Bin the old joke book.. we are reclaiming our stories
Beyoncé’s mum hits right note at movie premiere
Some girls dream of looking like Beyoncé… not me. I’d be happy to look like Beyoncé’s mum.
Tina Knowles – the Queen B mother – turned up for the premiere of Jay-Z’s new movie looking like a million-dollar superstar herself. At 67, she was rocking rock a black sparkly jumpsuit with her handsome 74-year-old hubbie on her arm.
Rapper Jay-Z’s
Netflix offering is called The Harder They Fall.
May I suggest his next film tells his wife’s life story. He can call it: “The Apple Doesn’t Fall (Far From The Tree).”
Readers of a certain vintage may remember a high-profile visit to Scotland by one Monica Lewinsky.
It was March 1999, little more than a year after the scandal broke over her “relationship” with president Bill Clinton. She swooped in on a signing tour to promote a hastily produced book – Monica’s Story by Andrew Morton (Princess Di’s biographer).
As a young reporter, I couldn’t believe the scenes being played out at the huge Borders book store on Glasgow’s Buchanan Street. The place was deluged. Customers queued down umpteen flights of stairs and spilled right out on to Royal Exchange Square where a large, noisy crowd had gathered, a few wearing Bill Clinton masks and some waving gigantic inflatable cigars.
Lewinsky herself sat shyly behind a desk, robotically signing her autograph and smiling but saying very little. Some wag had set up her desk in the “Fun and Games” section of the store. This young woman was the butt of the joke. After all, she was making money from the outrageous revelations that she’d performed oral sex on a serving president. In the Oval Office, if you don’t mind. Surely she was the type of girl happy to go along with the mockery?
But the public reaction is all rather shameful in retrospect, isn’t it? Frankly, I’m embarrassed to have felt anything other than sympathy towards the woman.
Lewinsky’s reputation was already trashed. She would ultimately struggle to find work, privacy or to make sense of what had happened.
She had been a 22-year-old unpaid intern at the White House. She was used by the most powerful man in the world, then set up and exposed by people she trusted. What went on between the work-experience girl and the president was consensual, she has said, but Clinton was 27 years her senior, married and a global megastar. He threw her under the bus to save himself.
These days we’d probably say she’d been groomed. Yet she was portrayed as either a temptress or a slut as her character was annihilated. Often both.
Would the response be any different if it all happened today? We’ve come a long way in encouraging women to tell their own story, to refuse to be defined by the actions of men with more money or power or status. And once Prince Andrew finally appears in an
American court to answer Virginia Giuffre’s sex trafficking allegations against him, we’ll have taken a truly significant step forward.
In the meantime, Tuesday sees the UK launch of a new 10-part drama series about the affair – Impeachment: American Crime Story (BBC2, 9.15pm). Lewinsky, now an anti-bullying campaigner and supporter of the MeToo movement, is one of the producers.
Good for her. Only by reclaiming their own story do women ever break free of the dismissive and derogatory labels they’re given by their association with inadequate, manipulative men: “mug” or “bitch”, “slapper” or “gold-digger”, to name a few.
I really hope that’s what Coleen Rooney is attempting to do in the for thcoming Amazon Pr ime documentary about her husband. Everyone seems to have an opinion on this mum of four. She’s stuck with dozy multi-millionaire Wayne despite his drunken antics, liaisons with prostitutes and late-night rendezvous with women who are not his missus. And somehow she ends up being portrayed as the fool, the doormat, the sap. It’s about time Coleen took the chance to stick the boot right in.
After all, she’s not the one who has done anything wrong, except fall in love as a schoolgirl with a schoolmate who happened to be good at football. He’s the one who has betrayed her trust over and over again. The faults are in his character, not hers.
He’s got the brain, restraint and sexual morality of a randy Jack Russell so he needs constant retraining. Coleen should reclaim that narrative.
No one should have mocked Lewinsky back in 1999. But maybe her story is even more important today.