SOME people may find poor Posh-Spice-as-was a wraith-like, insubstantial creature, desperately flitting from one quick fix solution to another in the absence of any worthwhile career or life of the mind — in common with her husband, she claims never to have finished a book. At this gifting time of year, and as one who has finished many, might I suggest she starts with
The Bad-Tempered Ladybird, progressing to
The Very Lonely Firefly and graduating to
The Mixed-Up Chameleon.
The Very Quiet Cricket may remind her of her performing days, while her “better half” may well identify with
The Very Busy Spider. All are published by Picture Puffin.
From hip-hop to kabbalah to Scientology, she appears to have grasped at more straws than George Best to keep the leaky boat of her life afloat, while at the same time her skeletal form seems a poignant echo of the way she has faded from public consciousness as anything more than the bare bones of what she was — singer, It-Girl, half of a golden couple. At the risk of coming over all pretentious and post-modern here, it’s as though she is torn by an equal desire to stay slap-bang in the public eye and to disappear altogether.
Far from being hard on our stars, we are actually extremely tolerant and forgiving of their faults. We don’t expect our pop icons to be perfect, to be intellectual or even — be my witness, Madonna — to be accomplished singers. What we do expect them to have is an almost animal instinct for what works. Posh, bless her, seems to have consistently bad instincts, be it the astoundingly awful solo projects she has undertaken to the fact that, if you have the bad luck to be an uptight bag of skin and bones living mostly apart from your husband, it is not the smartest thing in the world to leave him under a hot Spanish sun in the close company of a personal assistant such as Rebecca Loos.
Her latest bad call, if the sleb-sheets are to be believed, is to ditch her Spanish Diet in favour of an eating regimen based on a creepy-sounding book Japanese Women Don’t Get Old or Fat. Last year, of course, the big gimmicky diet book was French Women Don’t Get Fat, which, as anyone who has ever been to the French countryside has noticed, might have more accurately been called Upper and Middle Class Parisiennes Don’t Get Fat. Or if one was in especially mardy mood, Upper and Middle Class Parisiennes Don’t Get Fat yet their Husbands still Play Away.
How predictably clueless of poor Victoria to choose to emulate females of yet another nationality who are synonymous with not being able to keep their dogs on the porch, as we say back in redneck country. Be it the Frenchman with his legendary mistress or the Japanese man with his mythic geisha, being thin would appear to have done their wives little benefit on the home front. Add to this the recent survey claiming that men with thin partners are more likely to cheat on them, and — oops, Posh did it again!
And I’m not being racist here, but who on earth would want to look like a Japanese woman? I’ve thought for a long time that women of Chinese origin are generally the most beautiful women in the world, and that women of Japanese origin — well, aren’t. As if to prove my point, the film Memoirs of a Geisha, which comes out next month, is the subject of some controversy, starring as it does gorgeous Chinese actresses as all three of the Japanese heroines. What a diss!
“She has sold her soul and betrayed her country. Hacking her to death would not be good enough,” said one of her countrymen of the actress Ziyi Zhang, still angry about atrocities committed on the Chinese by the Japanese in the war. One understands his feelings, but of course the film-makers had to search beyond Japan to find their romantic heroine. After all, when many of your nation’s women resemble Ronnie Corbett, who’s going to take them seriously as objects of beauty? Apart from poor, clueless Posh, of course.
Sexy dressing? Relax, sisters
“WOMEN NOW empowered by everything a woman does” ran a headline in the brilliant satirical magazine The Onion a couple of years back. It’s true that, if you’re smart, when you hear some dumb cow mewling on about how empowering it is to learn pole-dancing, you want to give her a good shove under the racehorse that killed Emily Wilding Davison. But then, if you’re even smarter, you think: “Hang on, chucking yourself under a racehorse is pretty dumb too — and lives up to the unjust female stereotypes of the self-sacrificing martyr and the hysteric.”
Increasingly, though, I am equally annoyed by uptight prisses who seem to believe that if women dress sexy, be it for pleasure or profit, they are in some way doing the dirty on everything feminism ever stood for. There are various reasons for this. One is its rather pathetic lack of comprehension of how working-class women experience life. It’s all very well for bourgeois bossyboots to bleat on about women having “worthwhile” jobs, but when you’re given a crap education and then find that all the best jobs — even the ones that used to be available to bright working-class kids, such as acting and journalism — are bed-blocked by well-connected, talent-free middle-class tossers, taking one’s kit off in return for the same money in one hour as you’d get keeping them on for one week starts to look not just attractive but sensible.
Accusing the Pussycat Dolls of being traitors to the cause, and insisting that if they covered their asses up a non-sexist Eden would miraculously appear, also ignores the fact that the countries where women dress the most “modestly” also have the least human rights; to work, to education, to choose who to have sex with. Most women would opt for a country with porn and equal rights legislation than no porn and stoning to death for adultery and the living death of the burka.
It’s also too easy to see commercialised sex as a thing about men oppressing women — until you consider gay male culture. The fetishisation of fitness, youth, the body, pin-ups and porn — gay male culture has all this in spades. Does it mean that gay men hate each other? No: they are realistic about the fact that there is a tough, sleazy, strictly physical side to sex as well as a cuddly-wuddly one.
At the end of the day, a nice pair of tits is a nice pair of tits and — like a nice bum on a boy — is neither the fall of Rome nor the meaning of life. And if anyone can’t appreciate both, as part of a fully balanced diet, I feel sorry for them.
