Princess Kate’s reality TV wedding

Article originally published at The F Word: http://www.thefword.org.uk/features/2011/04/princess_kate_royal_wedding

Leave me out of your utterly banal "happy national celebrations", kthx bye.

“It would be extremely unwise of anyone to try and spoil a happy day of national celebration.” - Boris Johnson, feminist icon

Once upon a time, in the far away land of Berkshire, a beautiful little girl called Catherine was born to the nouveau riche Middleton family. As she grew older, she would sit by a wishing well, singing daintily to the mysteriously sentient birds that clustered there. It is said that proletarian residents of the Middletons’ village would hear strains of ‘Someday my prince will come’ floating over the wall of the house where little Kate was confined. Very shortly after Kate began singing about wanting a prince to rescue her from her debilitating solitude, he appeared. Aside from a few minor dwarf-oriented subplots, they were soon conjoined in holiest matrimony and lived happily ever after.

Wait, now I come to think about it, that might be the basic plot of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, released in 1937. Nowadays, Disney heroines are very slightly less a misogynist’s wet dream, but you could be forgiven, after reading much of the media coverage of the forthcoming royal wedding, for thinking 1937 has come again (hopefully much like Snow White’s prince. And Snow White, obviously. I do hope that they both managed to come regularly during their happily married lives.)

Fictional characters’ orgasm frequencies aside, the media build up to the royal wedding has slowly but surely lubricated the royalists’ clunky marketing machine, as a result of which Kate Middleton, a rich and privileged but otherwise normal person, is re-branded as the central figure in an odd sort of fairy parable. Allusions to this archetypal story in which a peasant woman marries a prince and becomes a princess buttress the lurid media coverage. The objectionable assumption is that the archetype still has the power or relevance to transfix the nation’s imagination.

The sheer relentlessness with which attainment of princesshood is being presented as both desirable and admirable is frankly a little bit sickening. I’m under no illusions about the number of people who keep the radical feminist analysis of prince/princess mythologies that is Andrea Dworkin’s Woman Hating under their pillows (if you are one of these people please call me). But one doesn’t have to be a die-hard Dworkinite to recognise every story reporting on some irrelevant minutiae of the wedding’s organisation, and every scare about ‘anarchists’ targeting the national celebrations, as more grist to the mill of the whole gender-role-pushing, vulgar, money-spinning bandwagon.

Imagine strong, handsome, ruddy-cheeked Prince William giving up his job as a helicopter pilot to marry a prince (or a princess of the kind that is actually heir to a modicum of state power, even as figurehead)

On many accounts, Kate has given up her previous career, at least for the build up to the wedding, in preparation for the onset of princessness. It would be unfair to simply blame her for this. I can only imagine what kinds of pressures she may be under to conform to what is expected. But at the same time, I have not really seen any journalist challenge the seemingly foregone logic that marrying a prince primarily entails a full-time role as official princess.

The implication is that subsequent to the marriage, Kate’s career will be distinctly secondary, that really, her subsequent career will be ‘princess’. It is as if the title confers a difference in kind on its grateful acquirer, once merely mortal, now passively reified, admitted to the sacramental circles of the blue blooded.

As far as I can make out, the role of someone who is only a princess by virtue of marrying a prince is this: a prince’s wife, a mother to heirs, an attender of state functions, perhaps with some occasional token charity work. William will not give up his job as a helicopter pilot, nor is it suggested that he should.

Extrapolating from the favourable media reports that William asked Kate’s dad’s permission for her hand, we might be able to just about deduce that this is no modern, feminist marriage. As if Kate’s dad owns her hand, or any other part of her. A recent ‘big story’, that William will not wear a wedding ring, though Kate will, is further icing on the cake of their royally betrothed power dynamic. Unlike William, Kate will be defined merely in virtue of her marriage - something utterly antithetical to the great strides feminism is supposed to be making into the upper echelons of institutionalised sexist tradition.

Equal celebration and denigration of woman-only-as-wife are still rife in much, if not most of the national media. One needs only to contrast the considerable coverage allotted to, for example, male politicians and footballer’s female partners, with the relative obscurity of female politicians and footballers, to see this. Some writers seem to consider the right to free speech as a go-ahead for an insidious misogyny which threatens to force traditional gender roles down our throats until we stop muttering nonsense about women being human too, or whatever. The media’s wholehearted advocation of Kate Middleton as being successful, more successful than those other women who only do things like conflict resolution or working on a cure for cancer or sitting on the board of a company, is not just sexist and retrograde, but also slightly surreal.

