So, given that it is the biggest awards show on earth, it feels like it’s time to look at the Oscars and ask: When are they going to stop being such balls? By which I mean—utterly toxic for women. There are places it’s worse to be a woman—Afghanistan, for one; and the men’s urinals of Foxy’s nightclub in Nottingham for two—but Hollywood runs it pretty close.
Last year, 97 percent of movies were directed/produced by men. Although men and women are vaguely similar—generally the same number of legs, etc.—the stories men and women wish to tell, and listen to, are very different. One only has to compare and contrast the respective conversations on hen nights and stag dos to see that.
If 97 percent of the stories are chosen by men, Hollywood is still 97 percent unequal. In essence, if news of feminism were a car, driving from Mary Wollstonecraft towards Hollywood, I would estimate it’s still broken down somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic right now.
And this is hugely obvious at the Oscars. Evidence one: all the women there are in pain. For the few women actually succeeding in Hollywood, this is their big night of power and triumph—yet all will have been on a diet since six weeks before the Golden Globes, yanked into a dress they cannot breathe in, and will be wearing shoes they cannot walk in.
Their male peers, meanwhile, are walking around safe in the knowledge that there won’t be whole, live TV shows devoted to how they look fat in their dress, or—thanks to E! Entertainment’s peerlessly evil “pedi-cam”—have lackluster toes.
In recent years—as women’s power in Hollywood has risen fractionally—there has started to be an acknowledgment of how women will be deemed to have “lost” an awards ceremony if they don’t take on this extra, female-only job of physically training for it like self-loathing athletes—lest they be derided and denigrated in the media. Julianne Moore accepting her BAFTA with a whimpered “I’m so hungry.” Emma Thompson taking off her heels and throwing them into the crowd. Tina Fey referring to The Hunger Games with: “And that’s how I refer to the last six weeks.”
So there’s a simple checklist here: we will know equality has reached Hollywood when the ladies start rocking up in comfortable shoes and a square meal inside them. For European award ceremonies held in the slashing rain, this will extend to women being able to wear a coat on the red carpet. It is amazing that, in 2015, a necessary part of being a successful young actress is being able to repel hypothermia, simply through willpower alone.
The second sign will come in the introductions. Are you a man coming onstage to present an award? Get ready to be described as “insanely talented,” “dynamic,” “inspiring,” or “hilarious.” You’ll like that.
Now, are you a woman coming onstage to present an award? Get ready for your introduction to sound like it was scripted by a sixteenth-century diplomat trying to sell a potential bride to Henry VIII!
“The scrumptious Cameron Diaz.” “The enchanting Anne Hathaway.” “The ravishing Jennifer Aniston.”
It’s always with the physical descriptions. This might seem like carping at chivalry—why is it so bad to say a woman is beautiful?—but think about this: some women aren’t beautiful. That’s just a fact. Imagine a world where we started introducing all men solely with physical descriptions: “The dewy Martin Scorsese.” “The lissome Clint Eastwood.” “The hunka burning love that is Judd Apatow.” See how weird it is?
And hey—while we’re spring-cleaning the Oscars of bullshit, let’s have a quick chat about people of color. Last year’s running gag was on the unpronouncability of nine-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis’s name. Just some perspective here: it’s not like black Hollywood has a monopoly on weird names. The white people are representing hard with Benedict Cumberbatch, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sigourney Weaver, and Shia LaBeouf.
If the Oscars is the biggest award show on earth, how about it finally stops acting all weird around people with darker skin and/or tits, and starts treating them not as freaky guests, but just as much a part of Hollywood as all those normal white guys?
Mums Are Superheroes
It’s been an amazing couple of years, really. I got 35 percent famous, cut my hair short, got pissed with Benedict Cumberbatch, had two number one books, gave up heels, and finally worked out what that weird smell in the hall was. (The lightshade was incorrectly fixed, meaning the seam—fastened with glue—was near enough to the hot bulb to warm the glue, releasing its disturbingly fishy odor. It wasn’t that there was a Hellmouth opening up AFTER ALL! It was such a relief.)
