How To Be A Woman

Chapter 14




Role Models And What We Do With Them




If there is one single thing that gives me hope for the future of female liberation, it has been, over the last few years, watching the fall, and rise, of various female icons. In many ways, it is within the pages of the glossy gossip magazines that the next chapter of feminism has slowly, and incongruously, been taking shape.

In the interregnum between female emancipation, and female politicians, businesswomen and artists finally coming into true equality, celebrity culture is the forum in which we currently inspect and debate the lives, roles and aspirations of women. Tabloids, magazines and the Daily Mail work by means of turning the lives and careers of a few dozen women into a combination of living soap and daily morality lesson – on the good side, responding to the gigantic desire to examine the modern female condition, but on the bad side, leaving the subjects ostensibly powerless to write their own narrative, or express their own analysis of the matter. This is why any modern feminist worth her salt has an interest in the business of A-list gossip: it is the main place where our perception of women is currently being formed. That’s my excuse for buying OK!, anyway.

So in the absence of a female Philip Roth scrutinising ageing, death and desire, we have the stories of ‘cougars’ like Demi Moore, Kim Cattrall and Madonna, dating younger men and remaining surgically ‘youthful’. We might not have a female Jay McInerny or Bret Easton Ellis – young, talented and off the rails – but we do have Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears and Amy Winehouse, getting successful absurdly young, and then self-destructing on a hundred sidewalks, and at a thousand parties.

As these stories get endlessly discussed in the gossip rags, we form our own opinions of both the celebrities themselves (‘Bloody idiot. And horrible hair’) and the way the press treat them (‘Everything they say about her is vile patriarchal bullshit. I wish to GOD Germaine Greer had a gun’). Until we get a proper female canon of artists, these minutely papped lives will have to do.

Perhaps the most notable case of all – while we still lack a coherent/populist fifth wave of feminist discourse – has been Katie Price, aka Jordan, who has come to embody a whole nexus of female issues. In a capitalist society, Price is an undeniably successful businesswoman – but by dint of selling her personal life. She is powerful – but by dealing in an outwardly old-fashioned notion of female sexuality. And she is independent – but defined, and judged, by her high-profile relationships. A few years ago, Price was being seriously touted as a feminist icon in broadsheet newspapers – I suspect because, at root, she simply confused cultural commentators to the point of panic. You can see her tits – but also has her own range of bed linen. What’s that all about?

I was one of those broadsheet journalists sent to find out whether or not she was a good, feminist role model. In 2006 I spent half a week trailing around after her for a cover story for Elle magazine. I ended the whole thing reflecting that I have genuinely interacted with monitor lizards with more warmth than Price. The first time I met her, it was at the photoshoot for the feature. Greeting me with a smile that didn’t reach her teeth, let alone her eyes – but then that’s Botox for you – she was sitting at a mirror, having her make-up done.


‘There’s something I’d like to say,’ Price said. ‘I’d love to do a mascara ad. All the ones on television are false advertising – they use false eyelashes. But these are real. I would love,’ she reiterated, looking at me in a ‘make sure you put this in the feature’ way, ‘to do a mascara ad.’ She prodded her eyelashes with her fingertips to show me how good they were.

Five minutes later her manager, Claire Powell, took me to one side. ‘We’re thinking Katie’s next move should be a cosmetic advert, make-up endorsement, that kind of thing. That’s where we’re moving to.’

Still, at least on this point if we were talking about her eyelashes – Price had something to say. For the next three hours in the studio, every other attempted conversational tactic failed. Books, current affairs, television and movies – Price shrugged at each one. When I asked what she did in her spare time, she sank into silence for nearly a minute, and they offered that she liked to stick Swarovski crystals onto household appliances – ‘like the remote control’.

