Basic B*tch
A millennial discovers ‘Shirley Valentine’
It’s exactly 30 years since ‘Shirley Valentine’, the film I only knew as an idiom and a threat,
was released. Iam 29-and-a-half: this is the feminist and cultural landscape I, a girl-child, was born into. When the algorithm presented it to me (we had just watched both Mamma Mias) it felt like stumbling across a historical document; a time-capsule from my conception.
In some ways, 1989 is unrecognisable: Shirley’s mundane husband bellowing at her about steaks and then pushing a plate of chips ’n’ egg into her lap is, to my snowflake eyes, domestic abuse.
But some things are eternal: the bad feminist best friend; the unbearable posh vegan; the f**kboy who tells you your stretch marks are beautiful. It’s Fleabag, but more depressing.
What were easy punchlines are today’s feminist battlegrounds: emotional labour, sexist micro-aggressions and mansplaining: “They feel they have to take over the conversation. I mean, I mean with most fellas if you say something like, like, ‘My favourite season’s autumn’, they go, ‘Oh, oh, my favourite season’s spring’, and then you’ve got 10 minutes of them talking about why they like spring”. And the orgasm gap: “Just a lot of pushing and shoving and you still come out with very little at the end”.
Maybe Shirley Valentine is just coming into its own, in this age of self-care and treat yo-self and body positivity and “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?”, where boundaries are religion, and 40 is when you can think about growing up.
As I watched middle-aged 42-year-old Shirley, whose life was over before it began, I thought what a joy it is to be nearly 30 and lying on a couch on a Tuesday night with two other women, watching films as old as ourselves; we’d had a glass of cava to celebrate one’s end of a return to academia and the other’s resignation — no children or husbands, no one looking for their dinner, no idea what we’d be doing a month from now. And already a little bit in love with ourselves.