But perhaps the most exciting thing was making the sitcom Raised by Wolves with my sister Caz based on our childhood, of being a huge, homeschooled family in the West Midlands. As we were writing it, we realized something: This show wasn’t, as we’d originally thought, all about the weird teenage girls in it. It was all about the mum, Della. I tried to explain why here.
“Mum” is a pejorative, really, isn’t it? I’m sorry to drop such a Downer Bomb the day before Mothering Sunday, but it is. “Mumsy” clothes, “Mum dancing,” “Your mum”—bad, all bad. “Mum” as an insult rests on the underlying notion that all mums are dull, knackered, sexless husks who—having reproduced—need to just lie down and rot so that their bodies may become useful to the world again by, e.g., helping a tree grow, or providing carrion for a passing fox.
This is odd, given that a notional “Mum Island”—back off, Channel 5! I’ve already copyrighted the idea!—would currently be populated by J. K. Rowling; Beyoncé; Björk; Tina Fey; Scarlett Johansson; the prime ministers/presidents of Chile, Malawi, Argentina, Brazil, Bangladesh, and Liberia; Shonda Rhimes; Sheryl Sandberg; and more Nobel Prize winners than I have time to count as I’m doing the school run in twenty minutes.
Mums can, demonstrably, get things done, wear the correct-sized clothing, be wildly creative, and dance in a sexy way. So why do we still think of them as Benny from Crossroads, but with tits?
I would suggest that film and TV are the problems here. Mums on screen divide into roughly two categories, thus:
1. Sensible dullards like Mummy Pig in Peppa Pig, whose job it is to appear in front of Peppa, Daddy, and George, and say, “Are you having fun in here? Well, I’ve come to end that! Come on—everyone wash their hands, and put all the good times away!”
Or:
2. Mums just as buzzkill as Mummy Pig, but lent “humanity” and “character” by constantly complaining about what drudges they are, while allowing the children they raised to treat them like dirt. Watching this, I’m like, “Hey, screen mom—you’re a formative influence on that kid’s life. You were essentially a god to them until they were ten. When did you skip the bit where you teach them some freaking manners? How am I supposed to like you when you raised such hateful, misogynist trolls?”
Basically, popular culture has not served motherhood well. It is fascinating that the onset of male puberty has created the sublimated superhero imagery of Spider-Man (web shooting), Luke Skywalker (lightsaber), and the X-Men, but the incomparably more dramatic shift into motherhood gets the alien bursting out of John Hurt—YEAH, THAT’S RIGHT, A MAN—in Alien, and that’s about your lot.
As an exercise, I’m just going to run through, once again, what becoming a mother consists of. First of all, you casually make an extra internal organ—the placenta. Like you’re some goddamn intergalactic robot UPGRADING ITSELF.
Then you spend the next nine months being a LIVING, WALKING FLESH NEST: casually absorbing your fetus’s endless excreta while you’re busy running an international business—something which, in later years, you will find the perfect metaphor for raising a teenager. Then, at the point where you’ve grown a skull and a brain big enough to make humans the dominant species on earth—but still just small enough to emerge from your pelvis without blowing both your legs off—a homunculus will effortfully punch its way out of your “special flower.”
Here—at the point where, in a comparable exercise, a man who’d just passed a microscopic kidney stone would be whe
eled onto a ward, dosed with morphine, treated like a brave hero, then left the hell alone—you magically turn your tits into a milky heaven buffet, and start cranking out fifteen meals a day into a tiny, screaming, ungrateful creature who resembles an enraged otter in a jumpsuit.
Just to, again, get this into perspective—when the most magic man who ever lived, Jesus, turned water into wine once, for one party, people went on about it for two thousand years, and formed a major man-religion around it.
Meanwhile, for millions of breast-feeding mothers every day, turning their bodies into lunch, the reaction is, “Bitch, please—don’t do that in Claridge’s.”
