Indeed, it is a measure of Frozen’s revolutionary femme-friendliness that it is the male characters who feel slapdash and two-dimensional—not, as is more usual, the female. The bloke with the reindeer is clearly Han Solo, the reindeer’s Chewie, and the snowman is totally Jar Jar Binks made of slush. I’m sure they intended to go back and flesh them out a bit more, but then got the demo of “Let It Go,” spent three months screaming it out at the top of their lungs, and forgot. And I understand that. It is one hell of a song—although the best version is titled “Let One Go,” and is about breaking wind—“Let one go, let one go / Can’t hold it in anymore / Let it go, let it go / Just push and give it what for / I don’t care what they say! / The smell never bothered me anyway”—and which I still find incredibly amusing.
I am forty.
Anyway, very much John the Baptist to Frozen’s Jesus was Brave—the also-feminist Disney film from 2012 that was just as ballsy as Frozen, but lacked that vital billion-selling power ballad. I loved Brave. But, after it was released, there was one problem . . . Disney tried to make their Brave merchandise sexy.
Happily, in the end—after a massive worldwide protest—Disney recanted, and de-sexinessed their gear. It was a salutary lesson in how just standing up and saying “STOP BEING WEIRD, THE PATRIARCHY!” can work quickly and effectively to make the world a happier, less dementedly shag-based place.
I’m going to say this very calmly, and very quietly—but if people don’t stop trying to make everything sexy, I will burn this planet to the ground. I will watch it burn to fine black ash, so help me God.
Last week, Disney announced the eleventh Disney Princess to be welcomed into the canon, alongside Snow White, Cinderella, and the Little Mermaid. It is Merida, heroine of their 2012 film Brave.
In Brave, Merida is a round-faced teenage rebel with a slight overbite, who can split any man’s wishbone from five hundred yards with her bow and arrow. She’s a massive badass. When her father holds an archery contest—the winner of which will marry her—she storms the competition, announces, “I shall shoot for my own hand,” and beats them all, winning her freedom.
Watching the film in the cinema, in the dark, with my daughters—twelve and ten—I was able to loll back in my chair and say, “Fill your boots, girls! Spoon this film up like good pie! This is the first Disney heroine ever not to have massive knockers, a twelve-inch waist, and the kind of mouth that could suck a potato up a straw. Well done, Disney! Well done for finally entering the twenty-first century!”
But not so fast, me! Because when Disney brought Merida into their “Official Princesses” franchise last week, Merida had . . . changed. A new picture of her showed her with a jacked-in waist, bigger tits, a lower-cut top, and a load of eyeliner. On top of this, Merida was no longer holding her bow and arrow—the source of her legendosity—and was, instead, standing with her hands on her hips, in the internationally recognized pose of “I am a bit of a vapid pain in the arse now.”
The outcry was instant. Merida’s creator, Brenda Chapman, said to Disney, “You are sending a message to girls that the original, realistic version of Merida is inferior . . . Little girls are subconsciously soaking in the sexy ‘come hither’ look and skinny aspect of the new version. It’s horrible!”
Now look. It’s not as if I’m a prude—God knows I’m not that. I like a rattle around the down-belows as much as the next person. If the buffet has a big plate of sex, I’ll have some, thank you very much—and I’ll come back for seconds.
But this obsession with having sexiness everywhere is becoming, frankly, demented. Currently, twenty-first-century culture feels like a massive groin on a pair of roller skates, caroming insanely off the walls. I feel like saying, “Where is this all going? Are you going to end up recasting the Statue of Liberty so she’s standing on Liberty Island in a tankini?” but I’m worried the mad fuckers might see this and actually do it. That’s the real last scene in Planet of the Apes. Lady Liberty in stripper heels, with her nims out.
Because, let’s be clear, the last place—the very last place—you need sexiness is in a Disney Princess franchise. Have you ever watched what kids do when the prince and princess finally kiss in a Disney movie? They cover their eyes up and go, “UGH DISGUSTING.” Billions of kids, over seven decades, shouting, “MUM, HAVE THEY STOPPED YET?” None of them have EVER watched it.