It became very clear that unless it was a book she’d ‘written’, current affairs she’d taken part in – such as selling exclusive coverage of her wedding for ￡1 million – or a television show that she’s starred in, Price had absolutely no interest in it whatsoever. Her world consisted entirely of herself, her pink merchandise range, and the constant semi-circle of paps minutely photographing this ongoing narrative of solipsism. No wonder her eyes were so blank – she had nothing to think about apart from herself. She’s like the ouroborus – the mythical serpent, forever eating her own tail.

Perhaps because of this lucrative self-obsession, throughout our time together, she was never less than a charmless, basilisk-eyed tyrant, bossing her then-husband Peter Andre around as if he were a piddling puppy, squatting on her best shoes, and infusing every engagement with a world-weary contemptuousness – as if wearing dresses, riding in cars and talking to people was the pastime of a cunt, and she was furious she’s got landed with it.

At one point she was so rude that Andre had to apologise to everyone in the room – ‘She’ll wear anything apart from a smile, ha ha!’ he said, trying to make a joke of it – as I stood and marvelled at the idea that someone whose sole career consisted of ‘being herself’ was doing it so unappealingly and gracelessly. It was like watching an Olympic sprinter coming off the blocks, sulkily, and then complaining about ‘getting sweaty’; or a rabbit bellyaching about all the sex they were supposed to have.

There were some fun bits to the week – trying on Price’s wedding ring, which was the size of a pork chop, larded with pink diamonds. And on the last night – at an awards ceremony dinner – Price had a glass of champagne and launched into a furious bitching session about other celebrity females: hissing ‘She’s so false!’ at Caprice and gleefully boasting about how Victoria Beckham had to hire ‘ugly nannies’ in case David Beckham was ‘tempted. She can’t trust him to keep his dick in his pants with anyone good looking! I feel sorry for her. All my nannies are gorgeous,’ she boasted, flashing a crushing look at Peter Andre.

But after five days together, on and off, the only real novel ‘discovery’ I’d made about Price was that she had, for years, worn the wrong bra size. ‘Marks and Spencers put me in a 34B!’ she said. ‘And when I got measured I found out that I was really a 34GG all along!’

I know. It’s scarcely Watergate. But given the rest of my interview, it was the best quote I had. I duly wrote up the piece – only to be emailed the next day by her management. ‘Would you mind not printing the thing about Katie’s bra size?’ her manager asks. ‘It’s just, we really want to give that as an exclusive to OK!’

Flummoxed by a situation where news of a woman’s bra size was literally currency, I capitulated.

I don’t really mind and one misguidedly thinking that Price is a good businesswoman – despite the fact that she has to rope her kids into her business to make money: something I always associate with desperate Third World families, rather than nice, middle-class girls getting million-pound paycheques. At the end of the day, it’s a busy, mixed-up world and we’ve all got to pick our fights.

But what I do find intolerable are the people who claim that Price is a feminist role model – simply because she has earned a lot of money.

The reasoning is this: men still have all the power and money. But men have a weak spot – sexy women. So if what it takes to become rich and powerful is to sex up the blokes, then so be it. That’s business, baby. You might be on all fours with your arse hanging out in ‘glamour’ calendars but at least you’re making the rent on your enormous pink mansion.

Well, there’s a phrase for that kind of behaviour. It is, to quote Jamie, the spin doctor in The Thick of It, being a ‘mimsy bastard quisling f***’.

Women who, in a sexist world, pander to sexism to make their fortune are Vichy France with tits. Are you 32GG, waxed to within an inch of your life and faking orgasms? Then you’re doing business with a decadent and corrupt regime. Calling that a feminist icon is like giving an arms dealer the Nobel Peace Prize.

‘I’m strong,’ Price will say, in another exclusive interview with OK! But by and large, strong people tend not to go quacking to the press every week about how they’re ‘feeling’ and how unfairly everyone’s treating them, and what an arse their exhusband’s been.

As Blanche in Corrie said: ‘In my day, when something bad happened, you’d stay at home, get drunk and bite on a shoe.’