And then, of course, after the first year, the really difficult bit starts. The fevers and the ghosts and the sleeps that won’t come—the terrible falls, and the bullies, and the boy who breaks their heart, and the hair that makes them sad. And you have to teach them what jokes are, and what death is, and how to charm—all while putting three meals a day on the table, and money in the electricity meter, and joy between every wall in the house, and never, never, ever forgetting to try and love every minute, because suddenly, ten minutes after they were born, they slam the front door for the last time, and you are sitting there, going, “Where did the baby go? Where is my baby?”
The sitcom I wrote with my sister, Raised by Wolves, starts on Channel 4 this week, and it centers around a single mother of six, living on a council estate, in Wolverhampton. We knew we’d found the right actress for the part when Rebekah Staton walked in and said, “I’m going to play her like Clint Eastwood. Is that okay? Like a fucking glorious superhero.”
And we were like, “Yeah. How could you play a mother any other way?”
All the Lists of My Life
As I am a mother, I am now incapable of not constantly giving out advice. It appears to be hardwired into you—as soon as people start coming out of your nunny, you begin doling out tips thither and yon, and you cannot stop. You became an advice machine. You are all like, “Hints and tips are on me!”
Seven Things About Fashion Every Woman Should Know
Never buy a “jumper dress.” Too bulky to go under a coat outdoors, too hot and sweaty indoors—it’s a perfect storm of uselessness. PLUS: will go super-bobbly within three washes, so you’ll look like mad sweaty mohair bubble wrap. Avoid.
White trousers will always make you nervous—however knowledgeable you are about your current place within your Cycle of Red Doom. It’s not worth the aggro.
Duffel coats are surprisingly waterproof, give off a pleasingly benign air of “I am a poor student/Paddington Bear, please don’t mug me,” and go with everything. You could spend your life oscillating between wrapper coats, trenches, peacoats, swing coats, capes, and faux fur, spending over a grand and cluttering up your coat cupboard. Or, alternatively, bung £78 on a duffel from Toppers and don’t think about your outer layer again until 2024.
Never get an embroidered bra. Under anything more sheer than a massive thermal fleece, it will look like you have a horrific garland-shaped rash all over your wabs—such as harbinged the Black Death, in days of bad yore.
In matters of style, the word “comfortable” is—contrary to everything you’ve ever been told—your friend. Likewise, “jolly.” Look, you’re a long time dead, and life is hard—do you want to spend your entire life with aching feet and your knickers wedged up your crack, worrying your tits are about to fall out of your top and pulling down the hem of your “fierce” dress over your cold, unhappy thighs? I have drilled my daughters from an early age to appraise their own, and others’, outfits on whether they are “jolly” and “comfortable.” “That’s a jolly comfortable cardigan!” “Those dungarees look smashingly warm and bright!” “Mum—Megan Fox does not look jolly or comfy on the red carpet. We feel sorry for her.” Feminism will only have done its job when every high-powered woman at the Oscars is as jolly and comfortable as the men.
The area between your big toe and next toe is one of the most exquisitely tender and sensitive areas of the body. You will only realize this one hour after buying your first pair of Birkenstock flip-flops, miles from any shoe shop where you might replace them with something less agonizing, e.g., a bag full of wasps.
Similarly, although Doc Marten boots are among the finest fashion inventions on earth, do not even attempt to wear them before you have thoroughly smashed every inch of a new pair with a massive claw hammer, to “soften” the leather. I’m not joking. Huge hammer. Smash smash smash. I still bear scars on my feet from the first, nonhammered pair of Docs I bought—and that was in 1991. Anyone finding my dismembered corpse would look at my feet and conclude, “This is a Caucasian woman, late thirties, who came of age during grunge.”
Places Where Lost Things Are
That drawer full of random detritus in the kitchen.
That drawer full of random detritus in the hallway.
The pocket of your other coat.
In the car.
In the taxi you got into, drunk, last night. You won’t see that iPhone again. Bye-bye.
In a bag hanging on the back of a doorknob. (NB: More than 8 percent of lost things are in this location. Make it your first port of call.)
In the bedroom of any girl-child in the house over the age of twelve if said item is (a) electrical, (b) a choice piece of your clothing, (c) your spendy Eve Lom face cream, (d) high-calorie snacks you had purposely hidden on a top shelf, in order that only you and other bill-paying adults could access them.
