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 fucking,’ 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 fucking.’ 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 fucking!’ 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 fucked. 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,’ fem
ale 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-fucking 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 fucking 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 ourse
lves: 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?
CHAPTER 15
Abortion
I think I have polycystic ovaries. That’s what I’m getting the ultrasound for. I’ve been to my GP three times with symptoms – acne, exhaustion, weight gain, disrupted menstrual cycle – and this is where they’ve referred me: the Ultrasound Unit at the Whittington Hospital.
Yes – with those symptoms, you think I’m pregnant, don’t you? But I did a test six weeks ago, and got nothing, and this is where my GP has sent me now. I’m eating two cans of tinned pineapple for breakfast, and cry when I see a sad squirrel in an advert. Of course I’m pregnant. But the test said not. And I’m still breastfeeding. And I don’t want to be pregnant. So I’m not.
I lie on the bed. The monitor is up on the wall, waiting to show me what’s inside. I don’t really know what polycystic ovaries look like, but I’m guessing I’ll see circles, like oxygen bubbles. Or maybe something more visceral: clusters; bracts.
As the nurse washes her hands, in preparation, the ultrasound screen looks like the view from the deck of the Millennium Falcon, when it’s parked up. Dark, black space, with occasional speckles of light. Still.
When they finally put the ultrasound to my belly, though, it’s like the Light Jump: the whole solar system roars into life. Lines and whorls and kidneys and guts. Moons with asteroids circling. And then, at the centre – low, deep, hidden – a pulsar. A signal. A clock that’s ticking.
That is a heartbeat.
‘You’re pregnant!’ the nurse says, cheerfully. Nurses must be told to always say this cheerfully. They always do – however pale the client is, or however loudly the client has just said ‘Fuck’ and started shaking.
How to Be a Woman Page 24