Ciara and Russell Wilson’s Marriage is Not *Not* Our Business

 

By Stacy Lee Kong

 
 

Image: instagram.com/ciara

 

I don’t know if you know this (to be fair, I mostly did not), but Ciara is in the midst of a musical revival. Her eight studio album, CiCi, dropped late last month and has already sold 106,000 units and racked up 300 million streams—very respectable numbers, especially considering it was done without any major label support. Understandably, she’s been doing all the things to promote CiCi, her first album in six years and only the second on her own independent label, Beauty Marks Entertainment, including interviews with The Breakfast Club and appearances on The Today Show, viral TikTok dances with celebrity friends and, earlier this week, an event at the Grammy Museum. ICYMI, that last one went a bit viral (uh, before the news cycle was overtaken by… other things) because during an audience Q&A, her husband, football player Russell Wilson, piped up to ask what I’m sure he thought was a cute question. After telling her that one of his all-time favourite videos of her is “Ride,” he said: “Speaking of riding, when is Cinco coming?” For context, “Cinco” is a reference to—the currently hypothetical—baby number five.

I already didn’t love the idea of Wilson interrupting Ciara’s work event, but I liked it even less when I realized that this wasn’t even the first time he’d made private conversations about how their family may or may not grow into public moments. He’s done this at least three times in her IG comments: twice in March, on a video of her rehearsing choreography and a post of her playing mas in Trinidad, and once last October on a photo of her in a leather skirt and top set. In response, Ciara’s responses have been noncommittal, at best: “let me think about it…BRB 😭🥰😝” and “Someone come take my husband’s phone please 🤦🏽‍♀️😂😂.” You know I believe in enthusiastic consent, so to me, that looks like Wilson has been joking-not-joking asking about this fifth child for a while now—even though she’s been joking-not-joking asking him to stop. 

A caveat: I know that I don’t know these people. I don’t have any insight into the inner workings of their relationship, which means it’s impossible to tell if any of the things I’m about to say reflect their actual dynamic. And yet… I’m totally about to argue that a) this is weird and b) the public isn’t wrong to pay attention. 

I don’t care how many fans thought the question was cute, when you’re having your next baby probably isn’t a public conversation 

Let’s pretend this isn’t about two millionaire celebrities for a second. Let’s say it’s your friend and her husband, who already have four children. Your friend is working super hard on a big project, and her husband shows up at a work event. He’s ostensibly there to support her, but instead of asking her about this thing that she’s really proud of, or even just praising her work ethic, talent and/or skills, he makes a sexual innuendo and asks her when he’s going to give him another baby. Strip away the trappings of celebrity and that’s… not cool, right?

And it would be even worse if your friend had previously said she wants him to knock it off—which is the case with Ciara and Wilson. In an interview with Access Hollywood earlier this year, the singer talked about how he’s been pushing for a fifth child, and that she’d told him to stop, saying, “Let me tell you, someone needs to take my husband’s phone right now, okay. Because he needs to stop. Listen, Amora came out and he start talking about ‘Cinco?’ I’m like, ‘That’s just disrespectful. Do you know what I just went through right now with this?’” Sure, she was laughing as she said—but she still said it.

Not to state the obvious, but this is problematic even if you, like Ciara, lean conservative and buy into the idea that marriage, kids and the nuclear family unit are of paramount importance. My friend Tayo Bero also tackled Cincogate in her newsletter this week, where she offered some spot-on analysis of Wilson’s behaviour and why it matters, regardless of whether Ciara thinks it’s funny: “None of what Wilson says is out of line with the way she seems to want to live her life. It’s the way he goes about it that is clearly problematic; boxing her into compliance by putting it out to an adoring public—and signalling, by the way, to anyone who may want to cash in on Ciara’s current creative streak that she’s a wife and mother first, and that we shouldn’t get used to this version of her.”

Bero hits on the two things that feel weirdest to me—that these comments are clearly intended for public consumption, and he only makes them when she’s doing something for herself, whether that’s professional or personal. To be very honest, I like Ciara for nostalgic reasons, but she and Wilson aren’t a couple that I personally think about a lot, so while I’d vaguely been aware of his desire for a fifth child, I didn’t have any opinions about how he’s been communicating that. Until this week, of course. Now that I have thought about them, though, the dynamic feels the same whether it’s on IG or IRL: he’s making a private conversation public, which immediately puts constraints around how she can reply, because everyone from fans to People magazine is paying attention and Ciara is nothing if not media trained. What’s more, he’s leveraging, or at the very least aware of, the fact that her fans don’t just love her, they love her marriage and the fact that their fave is in a committed relationship with a Good Man™️. He knows they’re going to respond to his comments with their own opinions about whether Ciara should give him what he wants, and that the answer will overwhelmingly be yes. And I? Don’t like any of that.

