Worth It?

Cheryl Cole, as featured in The Sunday Times' Style supplement. Photograph of magazine taken by Dora Petherbridge.

Perhaps it would be fair to say that before I write what I am about to write, I think the point of this has nothing to do with Cheryl Cole. I think that if she were not the ‘nation’s sweetheart’ another woman would be in her place. That’s the problem with this kind of thing - the women are to all intents and purposes replaceable. Dare I say it their appeal depends on a delicate bank- balancing act, one in which they are marketable for as long as they are ‘in’. This makes the comparisons between Cole and Vera Lynn all the more disturbing. For if Cole were a talented musician in so far as she wrote her own songs and composed her own music she would perhaps be in a position in culture out with a time and space continuum that begins and ends with a man called Simon Cowell. Indeed she might not need at all to have been reduced to the sum of her parts: hair, legs, face, the clothes.

As it stands fair play to the woman, she’s making an honest buck and she’s living the ubiquitous reality TV star’s dream - the one that other young people believe is only a hair-extension’s breadth away. Nope its not about Cole. My problem is with the media. For it has been a while since I’ve read anything quite as sycophantic as this interview by Edwina Ings-Chambers (from The Sunday Times’ Style supplement) prefaced with the strap-line ‘She’s Worth It’. I’m sure she is, but aren’t all women? Or are we to believe that it’s only the photogenic, cellulite free, fine-featured amongst our wretched gender that are deserving of attention?

Take this dazzling piece of prose for example:

‘She’s clad in a white T-Shirt, a striped APC blazer, stacked Stella McCartney wedges and micro blue shorts that reveal legs so toned and perfect (and, yes, cellulite free) that your eyes follow them round mesmerically while your brain registers simple disbelief.’

Well that’s just lovely, but what if anything, does it have to say about Cheryl Cole, other than, in case you didn’t get the point, she’s blooming marvellous to look at?

Is it any wonder then that Cole goes on to say this? -

‘If you could just give me one word to be, ‘inspirational’ would be the one, I think ... Like, one woman said to me, ‘I’ve got you on my fridge door to inspire me to go to the gym,’ and I felt that about Britney when she did I’m a Slave 4 You. So to think that I can be inspiring someone like that – or in any kind of way.’

While I’m not against anyone going to the gym or making the best of their appearance I do wonder whether a picture of Cheryl on my fridge door would be inspiration enough to make my life that little bit more ‘worth it’. Indeed once detached from the hyperbole, the clever marketing and the agendas, when we separate the gods from their perfectly formed legs, what exactly do cellulite free thighs actually mean? Are they the marker of success, above achievements beyond the body beautiful? Do they inspire generosity, kindness, goodwill, spirit, motivation, ingenuity, creativity and empowerment? Will I need them around if I get ill or if my heart is broken?

Nah, I don’t think so.

So in a vain bid to restore some kind of balance to the madness, I give you some women of note and inspiration.

Whether any of them have (or did have) cellulite is none of my business.

Virginia Woolf – novelist, diarist, publisher, feminist
Mary Woolstonecraft – writer, philosopher and feminist - vindicator of women
Michelle Obama
The Suffragettes
Nina Simone – Jazz artist and civil rights activist
Marie Stopes – pioneer in the field of family planning
Marie Curie – physicist and chemist, pioneer in the field of cancer research
Jane Austen - writer
The Brontes - writers
Margaret Atwood – writer and feminist
Susie Orbach – writer, psychotherapist and psychoanalyst and campaigner for body diversity
Naomi Wolf – political consultant, writer and spokesperson for the third wave feminist movement
Lionel Shriver – journalist and author
Meryl Streep - actor
Crystal Renn - plus size model and author of the memoir 'Hungry'
Susan Sarandon - actor
Melody Gardot – musician, writer, Buddhist and helping to develop a programme for music therapy and pain management
Toni Morrison – Nobel Prize winner, writer and professor
Doris Lessing – Nobel Prize winner
Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir - Prime Minister of Iceland, first openly lesbian head of government
Tori Amos – pianist, singer/songwriter
Kathryn Biglow – First woman to win an Oscar for best director

None of these women inspire me to go to the gym.

