Life’s funny like that

There are many ways in which determined, ambitious women can navigate their way through life. They can be the slightly scary but impressive Alpha Females, like those documented by Charlie Lee-Potter on page 84, who get things done by not caring what anyone else thinks, ever. They can be the passive aggressive Faux Doormats who get their way by putting themselves down (see Bridget Hourican’s piece on page 88). They can be the classic Men’s Women as identified by Alice Marwick on page 90 – those who join the boys’ club by excluding other women. They can find their way to the corridors of power by playing the good little wife, as Robbyn Swan discovers on page 92. Or they can, says Anna Carey, make people laugh.

Being funny as a modus operandi is underrated in women. Humour is automatically seen as a good thing in men, but not necessarily in ladies. In fact, some people – step forward, psuedo-intellectual fop Christopher Hitchens! – have declared that this is because women are inherently unfunny. Why? According to Hitchens, in his notorious January 2007 Vanity Fair article ‘Why Women Aren’t Funny’, it’s because – and actually, this argument is so insane it’s actually kind of hilarious, except Hitchens isn’t joking – “For women, reproduction is, if not the only thing, certainly the main thing. Apart from giving them a very different attitude to filth and embarrassment, it also imbues them with the kind of seriousness and solemnity at which men can only goggle.”
This was the moment when I realised Christopher Hitchens had never met a woman in his life. Because, apart from the fact that the vast majority of us really don’t spend our every waking hour solemnly pondering the mysteries of our reproductive system, women have always been funny. After Jane Austen and Nancy Mitford, after Rosalind Russell and Bette Midler, after Richmal Crompton (one of Hitchens’s favourite authors – perhaps he thinks she was a man) and Sue Townsend, after Fawlty Towers (co-written by a woman, lest we forget, and everyone does) and Absolutely Fabulous, after all our friends and sisters ... well, after all that, it’s hard to see how anyone could claim that women aren’t funny.
In fact, female comic writers and performers are in demand at the moment, thanks to groundbreaking female writers and performers like Sarah Silverman and Tina Fey. In April, Fey and Silverman graced the cover of Vanity Fair for a story celebrating female comedy. And, while the angelically pretty, foul-mouthed Silverman has her brilliant moments, 38-year-old Fey is the undoubted queen of American comedy. A former chief writer for the seminal American comedy show Saturday Night Live (the first woman to hold that post), Fey is the woman behind the Emmy-winning sitcom 30 Rock, the funniest American sitcom in a decade. On July 27, she hits the big screen with her friend and former SNL colleague Amy Poehler in Baby Mama, the story of a busy executive (Fey) who hires a ditzy blonde to bear her child. Already a hit in the US, Baby Mama (which wasn’t written by either of the stars) shows that audiences are ready and willing to watch women be funny.
Humour binds people together. Saying something funny is a way of revealing your personality without making yourself vulnerable. You’re showing what makes you tick and, if someone else recognises themselves in this, then a friendship is born. “If I meet someone who doesn’t seem to have a sense of humour, I find it very unnerving,” says writer Louise Rennison. Rennison is the author of the hilarious, and hugely popular, Georgia Nicholson books, which chronicle the life of a melodramatic teenage girl; the latest book, Stop In the Name of Pants! (HarperCollins, £10.99stg), is published this month. Before Rennison’s debut novel Angus, Thongs and Full Frontal Snogging (the film of which is out on July 18) was published in 1999, books aimed at teenage girls were usually angsty tales of first love or broken homes. They didn’t reflect the fact that teenage girls spend huge amounts of their time developing elaborate in-jokes about everything from Swedish disco dancing to fake beards. “I think going to an all-girls school is quite significant,” says Rennison. “I’m very interested in all-girl environments, because you could try things out without being self-conscious, you learned how to do jokes. Boys don’t give you that chance.”

YOU CAN READ THE REST OF THIS STORY IN THE JULY ISSUE OF THE GLOSS MAGAZINE, OUT NOW. Photograph by Getty Images

Last Women Standing

We’ve all heard of Alpha Woman. She emerged in the 1980s, unashamed of her ambition, sights set firmly on success in a male-dominated world – but what has become of her in recent years? And what is it about her that makes us so uncomfortable? Charlie Lee-Potter looks at an endangered species …

