TINA BROWN

Journalist and TV presenter

Femininity is a woman who knows her power but doesn’t always choose to exercise it. A woman who’s confident enough about her own place in the world, she can let her guard down without fear of intrusion.

A feminine woman doesn’t have to come over as aggressively sexual – her sexuality is affirmed by her confidence in herself. It’s expressed through personal accents in her dress and style that become part of her allure.

The Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Christine Lagarde, is one of the most powerful women in the world, and she can change the tone of her meeting just by loosening her signature scarf. Twice divorced and a mother of two sons, she’s somehow retained the playful sparkle of a woman who enjoys her gender. As a result, the grim male power players who try to get the better of her at G8 meetings end up eating out of her hand.

Margaret Thatcher retained her femininity, too. Arriving at cabinet meetings at 10 Downing Street in

the Eighties, she captivated many of the male ministers attending with a faint whiff of Chanel No.5 as she swept past. When it comes to femininity, it’s all in the details.

Unfortunately, the common definition of what’s ‘feminine’ has been shaped more often than not by male marketers who deal in the obvious, regressive cliches of helplessness, blondeness, pumped breasts, stiletto heels and lashings of pouting lip gloss. The porn culture has only made this worse.

But crass sexuality is all about selling, and true femininity is about withholding, about leaving some mystery on the table. The actress Juliette Binoche is one of the most appealingly feminine women I have ever met. She has lived a life of renegade independence, but there’s an intimate amusement in her smile. And if you want to see a tough, achieving woman who has always been – and still is – consummately feminine, consider Helen Mirren. A crash course in femininity at its best is the famous 1975 interview when she was 30, with the heavy-footed TV talk show host, Michael Parkinson. Mirren was already a celebrated Shakespearian actress at the time, but Parkinson kept bringing back the conversation to her ample breasts, or what he called her ‘equipment’.

In a cool, ironic tone, she enquired, ‘Serious actresses can’t have big bosoms. Is that what you mean?’ She made mincemeat out of Parkinson, but it was said with such insolent charm he didn’t even know it.

True femininity is relishing that a woman can play multiple roles without apology. At last year’s Women In The World Summit at Cadogan Hall in London, the then Home Secretary Theresa May told me, ‘You can be clever and like clothes.’ Given I am a woman who has more pairs of Jimmy Choo shoes than Imelda Marcos, I couldn’t agree more. She’s secure enough in her own abilities that she’s not ashamed to admit she’s leaned on her ‘rock’, Philip May, more than a few times over their 35 years together.

I realise that the women I have cited here are over 50, an age when one’s sex appeal is thought, by men, to fade. Amy Schumer famously pointed this out in a hilarious skit in which she encounters Patricia Arquette and Tina Fey in a park gleefully welcoming Julia Louis-Dreyfus into the club of actresses considered to be no longer ‘believably fuckable’. ‘If you shoot a sex scene the night before your birthday, everyone is like, “Hurry up! Hurry up! We gotta get it before midnight because we think your vagina is going to turn into a hermit crab,”’ Fey deadpans.

But perhaps true femininity can only be attained after years of battling with a media culture that demands we either coarsen or deny it.

The exquisite Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie makes a powerful case for owning one’s femininity in a world where men are still the standard. ‘Many of us think that the less-feminine a woman appears, the more likely she is to be taken seriously,’ she wrote in her 2013 TEDx Talk, We Should All Be Feminists. ‘I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femininity.

And I want to be respected in all my femaleness. Because I deserve to be.’ I drink to that.

‘CRASS SEXUALITY IS ALL

ABOUT SELLING, AND TRUE FEMININITY IS ABOUT

WITHHOLDING, ABOUT LEAVING SOME MYSTERY

ON THE TABLE’