And that’s because children have slightly less use for characters with “massive sexual allure” than they do for “a handsome eighteenth-century barometer.” If you replaced every single one of these sexy ladies with a cute dog wearing a hat that could say “sausages” and farted a lot, then you would, finally, be giving the kids what they truly desire in a movie.
This nonsexy, nonmarried, galloping, bow-shooting Merida coined Disney $555 million box office in the first year. She proved that little girls want these kinds of heroes on their screen. But despite her success, some ass-hat insisted that she just . . . had to get sexy anyway. No reason. They just . . . like to do the sexy. It’s just what happens next, to girls.
Listen: Merida wasn’t for you, you bloodless, cash-counting idiots. She was for every ten-year-old girl who hates itchy dresses and kissing, and just wanted to carry on being herself for a bit longer. You can’t put a price on a girl being able to watch a big Disney movie that says that’s an okay thing.
Do you know what I’d like? I’d like to sing a sad ballad about all of this—sing a song about my unhappiness, and frustration. And, as I sang, an army of shy, adorable children would gather around me, and they would sing, too.
And as the song shifted up into a determined major key, we would march on to the offices of Disney chief executive Robert Iger and shout, “PUT THE SEXINESS AWAY, YOU BORDERLINE PERVERT!”
And he would! Because the one thing Disney taught me is that if you believe—if you really believe! If you really believe in magic—you can change anything!
The Most Sexist TV Show in the World
Disney notwithstanding, there are, of course, in popular culture, generally two kinds of female characters. The first is, as discussed in the previous essay on Brave, “a sexy lady.” The other kind is “a dead lady.”
And this is where dumb, limiting, repetitive representations of women leave us: with a large number of men unable to see women as real, living, clever, amusing, weird, faulty, extraordinary, normal human beings.
One of the most perfect examples of this came in 2012, with a Danish TV series called Blachman. Oh, Blachman. You are a confused, damaged, damaging man.
There is an extraordinary television program broadcasting in Denmark at the moment. Called Blachman, it features the eponymous host and his friend sitting in a darkly lit room. On their command, women are ushered in, and take their robes off.
Over the next half hour, Blachman and his friend then “review” the women’s bodies—commenting on the skin, the breasts, the hair, the fat. The veins.
We get close-ups of the men’s childlike joy when a cheerful, large-breasted young blonde disrobes.
We see their more charitable “Ah well—you’ve probably had a good innings” disappointment when it is an older woman, whose breasts are not so excitingly buoyant.
Although the world has been pretty much unified in outrage against the show—the Mail, of all people, asked, “Is this the most sexist show ever?”—Blachman himself is convinced of humanity’s need for Blachman.
“The female body thirsts for words. The words of a man,” he insisted, going on to warn critical Danes, “Ungratefulness is the only thing that can really wear down the few geniuses who reside in our country.”
Amusingly, it seems that Blachman himself is a trifle touchy if people seek to critique his metaphorical tits. He likes to answer back, angrily.
The women on Blachman, by way of contrast, do not answer back. They are not allowed to speak. But I ask, in all confusion: How can you understand a woman’s body if she’s not allowed to speak? How would you know what
it is you’re looking at?
I like to imagine myself on Blachman’s show. I would be interested in what he would say about me. I would be interested in what he would miss.
I suspect, when I first took my robe off, I would get his “charitable disappointment” face. I think he’d presume I was probably a bit ashamed of my body.
For starters, my belly is a good four handfuls—lying in the bath, I like to crush it between my palms, to make a soft, pink sandcastle. Once, I was very fat. This belly is all that remains of that vast empire, now—the bit I did not want to run off, because I find it luxurious to gently fist my hands into it, like a mink stole.
