I’ll tell you what we want...
ONE of life’s perennial unanswered questions is ‘What do women want?’ To quote Winston Churchill, it is ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’.
Mel Gibson tried and failed miserably to solve the mystery in a memorable film (before his subsequent fall from grace, which left us all asking yet another question: what was Mel on?) The reality of this particular puzzle is that women want what they want, and every woman’s wants are different. But what all women should want is not to let one faction of the female ‘tribe’ dominate an entire gender.
That is why I was full-on hysterical last week when I read a piece detailing why Taylor Swift is not fit to be a feminist. Apparently, the Nashville international superstar songstress is too thin, too successful and a country mile too pretty to be a role model to women.
And lest we’re in any doubt of Swift’s feminist shortcomings, she is also – through no fault of her own – too ‘relentlessly white’ for some to accept into their mean girls’ group.
How one is too white is beyond my comprehension and an issue for another day. What I have to tackle, however is the idea that Taylor Swift, Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, is not a feminist. Swift is by any standards a woman to be very much admired. She’s a super-successful selfmade star who – despite her beauty, wealth and ‘excessive whiteness’ – struggles with the exact same angst that all girls grapple with. And she’s a hardworking, street- and book-smart example for young girls to aspire to. So Swift should perhaps be relieved she doesn’t possess the attributes that some women demand from their heroines.