At stake here, however, is not just the idea of woman as wife, but a specific instantiation of a riches-to-aristocracy princess mythology. Princess Kate is good, kind, beautiful, well-mannered and passive, like all fairytale princesses. What Catherine Middleton is actually like as a person is irrelevant to the story we are being sold.

The trick here is to imagine the gender roles the other way round. Imagine strong, handsome, ruddy-cheeked Prince William giving up his job as a helicopter pilot to marry a prince (or a princess of the kind that is actually heir to a modicum of state power, even as figurehead). Imagine that it is assumed he will spend much of his time henceforth raising heirs, being beautiful, going to parties and dressing well. Can you imagine this happening? I can’t. The maintenance of polarised binary gender is well and truly alive within the royal wedding’s national narrative. Kate might as well stock up on pink, glittery princess outfits from the Disney store right now, preferably from a range that does matching mother and daughter dresses (though perhaps she will hope for sons until such time as the UK sees fit to overturn male-preference primogeniture laws).

The promotion of stereotypical gender roles is blatant, but other, less conspicuous assumptions support the credulous, glowing media reports. One such assumption is that even though our society is ostensibly just about OK with homosexuality, unmarried cohabitation, non-monogamous couplings and so on - what we really should all still be aspiring to is Wills and Kate’s ideal, heterosexual marriage between young, attractive, rich white people in a church. This is marriage’s ultimate Platonic form, the reporters seem to be implying, this is what you should all aspire to. We understand that not everyone can marry their Prince Charming, but by god we should be trying to. If we can’t bring ourselves to completely renounce our wicked, sinful, fornication-outside-of-holy-matrimony ways, then we should at least pretend to be buying into the culture that supports the opposite.

Indeed, buying is the operative term. Feeding into the royal wedding’s unsubtly enforced premise of national celebration, is, of course, an unabashed assumption that we will consume as we are told. Look at how happy the nation is on this wonderful day! Buy this poorly designed tea towel! Here, have a mug as well! Not lucky enough to be invited to the special event? Oh well, cheer yourself up by pre-ordering an official commemorative coin! Even the kingdom’s peasants can take away some Wills & Kate merchandise.

Aside from being entirely revolting in itself, the furore around the royal wedding provides a current on which those with a vested interest in making money out of selling sexism can ride. One example are the odious Princess Prep classes, advertised with the tag-line ‘All little girls dream of becoming a princess’. This summer school is provided to girls (and only to girls) too young to have much developed their capacity for analytical engagement with the implications of the activities on which they are enrolled. I can’t help thinking that if the girls attending princess classes are not at the same time provided with the critical tools to make up their own minds about whether the stifling docility of the princess role is for them, it is a form of, at least… severely questionable teaching.

Even for those, both young and old, who escape such official indoctrination, the internalisation of such retrograde ideas about gender is tough to avoid in a cultural climate which is currently doing its very best to promote moral admiration of the heterosexist ‘Wills & Kate’ ideal.

This is a reality TV show wedding. It’s a little surprising that Modern-Day Princess™: Kate’s Big Day Approaches, “a fly-on-the-wall show following Kate Middleton as she prepares for the greatest day of her life”, hasn’t yet been made. The unremitting marketing, merchandising and the promotion of a sexist status quo that underpins it all is everything that might be associated with the crass value system of reality TV. The Guardian’s April Fools’ joke, that they would be running a 24-hour live blog of all the preparations from 1 to 29 April, was spot on. But I, for one, am not buying it.

Who's the daddy: has Portia taken Ellen's name in vain?

This article was originally published at an awesome website called THE MOST CAKE. Click here!

The second picture of Portia and Ellen on this blog so far. Might have to start a new one dedicated solely to them.

I recently found out that our reigning celesbian married couple have now become as homo-norm as you can legally get – yes, Portia has officially taken Ellen’s name. They are now the DeGeneres’s. Doesn’t roll off the tongue, exactly. I can understand wanting to self-define in a way that reflects your married identity, but what’s wrong with Mrs. DeGeneres and Mrs. de Rossi?

According to BBC News Portia is keeping de Rossi as a professional name, to which I say – why bother changing it at all? Ellen and Portia are obviously the most famous married lesbians in the world: Portia doesn’t need to adopt ‘DeGeneres’ to define her, if you are anything like me you know and love them and the fact that they are married, presumably they know and love the fact that they are married, if she’s keeping de Rossi for half the time anyway why not just keep it full stop? Like, de Rossi is an awesome name, why get rid of it?

It’s irritating beyond belief when straight women today continue the old tradition of changing their names, blindly, as if it doesn’t mean anything anymore. Frankly, we haven’t reached the stage yet, gender equality-wise, where marriages are so equal that changing one’s name can just be a lovely custom, devoid of historical context.

