Why Justin Bieber’s Hailey Vogue Comment Struck a Nerve

It’s not hard to imagine what went down at the Bieber home when Justin Bieber’s Hailey Vogue Instagram comments first started to go viral.

Many of us have been there. You write or say something that you may have meant to be a compliment, but it comes out just…wrong. Of course, not all of us are Grammy-winning superstars, so when we fire off a less-than-considered Instagram caption, it doesn’t immediately go out to 294 million people and upend an entire news cycle.

In case you missed it, Vogue released its summer issue Tuesday featuring cover star Hailey Bieber. While Hailey and Justin appeared together on the magazine’s cover in 2019, this was the first time she’d appeared solo. Justin appeared to want to celebrate his wife’s achievement, and did so, let’s just say, in his own way.

“Yo this reminds me when Hailey and I got into a huge fight, I told hails that she would never be on the cover of vogue,” he wrote, in an Instagram post featuring the cover. “Yikes I know, so mean, For some reason because I felt so disrespected I thought I gotta get even…I think as we mature we realize that we’re not helping anything by getting even, we’re honestly just prolonging what we really want which is intimacy and connection. So baby u already know but forgive me for saying u wouldn’t get a vogue cover cuz clearly i was sadly mistaken.”

Okay, so we can all imagine what probably went down after he posted this, right? Hailey, fresh off the big launch of her cover, was probably relaxing at home with Justin and her baby when she opened Instagram and saw…whatever this was supposed to be.

If you squint, you can see shades of good intentions in the post. I’d like to assume that Justin wasn’t trying to humiliate his wife, or diminish her success in front of the entire world on a day that should be a triumph for her. But it didn’t land that way and shortly after posting his rambling caption, Bieber replaced it with a string of emojis. It seems he realized—or was told by his appalled wife—the error he made, and tried to change course. But the damage was done.

Justin Bieber’s Hailey Vogue comments have now overtaken the pop-culture news cycle, one that nearly 24 hours later is showing no signs of abating. Women are in large part pissed, and it seems to have struck a nerve that says a lot more about gender dynamics in heterosexual relationships than about any cringe social media post.

That’s because the dynamic between Hailey and Justin isn’t that unique, even if it may be on a grander scale than what many of us experience. It’s important to view this moment in the context of what we know about their relationship, the changing nature of which is also explored in the Vogue cover story.