Freeman - Be Awesome

Contents

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Huge yet insufficient thanks to the following awesome people:

Nell Freeman Romilly, Carol Miller, Andy Bull, Imogen Fox, Tim Robey, Irin Carmon, Tim Lusher, Richard Williams, India Knight, Ed Howker, Simon Amstell, Charlie Angela and George Glass for the Funny Face reminder and much more, the Graff family for the Shakespeare lesson, Daniel Lee for his Home and Away expertise (apologies for being such a vulgar dame, Daniel), Lauren Collins, Georgia Garrett, Louise Haines, Georgia Mason.

Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.

Thus spake the Dread Pirate Roberts/Wesley to Buttercup in the glorious 1987 movie, The Princess Bride. Aside from learning that one should never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line, this is probably the most valuable lesson that wise film taught me. But, contrary to what the Dread Pirate Roberts/Wesley appears to advise in this scene, I have never believed that one should just accept it.

The Nietzschean pirate was not wrong. Life is definitely pain: the Daily Mail exists; there are still people in the world who believe that banning abortion will lead to happy families as opposed to mutilated women; every straight man Ive ever met prefers boring Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffanys to glorious Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story and, call me a crazy idealist, but Id have thought that by the twenty-first century any movie that suggests the only happy ending for a woman is marriage would be deemed as unacceptable as any movie that suggests the only jobs available to black people are maids, drug dealers, sassy best friends or Nelson Mandela. Oh. Wait a minute.

Then there are the pains that come from within and, going purely from my own experiences and observations, women are particularly enthusiastic about inflicting these on themselves, almost as much as some of the aforementioned exterior agencies are about inflicting them on them, and it is entirely possible that the two sides to this equation are not unrelated, even an ever-interlooping system. After all, bullies look for susceptible targets.

This is not to suggest that women are delicate victims who need protection, or that feminism treats them as if they are, or whatever nonsense some folk come out with to justify not confronting such things: Show me a smart, competent young professional woman who is utterly derailed by an inappropriate comment about her appearance and I will show you a rare spotted owl, one journalist wrote in an editorial in the New York Times in 2011, suggesting that secretly women love to be reduced to their physical appearance and only pretend they dont because they think to do otherwise would be a betrayal of the Sistahz and their Orwellian attitudes to sexual harassment. But then this journalist also seems to think that a womans age (young) and employment status (professional) are in any way relevant to her credibility as a sensible person and, rather more jarringly, suggests that only weak women cant handle harassment (or worse), thus putting the focus and blame on the womens reactions rather than the mens actions (an all too common tack in a variety of contexts), so perhaps we need not waste any more of our time on this theory. Although I cant help but regret not getting to see that owl. I do like an owl.

Its hard to be awesome in an occasionally lame world. That so many bizarrely retrograde clichs and expectations still dominate so much of society and pop culture is depressing enough; the number of people who perpetuate them, internalise them and even enact them because, I guess, its easier to do this than to come up with ones own ideas, ones own arguments, ones own life, can feel downright deadening on a persons soul.

As a woman who works in the media and watches a lot of movies, I, inevitably, notice this in particular in regard to the depiction of women in the media and movies. This, I guess, is because feminism has arrived at something of an awkward place in that while equal rights (if not equal pay) are, at the very least, expected, anachronistic expectations and depictions of women remain. But to be honest, the fact that were even talking about feminism or, specifically, the definition thereof is depressing because it seems spectacularly lame to have to stroke ones chin about what gender equality means. I have yet to see a single article asking, say, Are Civil Rights Dead? or Is the Fight Against Racism Relevant to Twenty-First-Century Fiction?, to paraphrase two recent chin-strokey articles about feminism, neither of which, incidentally, came from the strawmen of daft right-wing tabloids but two ostensibly liberal and ostensibly respected British publications. It never ceases to amaze me how much of a meal people still make about the definition of gender equality. Id have thought that the clue was in the name, but then I always was very literal-minded.

The ubiquitous clichs about life in general, and what one needs to do in order for it to be a fulfilling one again, going by my personal experience tend to impinge on ones subconscious and fester during ones twenties and thirties, bringing with them the four horsemen of the apocalypse: self-doubt, panic, insecurity and credulity. One knows when these have arrived because one finds oneself reading the Daily Mail website, Mail Online, and giving a toss about it.

But contrary to what a certain pirate claimed, one does not have to accept this, or insist that one is unaffected by them because to do otherwise would be a cop-out of some sort, and I swear Im not trying to sell you anything. Well, other than this book and, seeing as youre on the fourth page Im assuming youve already bought it.

Instead, one needs to confront these stereotypes and assumptions and then one can see their stupidity clearly. Wait a minute, one? Who talks like that, other than David Starkey? As I am (spoiler alert) not David Starkey, I shall, briefly, stop hiding behind the presumptuous you and coy one I. Ta da! There is not a single word in this book that is not directed at myself. All the lessons in this book are lessons I learned by falling flat on my Semitic-nosed face. This has been the way of my whole career. In the daylight hours as opposed to the evening ones in which the majority of this book was written I pretend to be a newspaper columnist and a fashion writer, and at a conservative estimate, at least 70 per cent of my fashion articles have been written when Ive been wearing, at best, vaguely coordinated pyjamas, by which I mean a Vote Obama 2008! T-shirt (customised with tea and Marmite stains), leggings and Ugg boots. Its how Anna Wintour edits Vogue, you know. Those who cannot do, teach; those who cannot teach, teach gym; those who cannot teach gym, write bossy essays on the subjects at which they so consistently fail.