Replacing your name with your partner’s implicitly supports a conception of marriage as an contract of possession – whereby the man takes the woman into his family as a nice looking bit of property. Protest as people might that they simply didn’t like their name before (my mother’s favourite justification), the fact is that assuming one’s partner’s name implies a dynamic of possessor and possessed, of one party’s control over what should be a twofold identity. The concept of the ‘head of the family’, the ‘man as provider’, and so on, really hasn’t gone away. Physical and sexual violence are still rife within marriages, and where customs uphold the sexism that feeds these inequalities, I reckon they need to go.

On the other hand, you might think that Portia and Ellen both being women alters the facts on the ground in some way. Like, if it’s lesbians it’s fine, right, because where there is no man it doesn’t matter who changes their name?

No way sailor-girl. Queer marriage is a relatively new thing, and people are still trying to shape it, and to make sense of it, and it’s not particularly clear to me that the adoption of another’s name, whatever genders you are, does anything to transgress or subvert. We’ve all experienced people insisting on viewing lesbian relationships through a straight lens: i.e. questions like ‘but, who is the man in the relationship?’ Worse, (and particularly infuriating if like me you can’t help looking femme most of the time), there’s still an assumption that the butch-er looking partner in any given lesbian couple is the dominant, manly one.

Listen, whilst my attempts at butch gender presentation can often be described as laughable, however successful they might be, I am not the man in the relationship. But neither is my (nonexistent) girlfriend the man – in my (not currently happening) relationship, there is no man: capiche? It totally doesn’t help that Portia is the ‘femme’ one and Ellen is the ‘butch’ one, and that Portia is the one changing her name, this plays right into the notion that the more masculine partner is the man.

Words are powerful, and where words characterise identities, they are doubly powerful. It’s amazing that in some countries in the world lesbian marriage is legal, and I stand up for the right of all people of all genders and sexualities to marry whomever they chose. But if we don’t keep our marriages queer, we end up assimilating into the very heterosexist dynamic that gay marriage should – if we are right to bother campaigning for it at all – transgress. And that kind of behaviour fucks me right off.

How Celebrity Endorsement and a Catchy Title Still Doesn’t Make It Appealing To Stick Diamantes On Your Waxed Pubic Area.

Definitely get this done immediately?

‘After a breakup a friend of mine Swarovski Crystaled my...ummm...precious lady. And umm...and it shined like a disco ball, and so I have a whole chapter in there about how women should vajazzle their, vajayjays....It looks like a little disco ball down there, its great....it does...and...and it’s hot pink today, for you. So that’s good.’
- Jennifer Love Hewitt, discussing her new book on ‘Lopez Tonight’.

A year or so ago a good friend sent me a Youtube clip called ‘Clitter! Its Glitter for Your Vagina!’ Featuring the unforgettable lines ‘thanks Clitter, for turning my labia into a yaybia!’ and ‘Clitter turned my yeast infection...into a jewel collection,’ the clip was an obvious yet diverting send up of those ubiquitous beauty adverts which purport to endow lifelong happiness if only women would buy into the relevant product. The clip showed deliberately crude upskirt shots of female celebrities’ crotches covered over with MS Paint-like attempts at glitter. In short, Clitter was ridiculous, and because it was ridiculous, it was quite funny.

Ironic then, that where my friends send me videos mocking the ludicrous idea of decorative glitter for the cunt, Jennifer Love Hewitt’s friends suggest she lie down and get the hot wax out. That’s right, some women in the world, in the real, substantial world, have decided that pubic diamante applications are not self-evidently nauseating but rather, sexy and fun. Clitter has actually become reality, but cunn(t)ingly retitled as ‘vajazzling’. You’ve got to hand it to Hewitt, vajazzling is a pretty clever name. Because it is a pun. It has two meanings at once, get it? Meaning number one: vajayjay, (I’m presuming that this is a word for the vagina) delineating the general area to be glitzed up. Meaning number two: jazz, like jazzy, like jazzy diamantes. Or jazzy Swarovski crystals, if you have loads of money to waste an expensive crystal collection on the area where your pubes should be.