Price could learn much from this. This idea that Price is ‘strong’ has come solely from the fact that she keeps saying ‘I’m strong’, while doing really weak things, like appearing on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here! so that people can learn ‘the real me’ and trying to get out of a dangerous driving fine by saying ‘I’m just a typical woman driver’.

There’s a similar bit of neurolinguistic programming going on with her being a ‘great parent’, and being voted Celebrity Mum of The Year.

‘I take care of my kids,’ she says. ‘I love my kids.’

Well, to quote the comedian Chris Rock: ‘You’re SUPPOSED to look after your kids, you low-expectation-having motherf*cker! What do you want – a cookie?’ One of the most cheering things in the last few years has been Price hanging around long enough for all the terrible consequences of her decisions and attitude to play out in public. Any girl who – in 2007 – thought it would be an admirable and viable career plan to start off in topless modelling, make a series of reality TV documentaries about her marriage, get her hapless children to model her clothing range, and persistently act like a craven, ungrateful, miserable, resentful and hard-bitten curmudgeon – but with huge tits – would surely have re-thought it all by 2010, as Price’s public image rated just below that of that fox that bit those kids in North London.

Similarly, around the same time, the phenomenon of the footballer’s ‘WAG’ – previously an equally aspirational role model for teenage girls – started to pall. As one footballer after another was revealed to have been serially unfaithful, suddenly, the idea of aiming to do nothing but hitch your life and livelihood to a famous, wealthy man started to look at best tacky and at worst mentally perilous.


For as these marriages broke up, under intense scrutiny, the tone of the media coverage was ‘But what would a woman expect from these men? If you enter into a relationship so unequal – in which your only value and resource is your attractiveness – can you be surprised when your partner finds you so interchangeable with other, similarly powerless, non-autonomous women he meets in dark nightclubs, gakked off his tits?’

But whilst Price – who has nothing to speak about or sell except herself – has waned, a whole generation of highly creative women have simultaneously begun to wax furious.

I’ve already discussed the concept of women being ‘losers’ – admitting that as a sex, our achievements are modest compared to those of men, and addressing the quiet, unspoken suspicion that this means that we really aren’t as good as men, underneath it all. After all, if women’s power and creativity had simply been suppressed by thousands of years of sexist bullshit, surely we should have knocked out Star Wars and conquered France within a year of getting the vote?

But, of course, on being freed, people who’ve been psychologically crushed don’t immediately start doing glorious, confident, ostentatious things. Instead, they sit around for a while, going ‘What the f*ck was that?’, trying to work out why it happened, trying – often – to see if it was their fault.

They have to work out what their relationship is with their former aggressors, and come up with new command structures – or work out if they want command structures at all. There’s a need to share experiences, and work out what a) ‘normal’ is, and b) if you want to be it. And, above all, it takes time to work out what you actually believe in – what you think for yourself. If everything you have been taught is the history, mores and reasoning of your victors, it takes a long, long time to work out what bits you want to keep, which bits you want to throw away: which bits are poisonous to you, and which parts salvageable.

In short, there is a long period of gently patting yourself, going ‘Am I OK? Am I all right?’, often followed by a long, long, thoughtful silence before any action gets under way.


But the action is getting under way now – and one of the places this is most apparent is in pop music. Pop is the cultural bellwether of social change. Because of its immediacy, reach and power – no two-year turnover, like movies; no three-year writing process, like the novel; no ten-year campaigning process, like politics – any thought or feeling that begins to foment in the collective unconscious can be Number One in the charts two months later. And as soon as a pop idea gets out there, it immediately triggers action and reaction in other artists, whose responses are equally rapid – leading to an almost quantum overnight shift in the landscape.

In 2009 – 13 years after The Spice Girls’ Wannabe made them the biggest female band ever – the charts, finally, and for the first time ever, became dominated by female artists. La Roux – a lesbian!, Florence and The Machine – a ginger!, Lily Allen – a gobby ingénue!, Beyoncé – a phenomeonal, bigthighed icon!, and, of course, Lady Gaga – a meat-wearing, bisexual, multi-medium agent provocateur!, were the most written about, the most papped, the most in-demand and, of course, the most successful. Along with Katy Perry, Rihanna, Leona Lewis and Susan Boyle, the onrush of women into the charts meant that male artists were dead in the water.

