MILLENNIAL DIARY
CENTRAL Statistics Office numbers show that the average Irish man is 36.1 years old when getting married, while the average woman is 34.1 years old. Both of these figures are up since the previous year — we just can’t commit.
Meanwhile, only 52pc of Irish couples opted for a Catholic wedding, another figure that’s consistently falling.
Of course, these numbers have ‘millennial’ written all over them. The oldest millennials are currently around 37 — and many still believe themselves to be too young, flighty, inexperienced and in their prime to be tied down by marriage. Obviously, by the time our grandparents were our age they’d already been married 15 years and had six children — but that makes sense given that they became adults at 18.
Technically, lawfully, we too became adults at 18, but all millennials know that in 2019, until you are 30, “adulting” is merely a semiironic hobby for hipsters.
These are the new parameters: Justin Bieber, at 24, says he is enjoying his adolescence, Emma Stone saw turning 30 as her entry into adult life. So it makes sense that we feel we need a few years to grow accustomed to being grown up before we commit ourselves to another person.
The other break from previous generations is religious ceremonies — just over half of weddings now are Catholic, with millennials’ bloody minded insistence on doing things ‘differently’. We’re so caught up in our notions that we think not believing in Jesus is reason enough to not have him front and centre of our wedding day, as our grandparents shake their heads because it never stopped them.
Anyway, it’s safe to say that the other 48pc of unique, non-Popish Irish weddings in 2018 were held in a woodland clearing, lit by candles in jars, and presided over by a fun friend/drag queen/reluctant granny with a ‘Whatever feels right!’ dress code. Katy Perry, passionate white advocate of the casual bindi and sexy sari, found herself in the middle of a racism row last week when she was found to be selling shoes reminiscent of blackface.
Katy Perry has a long and noble history of being relentlessly problematic, so it wasn’t the fact that she was manufacturing racist shoes that surprised people, but the fact that she manufactures shoes at all.
For anyone who’s followed Katy’s career, it seemed only right and natural that she would find a way of making footwear morally unacceptable.
Honestly, it’s a miracle she’s survived to 2019 without being cancelled, given her career should have been over before it began in 2008 with ode to toxic heteronormativity and homophobic anthem I Kissed a Girl. Since then, we’ve seen her in Egyptian drag, with cornrows, as a geisha, say she wants to skin Japanese people and wear them like Versace, call Rihanna a ‘hoodrat’ no less than three times — the list goes on.
In the past, Katy has cited her sheltered and conservative ultrareligious upbringing for her wokenesshiccups, claiming to still be “unlearning” biases. But shoegate is not even Katy Perry’s first brush with using blackface as a hip aesthetic; 2014 saw her tour with backing dancers fitted out with exaggerated bums and big red lips, almost identical to the racist imagery of 19th Century freak shows. A couple of years later, Katy would rebrand herself as a woke purveyor of ‘purposeful pop’, as ‘Artist. Activist. Conscious’. It seemed she had copped on.
But these shoes. Oh, these shoes. Of course, (white) people in their thousands have used the furore as evidence of a PC-gripped society going to the dogs. It’s not Katy Perry’s fault You People look for badness in everything! Everyone loves to be offended! Katy’s non-apology said that she was ‘saddened’ by the comparison, that the shoe was “envisioned as a nod to modern art and surrealism”. They got that right, at least — the idea of aggressively average pop star Katy Perry making racist slip-ons is a paean to surrealism if ever I heard one. People have been putting images of the shoes side-by-side with Picasso paintings as if that settles the matter. It doesn’t: Katy wasn’t doing anything particularly out-there here, these Picasso-style faces have been ubiquitous on the high street for a year or so now — I’ve seen literally hundreds of interpretations of the trend in all different colours, on everything from dresses to wallets, none of which have made me recoil and groan. So, using ‘modern art’ as a reference does not have to produce racistlooking products. The thing that creates racist-looking products is using racist imagery, whether you meant to or not.
Luckily, the Perry PR machine rolled into action in a timely manner, with a headline-grabbing Valentine’s proposal from her paramour, Orlando Bloom. Bloom is the most boring man in the world, and the perfect antidote to Perry’s all too-colourful extra-curriculars. It’s difficult to get cross about anything when confronted with his forcefully bland, nearly soporific features. Incredibly played, Katy. Last week saw an urgent recall of some ‘Miss Fit Skinny Tea’ products over ‘misleading labelling’. The Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) has ordered that all batches be taken off shelves immediately. It’s not clear what exactly the misleading health claims were, but their teas generally promise “to help you lose weight and burn fat fast” with “science”.
“Detox teas” or “teatoxes” have become a symbol of all that is rotten with influencer culture and ‘wellness’; the accusation is usually that the ‘weight loss’ teas are actually just laxatives — the ‘flatter tummy’ they promise is a short-term product of dehydration and diarrhoea. They are criticised for promoting disordered eating behaviours and causing unpleasant physical reactions.
Miss Fit has been keen to point out that it’s not like other teatoxes; they are “ethically better than the rest”. “We didn’t start like other ‘teatoxes’ so why copy them?? That’s why we no longer use the word teatox or influencers!” — other than changing their marketing strategy though, it’s difficult to figure out whether their actual product works in a substantially different way to the ones vilified across the internet.
In any case, no influencer worth her salt is still shilling ‘weight loss’ teas by any name — there’s a very clear divide in the industry now between the have and havenots, who accept payment for pretending their incredible bodies are the result of explosive diarrhoea rather than extensive personal training, strict diet plans, genes and Photoshop.
Perhaps Miss Fit products are completely different, and don’t deserve to be lumped in with other ‘detox’ teas that are little more than glorified laxatives. But I don’t see how any company advocating suppressing your appetite, or replacing actual food with a drink that fools your body into thinking you’re full, can claim any ethical standing. The pulling of the products from shelves by the FSAI might prove yet to be a misunderstanding, or a matter of a mere technicality — but it’s a welcome blow to an industry built on encouraging women to starve.