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 motherfucker! 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 fuck 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 C
ats’ 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.
How to Be a Woman Page 23