MILLENNIAL DIARY
TRADITIONALLY, a family business passes from father to son; older generation to younger. But there’s a phenomenon (two’s a trend) of reality TV family businesses being passed from child to parent. No one has taken to it with so much dedication and gusto as the Irish.
Since Maura Higgins graduated from Love
Island, she’s become a fan favourite on This Morning as a surprisingly perceptive and sensitive agony aunt dispensing sweetly abrasive common sense. Maura’s mum Sharon first revealed her star quality when she visited her daughter in the Love Island villa, her disapproval of Curtis clear to see and hilarious to watch. She’s taking that savage diplomacy to RTE now, where she’ll present a slot called Agony OAPs. Says Sharon: “Sometimes I can be brutally honest. Probably a Sagittarius thing.” She has her own catchphrase: “I’m straight up and down the middle.”
Then Vogue Williams is shaping the media career of her excellent mother Sandra like a millennial Rodin. Sandra is the breakout star of Spencer, Vogue and Wedding Two, where she rolls her eyes and nods doubtfully as only Irish mothers can. She also fights the good fight defending Ireland against mad-Paddy stereotyping on English television: she swore blind the other week that ‘gee’ is ‘Indian butter,’ and that if there was indeed another meaning, “It’s not a nice word — people don’t use that in Ireland really.”
Spencer’s terrible impressions of Sandra feel familiar to any Irish millennial in London who took up with an English person — it seems to trigger a deep ancestral wound. “That’s not how my mom sounds,” says Vogue in rare annoyance.
Vogue and Sandra are now embarking on a ‘skincare’ project; Vogue, about whom you could say a lot but not that she doesn’t understand social media, has full jurisdiction over her mother’s Instagram account, which is growing steadily. Millennials might be selfish, vain and out for ourselves — but we’d never leave our mams out of it.
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But generational relations aren’t so rosy elsewhere; last week, the ‘OK boomer’ meme jumped from the teenage/millennial internet to the parliament of New Zealand, when a 25-year-old MP talking about climate change shut down a heckler with ‘OK boomer,’ and boomers (shorthand for a certain personality type, rather than a specific agegroup) everywhere lost their minds.
Chloe Swarbrick, who went viral, is worried she might have ‘killed’ the meme, which is a comfortingly millennial response: our first responsibility is towards the internet, not the people who voted for us or to the environment.
People think ‘OK boomer’ is ageist and insulting, but it’s just a means of flagging a particular kind of intergenerational discourse. What Swarbrick was really saying was, “OK boomer, I can see you’re about to try and derail this very important conversation about climate change, the urgency for which is backed by incontrovertible scientific evidence and consensus, by offering no constructive or factual feedback and ending up with some vague and dogmatic punchlines about snowflakes and hysteria. I understand that you don’t like hearing this, but I literally do not have the time or energy to waste on engaging with someone who has no intention of listening. OK, boomer?”
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Last week, rapper TI ruined literally everybody’s day by mentioning his habit of taking his 18-yearold daughter to the gynaecologist every year to ‘make sure’ she’s still a virgin. Many column inches have been spent detailing how toxic, abusive, disturbing, upsetting this is. So the best comment I can offer is reproducing his words, in full: “Deyjah’s 18, just graduated high school now and she’s attending her first year of college, figuring it out for herself. And yes, not only have we had the conversation, we have yearly trips to the gynaecologist to check her hymen.
“So we’ll go and sit down and the doctor will come and talk and the doctor’s maintaining a high level of professionalism. He’s like, ‘You know sir, I have to, in order to share information’ — I’m like, ‘Deyjah they want you to sign this so we can share information. Is there anything you wouldn’t want me to know? See doc? No problem.’
“And so then they come and say, ‘Well I just want you to know that there are other ways besides sex that the hymen can be broken like bike riding, athletics, horseback riding and just other forms of athletic physical activity.’ So I say, ‘Look doc, she don’t ride no horses, she don’t ride no bike, she don’t play no sports. Just check the hymen please and give me back my results expeditiously’.”
TI also talked about how virgins are “no fun”. Freud himself wouldn’t have enough column inches.
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Generally, I love having grown up with Harry Potter. But one thorn in my side haunts me: her name is Emma Watson. Emma and I are the same age. So as she tells Vogue about the trauma of turning 30, I am consumed with loathing for myself and every 29-year-old white woman, and possibly for my entire generation
— of which Emma is, regrettably, the voice.
The interview is 30 minutes long and I watched every second, so you don’t have to. We had the full millennial royal flush: disclosing poor mental health, ‘taking up space,’ imposter syndrome, selfcare, the trans-women in ladies’ toilets debate, casual mention of therapy, “feminism is all about choice”, being friends with exes, yoga teachertraining, silent retreats. She repeatedly refers to Meryl Streep as ‘Meryl’; Laura
Dern is given her full title.
When asked if she knew ‘Malala,’ youngest Nobel Prize laureate, Emma says: “Malala Yousafzai?” and tells of how the Pakistani activist who was shot by the Taliban aged 15 in her pursuit of education, told Emma that “the reason [Malala] had wanted to identify with feminism was because of my speech”. A book was gifted. A hug was exchanged. ‘Single’ was described as ‘selfpartnered’.
I’m handing back my millennial card.