The conversations I’d had at Melody Maker, 16 years previously – ‘Oh God, we’ve just got to get a bird in the paper!’ – were turned on their head.

Now, at the Arts section of The Times, editors despair about having to cover male artists: ‘No one cares. Who wants to look at another picture of some dull bloke?’


In 2010, I went to interview the woman being touted as the next big feminist icon in the broadsheets: Lady Gaga. As an indicator of how quickly the landscape can change under the influence of just one, prominent figure, the difference between her and the last mooted Big Feminist Icon – Price – couldn’t have been more vast.

Price is a middle-class girl who’d risen to prominence via titty-shoots, with nothing to say – once she’d gained attention – except ‘Memememememe look at ME! And my Katie Price Pink Boutique iPod, 64GB, ￡399.99.’

Gaga, on the other hand, is a middle-class girl who’d risen to prominence by writing three of the best pop singles of the 21st century on the trot (‘Poker Face’, ‘Just Dance’ and ‘Bad Romance’), and with so much to say that she’d had to employ a multi-media art collective – The Haus of Gaga – to tour with her, in order to express it all. Gaga’s ticket was gay equality, sexual equality, political activism, tolerance, and getting shit-faced on the dance floor whilst busting some serious moves. And wearing a lobster on her head.

Whilst it’s always too early to call a career until it’s ten years in, the sheer scope, scale, impact and intent of Gaga’s first two years as a pop star thrill me more than any female artist to emerge since Madonna. Indeed, much as I acknowledge, as a Western woman, my eternal indebtedness to Madonna – I would never have had the courage to paraglide with my muff hanging out, or shag Vanilla Ice, if it weren’t for the pioneering work Madonna did in Sex – it should also be noted that Gaga ascended to the world stage, wearing an outfit made of raw meat, and protesting against the US Army’s homophobia, when she was just 24. At 24, Madonna was still working at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Brooklyn.

And the thing about Madonna was that, as a teenage girl, she always kind of … scared me. She was cool, and hot, and amazingly dressed, and I could see that all her songs of empowerment were going to do me good, buried in my subconscious. But I couldn’t get over the feeling that, if she met me, she’d look me up and down – dressed in my jumble-sale boots, patched shirt and straw hat – and then walk straight past me, to chat up Warren Beatty, instead.

And fair enough – at the time, all I would have been able to offer Madonna, by way of conversation, was a long rant about how I believed the driver of the 512 bus in Wolverhampton was a pervert, how lonely I was, and how much I liked ‘Cool For Cats’ by Squeeze. If I were her, I would have gone and shagged Warren Beatty as well.

But this is why, if I were a bookish teenage girl in 2011, and I saw Lady Gaga, I’d feel like all my pop Christmases had come at once. Because Gaga is an international female pop star on the sides of all the nerds, freaks, outcasts, intellectual pretenders and lonely kids. If you go to one of her gigs, whilst the atmosphere is ‘club’ – impossibly loud bass, mass frugging, poppers and WKD – the audience consists of every awkward kid in the city. Kids dressed up with Coke cans in their hair – à la the ‘Telephone’ video – with slogans scrawled on their faces, their arms draped around drag queens, and Morrissey lookalikes in glasses, and cardigans. They’re watching a woman with a quote from Rilke tattooed up her arm (‘In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write.’ Yes. It’s quite a small font) who’s performing on a custom-made, 14-foot-high piano made to look like the spider-legged elephants in Dali’s ‘Temptation Of St Anthony’, and singing about doomed love through the metaphor of Alfred Hitchcock movies.