Except, this fad has nothing to do with the vagina. Indeed, in the vajazzling clip from inane TV show ‘The Only Way is Essex’, which I hold to blame for bringing the vajazzle to British shores, the vajazzling beautician (vajazzler) explicitly warns the proto-vajazzled client (vajazzlee) that the vajazzles are not to be glued to the actual vagina (vajina?). As the Anne Summers uniform-wearing vajazzler says, ‘basically, don’t put it on your bits, basically.’ And therein lies the flaw in what is otherwise a reasonably catchy way to repackage something so banal that I still can’t believe it really exists. Hewitt et al are not really entitled to say ‘vajazzle your vajayjay!’ or whatever it is they say, because the vajazzles don’t go anywhere near your actual vajayjay. The word ‘vagina’ refers specifically to, for want of a better word, the hole that all the other bits of the vulva surround. Vajazzles explicitly don’t go on the vajayjay. They also don’t go on your clitoris, your labia minora, your labia majora, your greater and lesser vestibular glands, your vestibular bulbs, your vulval vestibule, or any of your other external genital organs. As a non-scientist, I admit I just looked up some of those names on Wikipedia. Anyway, apparently, the official name for the place that the vajazzles actually go is the ‘mons pubis’. Perhaps unfortunately for aspiring vajazzlers everywhere, ‘monspubisjazzle your mons pubis!’ just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

To casually subsume such a politically, sexually, and biologically complex part of women’s anatomies under the totalizing concept of ‘vagina’, or ‘hole that the man penetrates’, is utterly objectionable and highly sexist. This is a retrograde concept of female sexuality, one that overlooks the arguably much more vital role that the rest of the genitals, and more, rest of the body, play in sex and eroticism. I see the lazy conflation of the waxed pubic area with the vagina as symptomatic of the prevalence of the ‘teenaged Nuts-reader’ mentality; in viewing endless pictures of women (repackaged as ‘girls’) nude from the front on, we internalise the idea that the pubic region simply is the female genitalia, and conveniently forget that underneath all that are real, odorous, vital, wet, dry, aggressive, soft, hairy, receptive, hard, human genitals. I mean, what could be less suited to a trivialising star/rainbow/pretty butterfly decoration than genitalia? If this is intended as a way that women can affirm and identify with our own bodies, fine, but can we have something a bit less...diamante? Maybe as a way to affirm, identify, empower, etc, we could instead have cultural narratives that embrace a variety of bodies and a set of beauty regimes that are even slightly less demanding, alienating, and infantilising?

Actually, for something ostensibly presented as idiosyncratic of some modern femininities to lazily take on an ignorant, simplifying, het-male-gaze view of female genitalia really just points to a wider problem with this whole vajazzling practice. In all Hewitt’s self-denigrating talk of cute little disco balls, it is unquestioned that a prospective vajazzler will have to completely wax her cunt, thereby further relegating the female body to the realm of unthreatening object: there for male pleasure. Why the necessary full wax? Can’t I put Swarovski crystals in my massive bush, if I choose to? A liberal sprinkling and it would be like a cute little mohair disco ball down there. I’m joking, my cunt isn’t cute, and I would never decorate my pubes with crystals because a: as I’ve hinted, I think it is endlessly stupid, and b: I would hope that any prospective partner of mine would not be able to have sex for laughing if they took down my underwear and found crystals inside.

Practices like these continue the ongoing process of normalisation of a sexist-ualised culture which simply expects women to conform to pornographic standards. It is well documented that women often self-objectify, how could we not when we receive constant cultural conditioning telling us that even if we don’t want to attract men, we should still shave/wax our legs, armpits, cunts, arms, eyebrows, moustaches, we should still wear clothes that are uncomfortable, impractical and constricting, we should still wear shoes that hurt and prevent us from walking, we should still diet until we are stick thin, still always wear full make up before leaving the house, still straighten or curl or dye our hair, still refrain from making ourselves strong and fit, and what’s more, we should do all these things for ourselves, because we like to do them? Sorry, but I can recognise bullshit when I hear it.

It is not just that monspubisjazzling is silly, even though it is. It is also self-othering and self-trivialising in the way that all needless ‘beauty’ practices are. First and foremost women are human subjects, and even if we sometimes take up ornamental practices, we should not reduce ourselves to them. The general genital region is culturally significant, and reasonably so, and I am not sure that its conversion into a site for decor should be seen as less meaningful than it is. Sure, if a woman performs a stereotypically feminine gender act because she enjoys it, or because she wants to look/feel sexy, or for whatever reason, she totally has the right to do that, but even in our modern feminist lexicon of consumer choice, the motivations behind ornamental practices should never go unquestioned or uncriticised. As Clitter pointed out of cunt glitter, ‘known side effects include extreme vaginal irritation, dry mouth, and fabulous looking herpes.’ However disco-fab pubic diamantes might be, I’m sticking with the hair what grows there.

Disclaimer: I'm aware that Laurie Penny has just written about the vajazzle probably better and definitely more succinctly, but I wrote this ages ago and just hadn't put it up yet. Whatevs Laurie, stop copying me.