Then there are my scars—across my body, like an editor’s corrections on a manuscript. Odd symbols—shorthand for different things. The long one across my belly is for a girl who’s twelve years old, now: how surgeons had to go in with the knife, with a Caesarean, as she was dying. Fear, and joy, and then opiates, and milky staring.
The scars on my arms, on the other hand, are from my father’s razor: I was an almost cheerful teenage self-harmer, in 1993. I crisscrossed my forearms repeatedly—curious to see if it would stop me feeling trapped, and useless. I did it for attention, even though I hid the scars most assiduously, under jumpers. Twenty years later, I know the person whose attention I was actually trying to seek: me.
By now, if I were on Blachman, I wouldn’t be able to stand still, and silent, anymore. I would drag another chair over and sit between Blachman and his friend—I couldn’t bear him missing all the gossip, and the glee, from my nakedness. Yes, Blachman—I know one breast is bigger than the other. I don’t need you, Salacious Crumb sidekick, to point it out to the viewers, while I stay mute, and somehow unknowing of my own self. I call my breasts “Simon and Garfunkel”—their wonkiness stopped upsetting me by the time I was twenty-one.
“They make me laugh—I’m very fond of them. I’m fond of my whole body,” I would tell Blachman—my legs draped over the side of the chair, in a chatty manner; flashing my fur because it was his idea for me to turn up naked. I would have arrived in a nice dress, otherwise.
But Blachman would be very uncomfortable having me next to him. And when I invited all the other naked women on the show to come over, too—to sit down, and talk about their bodies, and laugh, and grab their thighs, and remember awful things—I suspect he would wish to leave.
Because, whatever Blachman says, this show isn’t really about female bodies. What Blachman talks about when he talks about women’s bodies is—Blachman. How naked women make him feel—what naked women make him want to do. He believes that it’s an important thing to tell a woman whether or not he would like to fuck her—the belief held by a million male Internet commentators, typing “Wouldn’t” under pictures of women—women who, I’m sure, if they could be arsed to reply, would type, “Thank God—I’m really busy today, byeee.”
You could do all this without the naked women, Blachman. Blachman could be just that. Blachman.
But, then, who would watch a man sitting in a chair, alone, talking about women’s arses? He’d look insane. Blachman is nothing without women’s arses—and a man’s opinion thirsts for viewers.
No More Page 3
Of course, for every Blachman there is a woman like Lucy-Anne Holmes, who founded the No More Page 3 campaign: working to end the frankly weird anomaly in which the Sun—ostensibly a family newspaper—features a young, naked, usually white topless girl, Monday to Friday. (There are no tits in the Saturday edition. When I inquired about this, I discovered that the logic is that the “working man,” at his workplace, was thought to need “cheering up” with tits on weekdays, but on Saturday he had football, instead, and so can give knockers a rest until Monday again. Oh, men! Other men represent you so badly! You should be furious at the patronizing way you are thought of.)
Fighting a long and often brutal online campaign, No More Page 3 eventually won in 2015: there are no topless Page 3 girls in the Sun anymore. It was a beautiful example of how feminism works: there are a million small tasks to be completed, and we all pick one, according to our interests and abilities, and fight it calmly, correctly, with determination and humor.
And that is how the future is made.
Look, who knows what will be happening with Page 3 of the Sun by the time this column is printed. The bosoms are out, the bosoms are covered up, the bosoms come out again—it’s like sitting on a nudist beach on a particularly changeable day, weather-wise.
But whether they stay or whether they go, I still feel it’s important to clear up just why something as ostensibly “innocent” as a lovely girl showing off her smashing duckies in a newspaper has “incurred” the “wrath” of “feminists,” although tbh whenever you see that phrase you should imagine not Medusa riding her Man-Hating Chariot out onto the battlefields, waving a staff made of severed penises and screaming, “I AM FURIOUS! I COME TO CHANGE THE WORLD AS YOU KNOW IT, AND DESTROY ALL CIVILIZATION!,” but, instead, some tired-looking women sadly sending off some polite emails while whispering, “I’m so tired of this shit. Batman never had to get together a petition with two hundred fifty thousand signatures on it when he wanted to change things. He just went and rammed the Batmobile into the Penguin’s den. Why can’t I ram a Batmobile into the Penguin’s den? I wish I was Batman.”