And whilst she undoubtedly deals in sexuality – if you haven’t seen a close-up of Gaga’s crotch in the last week, you simply haven’t watched enough MTV – it’s not the confident, straightforward animal sexuality of every other female pop star. Gaga’s take on sexual mores is to examine female dysfunction, alienation and sexual neuroses. When her debut album came out, she had to fight her record company, who wanted to put a straightforward, borderline soft-porn image of her on the cover.

‘The last thing a young woman needs is another picture of a pop star, covered in grease, writhing in the sand and touching herself,’ she said. ‘I had to cry for a week to get them to change it.’

By the time she played the 2009 MTV Awards, her performance consisted of a chandelier dropping onto her head, with Gaga slowing bleeding to death as she sang. The year before, Katy Perry had jumped out of a cake.

When I went to interview Gaga, we got on like a house on fire. At the end of the interview, she invited me to ‘come party’ with her, at a sex club in Berlin.

‘You know Eyes Wide Shut? It’s like that,’ she said, swishing down a backstage corridor in a black, taffeta, custom-made, one-off Alexander McQueen cape. ‘I can’t be responsible for anything that happens and, remember – use a condom.’

We went across Berlin in a blacked-out motorcade of 4x4s – her security effectively curtailing the trailing paps by simply standing in front of their cars, and impeding their exit – and ended up in a disused industrial complex down an alleyway. To get to the dance floor, you had to go through a maze of corridors, and past a series of tiny, cell-like booths, decked out with a selection of beds, bathtubs, hoists and chains.

‘For f*cking,’ a German member of our entourage explained – both helpfully, and somewhat unnecessarily.

Despite the undoubted and extreme novelty of such a venue, Adrian – Gaga’s British press officer – and I gave away our nationalities instantly when we commented, excitedly, ‘Oh my God! You can SMOKE in here.’ It seemed a far more thrilling prospect than … some bumming.

It was a small entourage: Gaga, me, Adrian, her make-up artist, her security guy, and maybe two others. We walked on to the small dance floor, in a club filled with drag queens, lesbians dressed as sailors, boys in tight T-shirts, girls in black leather. The music was pounding. There was a gigantic harness hanging over the bar. ‘For f*cking.’ The same helpful German again.

Gaga headed up our group. Even, like, Keane would slope off to a VIP booth at this point, and wait for people to bring them drinks. Instead – cloak billowing, and very much looking like one of the Skeksis in The Dark Crystal – Gaga marched up to the bar, and leaned on it in a practised barfly manner. With a bellowed, ‘What does everyone want to drink?’, she got the round in.

‘I really love a dingy, pissy bar,’ Gaga says. ‘I’m really old-school that way.’

We went into an alcove with a wipe-clean banquette – ‘For the f*cking!’ the German says, again – and set up camp. Gaga took off her McQueen cloak and chucked it into a corner. I promptly stood on it, to the wincing horror of her make-up artist, who carefully removed its ￡10,000’s worth of taffeta from under my feet. Gaga was now just in bra, fishnets and knickers, with sequins around her eyes.

‘Do you know what that girl at the bar said to me?’ she said, sipping her Scotch, and taking a single drag off someone’s fag before handing it back. ‘She said, “You’re a feminist. People think it means man-hating, but it doesn’t.” Isn’t that funny?’

Earlier in the day, conversation had turned to whether Gaga would describe herself as feminist or not. As the very best conversations about feminism often will, it had segued from robust declarations of emancipation and sisterhood (‘I am a feminist because I believe in women’s rights, and protecting who we are, down to the core’) to musing on who she fancied. (‘In the video to “Telephone”, the girl I kiss, Heather, lives as a man. And as someone who does like women, something about a more masculine woman makes me feel more … feminine. When we kissed, I got that fuzzy butterfly feeling.’)

We had concluded that it was odd most women ‘shy away’ from declaring themselves feminists, because ‘it really doesn’t mean “man-hating”’.

‘And now she’s just said the same thing to me! AND she’s hot!’ Gaga beamed. She points to the girl – who looks like an androgynous, Cupid-mouthed, Jean Paul Gaultier cabin boy. ‘Gorgeous,’ Gaga sighs.