Why I'm (what I call) excited, for Miranda Series Three

A little while ago a very small and gentle TV revolution took place. You probably didn't notice, or if you did you probably thought, 'who is that large unusual looking woman, why is she on TV, and who is letting her try to make jokes?' Certainly, my initial thoughts were mostly that, dressed up in 'this really isn't funny'... 'this is really obvious humour', and other, similar rebuffs often used to denigrate women in comedy. Then I got to the sitting-on-whatIcall-the-sofa-every-Monday-waiting-for-Miranda-point, and it's been plain sailing ever since.



Since Season Two ended a couple of weeks ago TV hasn't been the same. Why is Miranda so great? I'll tell you why. Miranda is great because it is a tiny crack in the facade of one kind of humour presented as the only kind of humour that otherwise permeates British comedy. The fact that Miranda has somehow got on to our screens with a female-led, knowing, whimsical slapstick is nothing short of a miracle. Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of mainstream comedy shows like 'Peep Show', 'Mock the Week', 'Never Mind the Buzzcocks', 'QI', &C &C, which as far as I can tell invariably feature men who think they are very funny and clever sometimes saying quite funny and clever things whilst the token women/woman laugh(s) appreciatively. I'm also a fan of many of the male stand up comedians around at the moment, though I can't actually think of any examples. Maybe it goes without saying that I'm a much bigger fan of any of the female comedians that make it onto the little screen - but not since Smack the Pony has there been a genuinely wonderful female-driven comedy that has been as hugely successful as Miranda is. (Though there have been many wonderful female-driven shows which haven't made it so big, particularly Beehive)

By the time we reach about fourteen, or leave our girls-only schools for the mixed world, I reckon it's fair to say that most people have internalised this idea: Women-Aren't-Funny. What that means is, of course, that even when women are funny (i.e. it would be funny if a man said it), they aren't, because nobody finds them funny, because women can't be funny. Any time someone female is making a joke in a public forum there's a kind of bracing in the audience, as if to say, this better bloody be good if you expect me to find this funny. Women comedians/comediennes(?) face a wall of subconscious resistance that men do not face, before they can convince anyone - little wonder that so few make it onto the television at all.

More, as women aren't funny, men get to define what's funny all by themselves. Unsurprising then that humour is still so dominated by celebrations of masculinity, and that a staple of comedy is still the denigration of anybody outside the white-man box. I used to think Frankie Boyle was good on Mock the Week, but the fact that in 2010 somebody decided it would be cutting-edge to give him a television slot solely to say the most offensive things possible for an hour at a time, is as mystifying as it is puerile. Toy trains being orally raped by station owners (cue hilarious floods of semen) is surely not funny to anybody over the age of twelve, or anyone who understands anything at all about rape. Boyle's 'controversial' humour comes across to me as a bit like a bloke on a stage waving a flag saying 'I've found a niche market full of people who think that political correctness spoils their privileged and God-given entitlement to make fun of the less privileged! Those people run television! Go me!'

Which is why Miranda is so great. Miranda doesn't need to play the childish 'haha I done a taboo' card because Miranda is actually a clever, witty and observant writer. Miranda makes humour out of amping up the small awkward moments beyond all reasonable proportion, which has been done many times, but she doesn't it from a pretty much untouched perspective, that of an engagingly normal woman. She opens up a new kind of subjectivity in the field of situation comedy. Women doing slapstick - whatever next?! Woman flirting with the camera, but as a friend not a lover? I've not seen so many excellently timed raised-eyebrow actor/camera/audience moments since Frankenfurter in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Women inside a joke shop singing brief snatches of M People to a conveniently placed Heather Smalls mask? Definitely haven't laughed so hard at that before.

It's not just the character of Miranda who gets the laughs either. Patricia Hodge as Miranda's, what I call, mother, is just SUCH FUN!* Frankly, if you have a mother, and if your mother is even slightly overbearing, you will understand how her character can be both sharply observed and completely overplayed. One brilliant episode from the last series is thirty minutes of Miranda and her mother trying to look normal in front of an unflinching psychiatrist. I think I have never laughed so hard. And that's not to mention the wonderful but brief appearances from Sally Phillips ('bear with...bear with...') as the old school friend with a penchant for the most irritating slang possible.

Look, the fact is that you won't appreciate Miranda if you approach it confrontationally. If you whack it on thinking, ok, this better be good, frankly you probably won't laugh. Sit down to your computer with an open mind, watch a couple of episodes, and tell me if you don't think that this wonderful, whimsical, gentle show isn't exactly what British comedy needs a Season Three of. Such fun.





*Please see show for references