There is nothing more irritating to some people than a woman who speaks her mind. When it comes to Jada Pinkett Smith – actor, sometimes rocker and wife of Will Smith – that level of irritation multiplies tenfold.
I’ve understood some of the reasons why in the very recent past. She is, I’ll admit, at times almost painfully earnest. Painful not because of what she’s revealing, but how – with that breezy, centred, confident yoga teacher demeanour that makes us more guarded folk feel patronised, perhaps even insecure.
There’s a part of me that feels guilty to admit that. I’ve been a fan of hers since I discovered A Different World re-runs on TV as a kid, The Cosby Show spin-off that gave her her big break at 20 years old.
Even then, when playing the spirited, earthy character of university student Lena James, a little bit of the Jada we know now appeared to be in the mix, too. She always seemed like someone who knew herself, wanted to know others as intimately and was open to learning and sharing knowledge about the world that she felt would make it a better place.
In the real world, the frequency of that candour seems to grate. Sometimes, I’m included in that. On learning about the release of Jada’s memoir, Worthy, I instinctively thought: “Why won’t they leave us alone?!”
We’ve heard it all in excruciating detail: the “entanglement”, the separation rumours, the fallout from “the slap”, her relationship with Tupac Shakur, the Scientology rumours. For years, it feels like we’ve been in an endless loop of updates about the Smiths, and a lot of us are tired.
Yet while rumours about the Smiths have been so ubiquitous it is impossible not to have some kind of opinion on them, there’s something sinister beneath the surface that I fear is fuelling the vitriol towards Jada in particular.
Putting the Scientology flirtation aside for a sec – an issue that never stopped the likes of Tom Cruise from maintaining his beloved status in Hollywood and beyond – I do wonder why it is that Jada’s honesty about her complex, 26-year relationship with Will Smith, or indeed her relationships with other men, generates more negativity than most of the other revelations we’ve been accosted with. I think the answer is misogyny.
As if new to the concept of a promotional tour – she certainly isn’t the first celebrity to release a book and, you know, talk about it to generate sales – a subsection of the internet has taken to ridiculing everything she says. In a recent interview, responses to her openness about struggling to rekindle her relationship with Will Smith range from, “That’s why their kids are weird”, to “Tupac dodged a bullet”, to “Why is she always talking in riddles?!”
When we consider the words she’s actually saying, though, there’s nothing controversial, nor particularly hard to understand about what she’s communicating. Speaking of the resentment she often had towards Will Smith in their marriage, in an interview with podcaster Steven Bartlett this week, she said: “I felt as though at that time, I was like, ‘I want to help you do all of those things. And in return, I should get a bit of what I want, which is this connection.’ So for me, just giving, and giving, and giving, and giving and not realising that I was abandoning myself in the hopes that if I just keep pouring into this, if I keep pouring into him, if I keep pouring into his dream, I’m going to eventually get what I want – and that’s a false idea in so many ways. And so many of us do that.”
Truth be told, a lot of us struggle with the same issues. And a lot of our relationships are just as messy. While some of us look to stars to embody fantasy versions of the lives many of us wish we had, I think it really is a lot more helpful to hear the ugly truth, especially when it comes to relationships. Besides, it’s a lot more relatable than the fairy tales we tend to get, right up until divorce filings burst that perception of perfection.
Ever since I was a child, with each Hollywood blockbuster move the Smiths made, people have seemed oddly uncomfortable with how liberal they are, in a way I’m not sure they would be if they were white. They behave in ways that traditionalists feel black couples “shouldn’t” act, betraying the cookie-cutter representation of black love that so many naively cling to.
There has been furious indignation about Jada’s sexually liberated attitude, about her sway with men, and most of all, about Will Smith’s presumed willingness to be “humiliated” by their (read “her”) liberal choices again and again. The subtext reads: “We don’t behave in this way”, and that’s fine. But, so what if they do?
Once lauded as couple goals, the pair now seem to be evidence of a world gone mad. And I think that’s deeply unfair. While I’ve only ever watched two Red Table Talks – the once-popular platform wherein Jada Pinkett Smith would have discussions about everything from her relationships with the women in her family, to polyamory, to why Jordyn Woods fell out with Kylie Jenner – I did find her openness refreshing.
In her 1989 book, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, feminist theorist bell hooks wrote: “When we speak in a liberated voice, our words connect us with anyone, anywhere who lives in silence”.
Perhaps Jada’s openness has offered that to people who have found themselves in similar positions in their own relationships. If that’s the case, I hope she keeps talking. Of course, I won’t pretend that I, or even anyone else, should solely look to celebrities to feel heard. But I do think it’s nice that those of us who aren’t too deluded to admit we have relationship issues have one more public figure to relate to.