A Room of One's Own?

Logging into Facebook has become a daily part of my routine. I don’t know what I did in the mornings before it existed. Now over tea I find myself rummaging through the news feed searching out snippets of info, crazy observations and funny musings. There can be real diamonds in the rough, for every update that goes along the lines of ‘3 DAYS to go before my WEDDING!!!’ or ‘OMG cannae believe I drank SO much last night ...’ or ‘Lady Gaga WTF’, there are moments of sheer brilliance. This one comes courtesy of one of my friends, who shall remain nameless (you’ll understand why when you read it)

‘Gordon Brown does have a sexy voice’

Not sure I’ll be closing my eyes during the next televised debate. Should this person’s observation prove to be in fact correct it could create the existential crisis to end all existential crises, and I just don’t need this when my soul is already wavering, and we are so close to a general election.

In other news I am acutely aware that this blog might just be a tiny bit lame. ‘Feminism’ is in my title yet I have to admit I’ve let it slide over the past month. This is not because the cause has fallen by the wayside, only last night I was having a discussion with a friend about what I will call, the ontological problems related to being a feminist in the world at large. But it is sometimes difficult to maintain the momentum, especially when despite what some broadsheet newspapers would lead us to believe and the recent BBC Four documentary series ‘Women’ discussed, I do believe that there is a massive gulf between my feminism and any sort of real activism. And it is impossible for one person to address this, let alone rectify the situation.

Earlier this year the Reclaim the Night march was cancelled in Edinburgh and before that, the only murmur of discontent was the lovely Gude Cause Procession which to be fair displayed no discontent at all. The procession to mark the centenary of the Suffragettes movement was very much a celebratory affair, certainly not one riddled with anger. Indeed despite a call for women to bare banners with slogans calling for action on the work that still needs to be done with regards to equality, there were very few young participants willing to stick their necks on the line.

I don’t think this means feminism is dead. Perhaps young people have just become more self conscious and feminism seems a bit old fashioned. I do think there is an argument to be had about how much the older female generation are actually doing to promote empowerment, selfhood and women’s rights amongst their daughters. For its all very well to argue that they’ve done their bit and the baton must be passed on, but this doesn’t hold up if our young women don’t feel a part of the re-lay race let alone inclined to pick up the baton. And womanhood carries its own set of burdens. While manhood for me at least conjures images of ego and individualism, womanhood seems so intermingled in every aspect of that which makes up the bare bones of society; birth, marriage, child-rearing, domesticity, cooking, the home and the hearth. We’ve still got a long way to go before this is a realm of equality. And this is the generation who are most spoiled by their choices, for we can now choose our careers, choose to have or not have children and whether to get married. But all these choices merely mask my fear that there really is no choice at all. For my experience of being female is that there is always a compromise to be made.


In a very small and insignificant way I want to see this blog as my own act of feminism. In literary circles this term is often bandied about – it certainly was when I was at university – but it does hold up - that is the ‘room of one’s own’. On feminist literature courses we were taught that the very act of putting pen to paper, or tapping keys on the board, was the act of writing oneself into existence. This is especially significant for those who feel marginalised. And this argument holds up today. Is it any coincidence that these election debates are headed by three men, that the hyperbole, jargon and sound-bites are uttered mostly from the mouths of politicians? The whole thing leaves me not only confused, but utterly isolated. So I suppose that’s why I write. Well that, and my propensity towards introspection. But that’s for another blog post ...

To finish and if only to revitalise myself – why not a quote or three from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own -



Image courtesy of guardian.co.uk. Photograph.AP.

‘All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point – a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved.’

‘The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.’

‘The news of my legacy reached me one night about the same time that the act was passed that gave votes to women. A solicitor’s letter fell into the post-box and when I opened it I found that she [her aunt, Mary Beton] had left me five hundred pounds a year for ever. Of the two – the vote and the money – the money, I own, seemed infinitely more important.’