As I said the other day, The Girl With a One Track Mind has been revealed by the Sunday Times. She has now ‘hit back’ with an interview for her favourite paper, The Guardian. I read a recent review of her new book, written under the name Abby Lee, based on her blog. It was in Metro and declared that Ms Margolis’ rather ‘in yer face’ sexuality could not be reconciled with feministic attitudes.
Now, this is a question which has long been a problem to me - can ‘modern’ female sexuality be seen as a triumph of feminism or merely as another success of male dominance? I wrote a essay on the very thing in my third year. Is the promiscuous woman liberated or does she only think she is?
I have argued for ages that, although it is very good fun at the same time in its own airy-crap way, Sex and the City is the most male fantasy programme for years and has done the least good for female attitudes and feminism. It promotes women who have extremely high-flying jobs, sleep with anyone they want to and yet by the end of it all they want babies and find their very own prince charmings whilst fighting off cancer. Now, I like Margolis’ blog a lot, her political stuff is really interesting but of late she has started on about this ‘finding the right man’ crap as well!
Is, in the end, the liberated, sexually free female just as trapped as she ever was? Now boiled down to male sexuality with the usual fairy-tale ending attached? It is great to sleep with whoever you want, where you want because you know Mr Right will come along in the end and then it can all stop and you can have a nice house in neutral colours and be faithful and happy ever after!
Much the same sort of thing can be levelled at Channel Four’s lastest showing in their ‘body image’ season: Fat Beauty Contest. It does not empower ‘larger’ women to be in a fucking beauty contest, which seems to me to encapsulate everything that has put ‘larger’ (and, well, almost all) women down over the last few decades. Whether ‘beauty’ is defined in terms of being thin or ‘curvy’ it is not what women need to aspire to or to be shrunk down to.
As Margolis says in the above interview what women really need to get over in order to have feminism back on the agenda is to stop fucking worrying about their weight. START worrying about your career, your education, your skills, your happiness. ‘Cos I tell you this much - I may be a fat bastard, but most of my weight is in my brain.
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