So. First things first. Why do feminists want to ban Page 3? Is this because they’re all UGLY JEALOUS LESBIANS? Well, no—although I must remind everyone that the opinion of an “ugly,” “jealous” lesbian is absolutely equal to that of a horny straight man who wants to see some breasts. There’s absolutely no moral superiority in wanting to look at young girls’ tits. You’re not Nelson Mandela here, dude. You’re as emotional and biased as the “ugly,” “jealous” feminists.
The reason a lot of women are down on Page 3 is simply down to context. In 2015, there are naked breasts everywhere. We’re living in a boom time for boobies. No one is running short on tits. We’re up to our tits in tits. You can type “tits” into pretty much any piece of technology you have and see some.
And as far as I’m concerned, having porn in the porn places is fine. Carry on. It’s just having it in a newspaper—surrounded by war and economics, and high-profile celebrity rape cases—that looks weird, because it’s essentially demented admin. It’s incorrect filing. Because if you put tits in the wrong place, they’re going to cause trouble. Tits on a railway track = trouble. Tits in a microwave = trouble.
For here’s what happens if you have young girls’ breasts in a newspaper. You’re ten, at school, laying out newspaper on the tables, in preparation for art. And some boys find Page 3 and gather round it, making jokes. And then they turn to the girl who’s most “well developed,” and say, “Do yours look like that? Show us!” or—to the flat-chested girl—“Haha! You need a boob job!”
And it’s probably your first experience of that awful, incoherent rage/shame that you feel when your body is objectified. And you’re ten. And you wonder how those boys would feel if Page 3 was pictures of huge, hard cocks on sixteen-year-old boys, instead—and all the girls were gathered around it, going, “I bet you wish you had one of those, Mark—instead of what looks like the worm in the bowler hat in the Mr. Men books.”
You suspect their dads might want to sign a petition, too, when they came home crying.
Because it’s just an unnecessary bit of hassle—having to deal with a world where little children see pictures of naked girls in a family newspaper. Page 3 makes needless problems.
Then there’s the suddenly concerned men who are “upset” that removing Page 3 will take jobs away from working-class glamour models. I don’t worry about these guys so much, because I presume that their concern has been long-standing and well-informed, and that they have a checkable record of campaigning for the employment rights of young working-class women—that they are members of the Fawcett Society, speak out in favor of gender quotas, and are vocal about the 19 percent disparity in male/female wages
.
I presume that, because it would be weird if the only time they’d ever spoken out about their concerns was solely and specifically about the jobs for topless working-class girls. You probably wouldn’t be asked onto Newsnight as an economics analyst with that kind of very narrowcast specialty: pervonomics.
What else? Well, it’s so bafflingly narrowcast, isn’t it? Online porn has a wide-ranging and ardent love of big chicks, black chicks, Asian chicks, and lesbians. Page 3 has the air of being curated by one old man, sitting obdurately at the Page 3 Decisions Desk, commissioning endless shots of slim, straight white chicks and saying, “I knows what I like,” over and over again.
A whole, controversial page in a newspaper tied to this odd, narrowcast vision of sexiness. Alienating 52 percent of your potential readership. Looking, culturally, in 2015, like a misplaced item in the bagging area.
Let Us Find Another Word for Rape
And now we must talk about what women fear the most: rape. Rape, which will come to one in four of us—as Sarah Silverman puts it, “When you’re walking down a street late at night and you hear footsteps and you think: ‘Is this my rape? Is it now?’”—and yet which still, so often, shames us rather than the rapist. Rape, which is still seen as something almost 100 percent preventable by women, so long as you do the “right” things. Rape—which has the bastard’s curse of being to do with women and sex, and therefore lying on terrible fault lines in our logic and compassion. Rape, which I would like to rename.