By 2am, we had drunk a lot of vodka, and Gaga had her head in my lap. I had just come up with the theory that, if you have one of your heroes lying drunkenly in your lap, that’s the time you tell them all the little theses you’ve come up with about them.

‘Even though you wear very little clothing,’ I said slightly primly, gesturing to Gaga’s bra and thong, ‘you’re not doing all this as a … prick-tease, are you?’

‘No!’ Gaga replied, with a big, drunken beam. ‘It’s not what straight men masturbate over when they’re at home watching pornography. It’s not for them. It’s for … us.’

And she gestured around the nightclub, filled to the brim with biker-boy lesbians and drag queens.

Because Gaga is not there to be f*cked. You don’t penetrate Gaga. In common with much of pop’s history, and particularly its women – she’s not singing these songs in order to get laid, or give the impression she wants to. She wishes to disrupt, and disturb: sunglasses made of burning cigarette, beds bursting into flame, dresses made of raw meat, calipers made of platinum, Gaga being water-boarded in a bathtub – eyes dilated with CGI so that she looks like her own manga cartoon. Her iconography is disconcerting, and disarranges what we are used to seeing.

The end point of her songs is not to excite desire in potential lovers but the thrill of examining her own feelings, then expressing them to her listeners, instead. Her gang – the millions-strong army of Gaga fans, who call themselves ‘Little Monsters’, and call her ‘Mama Monster’, the den mother of their alternative world. As a woman, Gaga’s big novelty is not her theatricality, talent or success but that she has used these to open up a new space for pop fans. And this – Gaga’s gay-friendly, freak-friendly, campaigning facet – might be the most exciting thing about her of all. For women, finding a sympathetic, nonjudgemental arena is just as important as getting the right to vote. We needed not just the right legislation, but the right atmosphere, too, before we can finally start to found our canons – then, eventually, cities and empires.

Ultimately, I think it’s going to be very difficult to oppress a generation of teenage girls who’ve grown up with a liberal, literate, bisexual pop star who shoots fireworks out of her bra and was listed as Forbes magazine’s seventh most Powerful Celebrity in the World.


The week after I interview Gaga, a blurry, fan’s shot of her in the nightclub appeared in magazines across the world. You could just make out my gigantic, sweaty, backcombed hair behind her.

‘GAGA HEALTH WORRIES!’ the headlines shouted, claiming that ‘insiders’ had been ‘worried’ by her actions that night. I can assure you, they hadn’t. They were up, dancing with her, on the banquette of the nightclub, having the time of their lives.


Here’s one of the big pitfalls of the modern media’s obsession with famous female role models. Whilst it’s thrilling that a career like Gaga’s is front-page news all over the world – discussed in easy-to-access tabloid newspapers and magazines, rather than hidden away in textbooks, fanzines or tiny nightclubs with bad wine, where only three determined, hardcore feminists, who don’t really need it, will find it – there is a pitfall to most discourse on the state of modern womanhood taking place in these publications.

To wit: those deciding the editorial context of most of these magazines and newspapers are dispiritingly cretinous and mean-spirited, constructing fictional narratives about a series of entirely unconnected events or photographs, and paying the unenlightened drones in Sector B of multi-national publishing empires to write them. The underlying attitudes these stories on famous women reveal would make Kate Millett – or, indeed, anyone who’s read Psychology For Dummies – put their head in their hands and sigh, ‘Oh, the humanity, How can we have allowed our stupidity to be so obvious?’

And that’s the positive spin on the situation. The paranoid, suspicious part of me – which rises up at 2am, after taking the crude clingfilm bung off a bottle of red wine that was opened three months previously, and ill-advisedly drinking the whole lot before looking for miniatures of Malibu – sometimes wonders if this kind of journalism is written with a darker, and more purposeful intent.

