I had an epiphany – OK, sudden thought, then – the day that Angelina Jolie announced she’d had a double mastectomy. I’d first read her direct, unsentimental piece in the New York Times. Then I’d jumped on to Twitter, which alerted me to some of the reaction online.
Here, I discovered that some kind souls (I always imagine angry men in their childhood bedrooms, typing away on their laptops while Mum folds their laundry silently downstairs) still managed to deplore the 37-year-old’s decision to have surgery because she had an 87 per cent risk of developing the ovarian cancer that killed her mother at the age of 56.
Much of the criticism aggregated around Hadley Freeman’s piece in The Guardian, headlined ‘Angelina Has Done Something Extraordinary’.
Like Jolie’s piece, I found this impossible to read without hot tears of sympathy spouting, and yet the scores of negative comments it attracted (Mail Online readers, it goes without saying, are without exception sweetness and light!) can roughly be triaged thus:
1. ‘Well, she’s got implants now so what’s the big deal?’2. ‘Rich bitch, not everyone can afford such treatments, self-entitled cow.’3. ‘So what? Lots of people get cancer.’
So there was still room in the trolls’ hearts for hate – just as you or I find we somehow have a ‘pudding stomach’ even after two large courses. And so this was my thought . . .
It is no longer appropriate to direct flagrant abuse at ethnic minorities, homosexuals, or the disabled. It happens, of course, but it is discouraged.
Inflammatory or vile comments are deleted by ‘moderators’ if they do not meet ‘community standards’.
And there are protocols about what people can say in print: the Press Complaints Commission, for example, has an Editors’ Code of Practice, with a clause on discrimination that says the press ‘must avoid prejudicial or pejorative reference to an individual’s race, colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or to any physical or mental illness or disability’.
Which is good. We don’t want rancid or anonymous abuse infecting the web, or the press, unchecked. But somehow, when it comes to pampered, privileged celebrities, it’s open season, and this is also unpleasant, and just as uncalled-for.
Anti-Semitism, fashionable (to put it mildly) in the 1930s in Europe, is no longer tolerated i polite society, but envy, and the public slating of celebrities, usually by cowards hiding behind false names, is the one hate that dares still speak its name.
Jolie, right, is pictured with husband Brad PittThis is one of the reasons Angelina Jolie’s announcement made headlines. It was not merely because the world’s sexiest mother of six had decided to have her breasts removed and replaced. It was because her news was also a timely reminder to those eaten up with chippiness, envy and bile that even though she is a global celebrity, she is human too.
She may have a stellar career and Brad Pitt, but her killer bod is as subject to killer diseases as anyone else’s. To paraphrase Shylock in The Merchant Of Venice, part of what she was saying was: ‘I am a celebrity. Hath not a celebrity eyes? Hath not a global superstar hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Whatever Popbitch doth say, if you prick me, do I not bleed?’
Yes, Jolie’s announcement and explanation managed to challenge, wondrously, accepted notions of what it means to be a woman and what beauty is, and to redefine them.
But she also challenged society’s dual cult of celebrity and anti-celebritism: the readiness to assume that those in the public eye are not just physically perfect, but have perfect lives, and therefore can take any amount of flak, intrusion, abuse or harassment, as the payback part of the glossy package.At the Baftas last week, the comely actress Romola Garai shocked the audience – and the 12 million watching on TV – by talking about her vagina.
‘After the recent birth of my child,’ she deadpanned, in a white lacy sheath dress, ‘I had the misfortune of having 23 stitches in my vagina. So I didn’t think I’d be laughing at anything for a long time.’
So Jolie talks about shunts and breast expanders. Her doctor, Krissi Funk, talks about her patient’s ‘surgical journey’ in a blog. And Garai openly refers to her internal stitches.
We have to ask why such beautiful, talented women have chosen to talk about themselves in such an open, visceral way, and allow their doctors to.
And I suggest it is because they find their existences – as continuously scrutinised females in the public eye, in an industry that is openly body fascist – on one level dehumanising. Such apparently blessed women have resorted to talking about themselves very publicly as frail and weak, as vulnerable bags of flesh and blood.
Of course celebrities are different – they are richer, and more famous, than us. But the lengths they have to go to these days in order to be treated not as plastic celebrities, but as mere everyday mortals, are alarming.
The hardest-working booty in the businessBeyonce cancelled a concert in Antwerp last week, pleading dehydration and exhaustion – and who can blame her?
She’s the face (and body) of H&M. She’s in the throes of her mega Mrs Carter tour. She has a baby daughter.
Beyonce cancelled a concert in Antwerp last week, pleading dehydration and exhaustionAnd, until now, she’s never postponed a show, which makes her the fittest and hardest-working booty in the business. No wonder she’s tired – it’s a schedule that would have killed everyone else years ago.
There is not enough space here to list all the ‘veteran’ female newscasters in the United States (Katie Couric is aged 56, Diane Sawyer is 67, Oprah’s 59, while Connie Chung is 66 etc, etc).
Sadly, no space at all is required to name-check the women aged over 60 who present the news here, as there aren’t any. What’s more, according to a new survey, only 18 per cent of TV presenters over 50 are women. Shocking! It used to be that we were, in cultural terms, ten years behind America. But when it comes to telly, we are 30 years behind.
Barbara Walters has just announced her retirement at the sprightly age of 83, whereas in Britain, women disappear (or, as the Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman put it, are ‘airbrushed from our screens’) as they enter their sixth decade.
It is simply astonishing and antediluvian – as well as peerlessly ageist and sexist – that our channels are a place where men only are allowed to age.
I take issue violently with those who blame, in part, the fatal trustingness of a grandmother, and the viewing of child porn, for the deaths of Tia Sharp or April Jones.
To absolve the (alleged) murderer(s) of anything but full responsibility for their actions is disgraceful and can only compound the grief for the shattered families.
