Polly Vernon has her say
DESPITE SWEARING
I wouldn’t go and see any Films With Messages In this year – anything critics describe as ‘urgent’, anything that might make me Think, Despair or Call Me To Action (had enough of all that in 2019; just entertain me, Hollywood! Show me a good time!) – I watched Bombshell last night, the dramatisation of the real-life story in which two senior Fox News anchorwomen bring down Roger Ailes, Fox’s intensely powerful CEO, on grounds of sexual harassment.
Gretchen Carlson and Megyn Kelly did this categorically not in the spirit of sisterly feminist togetherness – they didn’t really like each other, let alone the feminist movement – but rather, because Ailes and his proclivities had disrupted both of their careers. They acted not on high principle or hashtag, and certainly not for the good of other women, but because their ambition left them with no option. Their motivation was capitalist rather than feminist; yet its end result was pretty damn (accidentally) feminist.
I was out of the cinema and back home in time for the episode of Love Island in which the one called Siânnise Fudge falls out with the one called Rebecca Gormley after Gormley takes up with Luke T, the bloke Fudge fancied; in doing so, Fudge felt, Gormley exposed herself as having no ‘girl code’. I’ve watched enough Love Island to know that Girl Code is a central preoccupation of any series, but re-encountering the concept just then – with the Bombshell women’s absence of anything approaching it, still ringing round my consciousness – made me wonder about it a little more than usual. What it is, if it matters, if anyone has it, really – when the chips are down and the head of your media organisation is asking you for a blow-job in exchange for promotion, for example – and if anyone can legitimately invoke it, or its absence, if what they actually mean is: you and I both fancy the same dude, and you got in there first, so now I’m cross?
Because Girl Code is a nebulous quantity at best, isn’t it? Malleable, terribly open to interpretation, dependent on some vague sense we should offer other women more loyalty, decency and consideration than we do men, because… ummm… Periods? The patriarchy? At worst, it can be weaponised, strategically deployed to bring women into line, shame us into compliance, stop us disrupting the micro-hierarchies within which we all operate, and which we call our ‘friendship groups’.
Girl Code is, at its heart, a recognition of the uncomfortable truth that women are still rather inclined to compete with each other – for friends, for men, for status, for jobs – and that some sort of regulating force is therefore necessary if we wish to sustain even the lightest veneer of civility.