Because the kind of media coverage our prominent women are given is hugely reductionist and damaging. Although the media attitude to all famous people has an underlying schadenfreude-y current of ‘Haha – wait until you show the slightest sign of weakness, and then we’ll stick a chisel in it, and work it a mile wide,’ female celebrities suffer disproportionately from this, because of the pivotal attention given to their appearance.

A ‘sign of weakness’ for a male celebrity is being found to be unfaithful, or unkind to an employee, or having crashed their car whilst stoned out of their tiny minds. A ‘sign of weakness’ for a woman, on the other hand, can be a single, unflattering picture. Women are pilloried for wearing a single, ‘bad’ outfit – not just on the red carpet, where part of their ‘job description’ is looking like some otherworldly apparition of beauty, no matter how busy, worried, unhappy or genuinely unconcerned about the whole stupid crapshoot they are.

No – paps will take pictures of women going to the shops in jeans and a jumper, with no make-up on, and make it look like her world is on the verge of crumbling because she didn’t have a blow-dry before she left the house.

Of course, in the real world, we know women who always blow-dry their hair before leaving the house are freaks: any mother at the school gates with a glossy bob is subject to pitying looks from the other mothers, who can’t believe she wasted 20 minutes, and a lot of upper-arm strength, zazzing her riah for any event less momentous than publicly announcing her engagement to Kiefer Sutherland, at Cannes. But when you see, say, Kate Winslet in the paper, looking perfectly normal on her way to Waitrose, we’ve become so conditioned to the tabloid view of female appearance that even the most hardcore feminist might find themselves having the trigger reaction of ‘Jesus, Winslet – your hair looked better when you were going down with 1,517 souls on the Titantic. Run a brush through it, love’ – before they suddenly come round, and shout up, to the heavens, ‘DEAR LORD! WHAT have I BECOME?’

And that’s just bitchiness about looking a bit drab. There’s a whole other league of judgement heaped on single pictures – one frame, out of 24 per second – where it appears a woman’s body has changed shape in any way. Again, I understand the interest in fluctuating physical statistics – men, worriedly, measure their willies; women, worriedly, measure their thighs. We all do it. We are fascinated by our bodies, and those of others, but it is surely ludicrous to load such significance onto such a tiny thing: like plonking an Acme anvil in a child’s hammock. Just as William Blake claimed to see the world in just one grain of sand, we presume we can see a whole woman’s life in just one shot of Eva Longoria’s upper arm looking a bit squished in a T-shirt.

A picture of Catherine Zeta-Jones in trousers that are puckering, slightly, around the groin will be met with a hail of ‘Catherine EATER Jones’ headlines, and faux-concerned editorials about how Zeta-Jones has always ‘battled’ with her weight. Alexa Chung is photographed in a pair of clumpy shoes that make her legs look smaller, and suddenly she’s anorexic, and on the edge of a nervous breakdown. They never blame the clothes in these pictures – stupid puckering too-tight clothes, or stupid baggy clothes. It must always be the woman’s body that’s at fault. Lily Allen, Charlotte Church, Angelina Jolie, Fern Britton, Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Aniston, Gemma Arterton, Michelle Obama, Victoria Beckham, Amy Winehouse, Billie Piper, Kerry Katona, Mariah Carey, Lady Gaga, Madonna, Cherie Blair, Oprah Winfrey, Carla Bruni, the Duchess of York, Sarah Brown – there can’t be a magazine-consuming woman in the Western world who’s not been called upon to speculate on the mental and emotional health of these women on the basis of a single bad photo of her. I’ve read more about Oprah Winfrey’s arse than I have about the rise of China as an economic superpower. I fear this is no exaggeration. Perhaps China is rising as an economic superpower because its women aren’t spending all their time reading about Oprah Winfrey’s arse. If I knew more about China, and less about Oprah Winfrey’s arse, I could probably argue a direct cause-and-effect.

