DON’T GET HER STARTED... ON FALLING FROM GRACE
I came over all ‘Et tu, Serena?’ on reading that the pregnant tennis star believed giving birth will make her ‘a real woman’. ‘I have so much respect for so many women [for giving birth],’ Williams said, in an interview. ‘I am about to be a real woman now, you know?’ I’ve always adored Williams. For her extraordinary talent, her graft; the dignity and calm with which she responds to the racism, sexism and bodyshaming repeatedly levelled at her; for how eloquently she destroys all detractors through the simple act of just winning shit. But I am childfree. I’ve never wanted kids; for decades, I’ve railed against the rhetoric that insists women cannot Truly Know love (or pain, or worth, or supreme, whole womanhood) unless they’ve ejaculated a small human through their genitalia. It’s a reductive way to consider the gender, never mind how cruelly stigmatising it is to women who want kids but can’t have them. So I felt forsaken by Serena, who’d represented something so shiny and good. But then I wondered if I had any right to feel let down by a woman who doesn’t know I exist, let alone that I maintain this one, specific stance on the fetishisation of motherhood.
We do this to famous women a lot. Decide they are definitely Our People, politically aligned with us, emotionally and intellectually attuned to us… Only to feel betrayed when they say or do something that doesn’t correspond to all our stances on life, or when they just mess up. We do it to Lena Dunham all the damned time: if she loses weight, if someone else digitally retouches her face on a shoot, if she gets her tone a little off when writing a fervent op-ed in support of abortion rights. We did it to JK Rowling after the author wrongly accused Trump of not shaking the hand of a disabled boy who’d visited the White House. We get far angrier with these women when we perceive them to have messed up than we should – because we expect so much more from them than is fair. We punish them for how completely brilliant they usually are.
But does the one ‘off’ thing they did truly negate all the excellent things they did before, or all the ones they will do? Shouldn’t we allow great women to also be flawed, changeable, sometimes straightforward wrong? If we don’t, aren’t we just building them up for a fall from our grace – while building ourselves up to feel disillusioned?