Ciara’s prayer—and the husband it landed her—is pop culture gospel by this point. Of course we’re all paying attention to her marriage

I’m typically not that worried about speculating on celebrities’ lives, as evidenced by… well, this entire newsletter. But I’m especially not worried in this case, because frankly, these two have basically asked us to do so. They’ve both invited us into their relationship and made it part of their public personas. That’s what Wilson is doing with his comments, which aren’t just requests for more babies but also a performance that is meant to communicate his ongoing love and desire for his wife and his status as a family man. And Ciara does it, too. In her recent Breakfast Club interview, she spoke extensively about Wilson and their family, and shared tons of anecdotes about their kids. At one point, Charlamagne asked her about the public’s focus on her marriage instead of her work. Her reply was essentially that it doesn’t bother her—but just being asked the question helps illustrate how integral her husband and children are to her brand. I mean, we literally know what the words of the prayer she says brought Wilson to her!

I mean, their relationship isn’t just a cute facet of their respective public-facing brands, it’s a pop culture trope on its own. The internet often jokes that A-list starlets need only ask and the couple will set them up with an athlete, in the hopes that they’ll also find perfect, God-fearing husbands. (Just ask Normani and Coco Jones.) And okay yes, there is something a bit funny about the idea of ordering a husband from God as if this was Uber Eats. But there’s subtext here that’s worth noting—the success of their relationship is also an advertisement for a particular type of marriage, one that’s traditional, heteronormative and conservative Christian. It’s not quite tradwife, but exists in a similar space, I think. And it’s important to note that, as is generally the case for men, it's Wilson who receives the biggest reputational boost from this brand positioning. He’s the good, family-oriented man who stepped up to be a father to Ciara’s son from a previous relationship and loves her down, despite her previous ‘bad decisions’ (a.k.a. Future). His love ‘saves’ her, which also inadvertently positions her as flawed, even tainted. 

In fact, Wilson’s public persona as a Good Man™️ is the entire reason he can endlessly joke about wanting a fifth child without any sort of reputational consequence. But, as one Twitter user perfectly put it, it gets to a point…

The patriarchy strikes again

That being said, I don’t know that I feel comfortable applying the framework of reproductive coercion to this discourse. According to the Canadian Women’s Foundation, “reproductive coercion occurs any time someone pressures another person about their reproductive decision-making, or takes steps that make it harder for that person to freely exercise their reproductive choice(s).” It can look like anything from removing a condom during sex without consent (which is also legally rape) to pushing a partner to have sex during certain times of their reproductive cycle to pressuring someone to get pregnant when they don’t want to. That is abuse, and I don’t want to dilute the meaning of that term because I’m over here rolling my eyes at Russell Wilson. But, I do think his actions exist on the same continuum as reproductive coercion. It’s like that rape culture infographic where assault is the outcome, but it escalates to that point because breaking consent is normalized through rape jokes and sexist attitudes, and increasing degradation isn’t taken seriously. Here, reproductive coercion is the outcome, which is normalized through jokes about wanting to keep your woman pregnant.

It gets a little complicated because so much of that normalization is, in other contexts, positive. It’s good that your partner doesn’t stop seeing you as desirable after having children. It’s good that he’s publicly invested in your family. It’s good that he wants to be a parent. But that’s the thing, right? Even Good Men™️ can, and do, buy into patriarchal ideas about where women belong and what they should be doing, not to mention prioritize their own desires over their partner’s. And because they see themselves as good men, and society supports that assessment, it’s hard to see when this is happening. But, one last thing to consider: Ciara and Wilson’s youngest child, Amora, was born in December 2023, which means she’s not quite two yet. However, health experts have long recommended spacing out births by at least 18 to 24 months in order to avoid serious health complications, including an increased risk of uterine rupture, premature labour and even maternal or child mortality. What’s more, in the U.S., “Black women had a mortality rate of 50.3 deaths per 100,000 live births—more than three times the rate for white women (14.5), and significantly higher than Hispanic (12.4) and Asian (10.7) women,” according to the Policy Center for Maternal Mental Health. I think a Good Man™️ would also consider that when carrying out a campaign to convince his partner to give birth a fifth time, even if it’s not a serious one.  

I can’t speak for Ciara, but any hint at coercion or control immediately makes me annoyed. I mean, we remain in a pretty terrifying moment when it comes to bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom, which I think provides some context as to why something that probably have been written off as just a little joke in the halcyon days of 2015 just… doesn't seem that funny anymore.

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CultureStacy Lee KongCindy Bi, Ciara, Russell Wilson, Normani, Coco Jones