Outside, in your recycling box, in the rain. Right at the bottom. Hurry! Hurry! Here comes the bin lorry! Go out there in your too-short nightdress, and scrabble through it in an ungainly crouch, against the clock! Oh, look—a fox has done its business on top of your recycling! Now you smell like the drains of Mordor! Enjoy your day!
In a box folder marked “IMPORTANT THINGS” that you have completely forgotten about, and won’t remember until you move out of your house seventeen years later.
Reasons Why There Has Never Been a Better Time to Be a Woman
Benedict Cumberbatch’s face.
High-Lycra-content jeans.
Like all voting and stuff like that.
The two hottest men in the world (Brad Pitt and George Clooney) married human rights campaigners and strident feminists. Twenty-first-century beefcake loves kick-ass women.
Beyoncé.
(But not when she does slow jams about fancying Jay Z. DO SONGS ABOUT FEMINISM AND DANCING, BEYONCÉ.)
Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s brilliant, ongoing female version of a bromance. “Ho-mance”?
The fact that, Louis C.K. and Chris Rock aside, the funniest people in the world right now are all women: Melissa McCarthy, Fey and Poehler, Lena Dunham, Amy Schumer, Sarah Silverman, Kristen Wiig.
ASOS.com have a search category “dresses with sleeves.”
The biggest pop star in the world, Taylor Swift, persistently wears comfortable yet silver brogues. By my reckoning, this is the first global diva capable of convincingly running after an ice cream van since Alanis Morissette, in 1991.
Only another twenty-five years until the Equal Pay Act of 1970 is estimated to be legally enforced across the board! Hurrah!
There is a sitcom about suffragettes (Up the Women, BBC2), an Icelandic socialist lesbian prime minister who demanded financial reparation from incompetent banks after the 2008 crash, and while Donna Tartt’s started a new book, Hilary Mantel’s already halfway through hers. Malala has a Nobel Prize, Laverne Cox is on the cover of Time magazine, Clare Balding is the person who most represents the values of the BBC, and J. K. Rowling dropped off the Forbes Billionaires list—because she’d given so much of her money away to charity. The three most exciting pop artists in the world at the moment are FKA twigs, Lorde, and Kate Tempest, and we have a black First Lady who raps on YouTube about turnips. When I was growing up, my choice of female role models was between Margaret Thatcher or Bananarama. Obviously that was pretty great, but—choice! Increasing the lexicon! The p
resent day! You’re amazing!
Things Every Teenage Girl Should Know
Self-loathing is the default mode of the teenage girl. You are not alone in this. Contrary to what you think, it’s nothing to do with how fat your legs are, or the unmanageability of your hair. You are self-loathing because you are turning into a woman—and this seems, to a thirteen-year-old girl, like something exhausting, joyless, and high-maintenance, for which you will be constantly judged. And you are right. By and large, that’s exactly what being a woman is right now.
But you don’t need to be like those women. You can choose what kind of woman you want to be. And if those kind of women don’t exist, you reply, “Those kind of women don’t exist . . . yet.” “Yet” is going to be a useful word for you. “The world isn’t like that . . . yet.” “People don’t do things like that . . . yet.” As a teenage girl—as the future—YOU are the “yet.” You are the one who gets to invent the future. You are the one who gets to invent new women. The kind of women you’d be excited to be. Refer to this process as “the revolution,” for short, as it sounds more exciting. You want the future to be exciting.
Start the revolution with you. If you’re self-loathing—invent a you you don’t loathe, instead. Imagine the thing you would want to be—then be it. Make yourself your own project/pet/pretend best friend. Pretend to be confident, happy, relaxed—and you’ll soon realize there’s no difference between pretending these things and actually being them. Wear a silver cape. Be obsessed with geology. Don’t speak until eleven a.m. Intend to be the world’s first Girl Beatles. Learn what every drag queen before you knew: fake it till you make it.
Your key hobbies need to be long country walks (get some fresh air in your lungs!), masturbation, and the revolution. Between those three, you should, in the long term, stay relatively sane.
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