Alpha Woman terrifies us, and she knows it. Her make-up is perfectly applied and her tights simply wouldn’t dare form a ladder. Her hair does what it’s told and so do her employees, of whom she has many. She can quote from the European Union reform treaty, knows the price of a barrel of oil and never says sorry. But there’s a major problem with Alpha Woman. Hardly anyone will admit to being one. Women love confessing to “muddling through”, to achieving extraordinary things by accident, to becoming successful without trying very hard. Self-deprecation is our default position, even though we usually manage to sneak in the fact that we have a university degree and could have been a professional pianist if we’d really stuck at it. But try getting us to admit to alpha-hood. It’s worse than confessing to a vodka habit or owning up that we knowingly send our children to sleepovers with nits.
When I started canvassing views on Ms AW, I found myself indulging in a little foreplay. Every time I asked for a woman’s opinion on alpha-dom, I prefaced my question with an apologetic, “I don’t know about you, but I’m more of a gamma woman myself”. What on earth was I doing with the faux-humble warm-up routine? I slipped into it every time and I came to the shaming conclusion that I was trying to be unthreatening and likeable, while at the same time displaying my knowledge of the Greek alphabet. And it dawned on me that, until we can bear to admit to being tainted by the alpha gene and until Alpha Woman has stopped being a figure of suspicion, there will continue to be only a tiny percentage of women in the boardroom and there certainly won’t be a Madam President behind the desk in the Oval Office.
Men brag about wanting to be the best and they’re admired for it, but women just can’t bring themselves to do it. Ever since we competed for friendships in the playground, we’ve wanted to be liked. Alpha Woman’s greatest asset is that she doesn’t care if she’s detested. Craving the approbation of our friends and colleagues is one of the greatest barriers to a woman’s success. Think of the successful women you know who don’t give a stuff if they’re loved or loathed and you’ll find the list is very short indeed. My bet is that it will include Margaret Thatcher and may well feature the likes of neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield, football boss Karren Brady, The Apprentice’s eye-rolling lawyer Margaret Mountford, the late Benazir Bhutto and Hillary Clinton. Between them, they’ve been sneered at for just about everything in the book, but they either don’t care or don’t let it show. Hillary Clinton has had to endure more criticism than all the others put together. Her husband’s infidelity has been turned upon her, as though it was somehow her fault. And, even though she’s smarter, tougher and more hardworking than her husband, it was never likely that America would be able to stomach a woman presidential candidate. Admitting defeat, she likened her bruising fight for the top job to hitting the “highest and hardest glass ceiling”, but I would put money on the fact that she’ll be bashing her head against it again next time around.

YOU CAN READ THE REST OF THIS STORY IN THE JULY ISSUE OF THE GLOSS MAGAZINE, OUT NOW. Photograph by Getty Images

The Faux Doormat

She’s never openly aggressive, but you can always tell what she wants. You know when she’s angry, but she never comes out and says it. She pretends to be meek and mild, but she’s got a steely core. She’s the faux doormat and, says Bridget Hourican, she always gets her own way – but at what cost ?

Round at some friends’ house for dinner; he was cooking and she and I were chatting, when she turned to him and said sweetly: “You’re going to put in onions, are you?” He snapped back: “I’m doing the cooking! All right? Save your recipes for when you’re cooking!” The reaction seemed disproportionate, and unlike him. She raised her eyebrows mildly and went on chatting.
Nobody – except the relentlessly prurient – wants an insight into friends’ relationship problems. What was going on here? Was he secretly insanely bad-tempered? Some kind of control freak? Was she forbidden to advise, let alone criticise him in front of others? Or was he just snapping under the strain of hundreds of such sweetly phrased, indirect remarks? Was this another minor battle in the slow war of attrition she was waging?
I don’t know. But the next time I was preparing a meal, it came to me that there’s nothing more annoying than someone hinting at how you should cook. In fact, there’s nothing more annoying than someone hinting, period. Would it have been better if she’d yelled: “Dumb-ass! That doesn’t need onions!”? But then, she’d have appeared angry and aggressive, instead of him. And if, as I was beginning to think, she was the faux doormat type, she would never expose herself to the critical position of aggressor.
Passive aggression is a means of getting what you want – or bullying – without ever landing a direct blow. It is an oxymoron, and a highly evolved way of dealing with social situations. Animals do not do passive aggression. Men aren’t supposed to, although a few manage it brilliantly (on which more later). Women are allowed get away with it – on some level it’s accepted as their right, the evolutionary weapon of the weaker sex.
The classic passive aggressor is mistress of displacement. She shifts her rage onto a defenceless and blameless object, like the dinner or a toddler – if her husband’s late home, she doesn’t shout: “What the hell do you mean coming back so late?” She says quietly: “Well, the dinner’s gone cold “ or “Maisie wanted to see you and now it’s long past her bedtime.” It is impossible to argue with cold spaghetti or a tearful toddler, so the husband is effectively robbed of all lines of defence. All he can do is apologise.
The archetypal faux doormat is charming, indirect and admirably in control of her emotions. If she gave in to temper and started shouting, she’d put herself in the wrong. She’s frequently above average good-looking, possibly because pretty girls rely on their looks and dislike appearing in a poor light (ie going red in the face from screaming, or giving themselves wrinkles by frowning); or possibly because pretty girls flirt, and flirtation is a first lesson in the manipulation required for passive aggression.

YOU CAN READ THE REST OF THIS STORY IN THE JULY ISSUE OF THE GLOSS MAGAZINE, OUT NOW. Illustration by Paula Kennedy.

Whose team are you on anyway?