And the absolute randomness of this damaging, time-wasting speculation is perhaps the most pernicious and ludicrous thing of all. Journalists seem to choose who they’re ‘concerned’ about with the randomness of a roomful of people pulling names out of hats. I’ve seen shots of Mischa Barton in one publication faux-concernedly lamenting her ‘worryingly skinny frame’ – and then the self-same shot in the magazine next to it on the rack, captioned: ‘Mischa Barton – celebrating her new curves.’

Argh! ‘Celebrating her curves!’ Is there any more evil sentence in modern celebrity journalism? ‘Celebrating her curves’ is – as every woman knows – the codified way that magazines can accuse someone of ‘looking fatter’ but without the celebrity being able to complain, lest they look like they’re disapproving of women being ‘curvy’. It’s an engagingly evil paradox – the kind of mind-f*cking North Korean dictatorship would go in for, if they decided to suppress the proletariat using only cattiness, and rampant body dysmorphia.

And so these celebrity women have to spend whole interviews listing what they eat – ‘I love toast!’ – and engaging in a relationship with the media much like that between a teenage inmate of an eating disorders clinic and a stern nurse: constantly having to ‘prove’ that they’ve been good, and have eaten up all their shepherd’s pie, rather than hiding it in the sleeves of their cardigan, and dumping it in a plant-pot when no one’s looking. And what is the reason given for these gleefully run pictures of women in swimsuits on the beach, who are depicted not as people ‘on holiday’, ‘doing some work’ or ‘being with their family’, but in the middle of a lifelong ‘struggle’ with their ‘body issues’? It’s ‘the human angle’.


‘Jennifer Lopez has cellulite – there is a God!’ they will trumpet, next to a hatefully enlarged shot of Jennifer Lopez’s thighs. ‘Celebrities – they’re JUST like YOU!’ they parp, next to a shot of some poor bitch from EastEnders wearing bad jeans that give her a muffin top – seemingly unaware of what an ultimately alarming statement this is. For a female reader, there’s ultimately no comfort in seeing a picture of a famous woman, papped with a long-angle lens, with red ‘circles of shame’ around her soft thighs, stretch-marked upper arms or slightly swollen belly. Because what this ultimately tells a reader – usually young, and impressionable, and still hopeful about the world – is that if she were a creative and ambitious woman, who worked hard, got some breaks and, somehow, managed to rise to the top of her profession and become as famous as these women in a still male-dominated industry, the paps would come for her, and make her feel just as shitty as Cheryl Cole. What a f*cking depressing state of affairs.

Here’s why I hate ‘the human angle’.



1) I don’t want my celebrities to be more human. Art should be an arena to reinvent and supersede yourself. I don’t want a load of normals trudging around, moaning about water rates and blackheads. I want David Bowie pretending to be bent, and from space.

2) In the 21st century, any woman, succeeding in any arena, does not need ‘humanising’. There are absolutely no exceptions to this. Not even Margaret Thatcher. It’s been a long, slow, 100,000-year trudge out of the patriarchy. There are still parts of the world where women are not allowed to touch food when they’re menstruating, or are socially ostracised for failing to give birth to boys. Even in right-on America, or Europe, women are still so woefully under-represented in everything – science, politics, art, business, space travel – that if any woman manages to construct a suitable persona for getting on in the world, and achieves even a fraction of the eminence men take for granted, I absolutely want her to be able to keep her front up. Let her keep her work face on. Let her seem a little indomitable and distant. Let her acquire mystery, or foreboding, or outright terrorising invulnerability, if she likes. When the world is overrun with Thatcher-faced Amazonian Illuminati, manipulating the world with a combination of nuclear weapons and sexual blackmail, then we’ll really need to get in there and humanise them. In the meantime, Jennifer Aniston has simply released another happy-go-lucky rom-com. I don’t think we need to start disassembling her fearsome iron mask just yet, by asking her when she was last on the blob.


Even though female role models expand in their variety and their achievements by the month, there is one thing we need to ask ourselves: is what we read about them, and say about them, ‘reportage’ and ‘discussion’? Or is it just a global media acting like a total bitch?