkenness and real talk. I mean, that's what I'd go for. Less liver-ruinous forms of solace are available.
Where was your ladybro, Pryce? Why were you sharing your incoherent late-night anxieties with a hack and not a stand-up pal with a proven track record in the field of setting shit straight? Well, I know why: because Pryce was as focused on her vengeance as Oakeshott was on her story. She didn't want anybody to talk her down. And the tenser the negotiations between journo and source become, the more insistent the marks of insincere affection are in the emails: signing off with love and kisses and inquiries about the children's health, while each twists the other as hard as she can.
It saddens me to see women palming the marks of mateyness off on each other, but Pryce and Oakeshott aren't alone in undervaluing the awesomeness of female friendship. Because women are still habitually seen as a bit rubbish in comparison to men, it becomes a boast for a woman to say that she's one of the guys. Rihanna is at it in this month's Elle: "I happen to think like a man and do certain things guys like to do … I will go to the guys' table and sit because I feel I can have a better conversation over there. And that's automatic, it's not prejudice."
The interviewer writes: "I tell her I admire her for saying that, it's not what her record label would want her to say." Oh shut up. It's exactly what her record label would want her to say, though it might wonder if she'd got the prep for her GQ interview mixed up with her women's interest cue cards. Whenever a gorgeous young star does a men's mag outing, it's pretty much inevitable that she'll say something like: "I'm just one of the guys only with breasts, and I happen to feel very comfortable with my breasts out."
Why is this line so popular? I've got a theory: it's because some men (probably the men who'd be at the "guys' table", having the kind of amazing conversation that's apparently impossible around females) don't like women very much, so their ideal woman is one who doesn't like women either. Women who like women are harder to run down, harder to push around. Women who like women are just cooler. Which is why female friendship deserves more respect than Pryce and Oakeshott give it, when they wear it like a visor during the formal joust of their bargaining. Ladies, don't pretend to be nice while shivving each other. It's sickening. Better yet: shelve the shiv, and hang with someone who's actually got your back.
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