Remember that girl at school who was only friends with the guys? Or the colleague who trod all over female co-workers to get into the Boys’ Club of the boardroom? She comes in many guises, from tomboy to vixen, but everyone knows at least one Man’s Woman, says Alice Marwick. Everyone, that is, except the men …

Thirty years after feminists proclaimed “Sisterhood is Powerful”, one type of woman couldn’t agree less. Whether a just-one-of-the-boys tomboy or an eye-batting bombshell, the “Man’s Woman” prefers the company of men – and makes that perfectly clear. Claiming that other women are too catty or find her “threatening”, she ignores the female half of the species, inhabiting a mostly male environment where she stands out by virtue of her gender. Sassy magazine used to call it “the whistle that only dogs hear”, describing how her appeal is lost on other women, but is readily apparent to men. Regardless of the underlying motivation – sometimes professional success, sometimes romantic impulse – the Man’s Woman takes a scornful view of women and their pastimes.
The MW emerges during teenage years, when there’s often tremendous social pressure to conform to rigid gender norms. Eric, 32, grew up in a wealthy, conservative community and says that, in shallow 90210-esque cliques, “[aligning with men] is actually a statement of strength and an attempt to separate from the superficiality”. Rachael, a 26-year-old teacher, says, “At school I got involved with a whole group of friends but, after a few weeks, I started to hang out only with the guys, because we had similar interests and sense of humour.” But this is generally just a phase. Once women graduate to high heels, business meetings and prenatal yoga, they usually widen their circles of friends.
Those who don’t often view other women as catty, petty bitches. These Men’s Women aren’t so much choosing men as they are avoiding women. To them, other women are competitive backstabbers who make it impossible to relax. “I just think men are easier to be with,” says make-up artist Ingo, 28. While there are certainly competitive women, this image of women as scrutinising and cutthroat is fuelled by media portrayals of female friendship that paint catfights as typical and tell women to prioritise romantic relationships over girlfriends. Even though real-life “frenemies” are rare, women burned by women in the past may choose men as a retaliatory strategy.
What about Ingo’s claim that it’s “easier” to be friends with men? Men are less complicated, this line of argument goes; they have lower-maintenance, stress-free friendships based on shared interests. While it’s true that some women find playing poker or watching sports more entertaining than stereotypically “girlie” pursuits, this view assumes that female friendship invariably involves things like make-up, fashion and shopping, which some MWs see as worthless. Not only does this attitude denigrate typically female interests, it ignores the many women with close female friends who aren’t interested in those kinds of things either.

To Hell in a Pillbox Hat

It’s 90 years since Irish women got the vote, and in the world of politics, it seems that attitudes haven’t moved on much since then. Robynn Swan asks why we prefer our political women to be unthreatening, girlie – and standing by a man

"Come to lunch and bring the baby … I love babies. Even now, at 58, I’d have one if I could.” Thus gushed Northern Ireland MP Iris Robinson in a recent interview. Robinson’s website trumpets her parliamentary success, but the focus of the story is her role as wife of Northern Ireland’s new First Minister, Peter Robinson. Iris showed the Sunday Tribune’s Suzanne Breen the conjugal chamber, replete with heart-shaped cushions, reportedly blushing as she tried to “hide black lacy underwear lying on the bed for a function later that night”.
Two intelligent, politically savvy women and what do we get? Chatter about babies and bedrooms.
Having “the wife” play along like that may ease Peter Robinson’s entrée into the testosterone-soaked club of big players on the world stage. Bare-chested Vladimir Putin; pugnaciously chauvinistic Silvio Berlusconi; pedal-pushing David Cameron. Barack Obama … er, being Barack Obama. It’s been styled the new political virility. Any time that much testosterone starts flying around, somebody is going to get screwed.
Enter Carla Bruni Sarkozy, new wife of the President of France. Carla in a pillbox hat. Carla in a buttoned-up, tightly-belted coat. “Charming” Prince Philip at a state dinner, smiling demurely during a photographic tour of the Elysée Palace, “civilising” her boorish husband with lessons in art and manners.
Bruni is famous for filching Mick Jagger from Jerry Hall, her most quoted public statement “I am a tamer of men, a cat, an Italian … monogamy bores me.” Now she reinvents herself, and the world applauds. Bruni has channelled her inner Jackie O. And behold! The President’s political fortunes take an upward turn.
Back in 1963, when Jackie’s pillbox hat gained iconic status, Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique was rocking the social landscape with the claim that women were the “victims of a false belief system that requires them to find identity and meaning in their lives through their husbands”. But, for years now, claiming to be a feminist has been like claiming … oh, forget it, there is no simile that works, no more guaranteed social suicide these days than donning the feminist cloak. We kid ourselves that 45 years on, we are past all that. Look again.
2008, wrote Hailey Eber on www.radaronline.com, was going to be the “year of the bitch”. Hillary Clinton would become “bitch supremo”. But last year’s presidential front-runner is this summer’s also-ran. American women abandoned her in droves for Barack Obama. Male voters? “There’s just something about her,” one conservative pundit declared, “that feels castrating, overbearing and scary.”
Even Hillary’s long years of “standing by” her philandering husband didn’t erase the perception that the Clinton marriage was first and foremost a coldly calculated political alliance. From the first moment of their now infamous “co-presidency,” the mantle of helpmate never fit Hillary. She appeared too nakedly ambitious.

YOU CAN READ THE REST OF THIS STORY IN THE JULY ISSUE OF THE GLOSS MAGAZINE, OUT NOW. Photograph by Corbis.

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