Why can’t women accept you can be sexy, brainy AND a feminist
A (somewhat provocative) plea from an Oxford educated historian
AT LEAST once a week I receive a cruel email informing me that I am a disgrace to womankind. Depressingly, they mainly come from women.
I’ve been called a tart for my choice of clothes. Last week, a woman I have never met wrote to me suggesting that the reason I am single and can’t hold on to a husband is because I spend so much time ‘lolling around in high heels’.
Quite what my personal life has to do with this woman is a mystery, but that didn’t stop her from advising that if I dressed more demurely I’d improve my chances of meeting someone respectable who would want to stay with me. Only she said all this in much crueller, and less polite, terms.
Another woman regularly writes demanding to know why she should be expected to care what I think, accusing me of sleeping my way to success. Even the way I speak — apparently, I’m annoyingly ‘breathy’ — is held up as a reason for women to hate me.
My crime? That I dare to call myself a feminist while indulging in such frivolous pleasures as high heels, designer clothes and a decent haircut.
I’m a long way from being a supermodel yet it seems that striving to look good is incompatible with having feminist principles or being a scholar (I’m an Oxford-educated historian who has published five books on Renaissance Europe).
In short, I am clearly supposed to feel guilty about the money and effort I invest in my appearance. As though to be a feminist means you can’t be sexy, too.
I don’t fall out of bed looking like this. Now that I can afford it, I work out with a personal trainer four times a week, feed a daily green juice addiction and spend more money than I’d ever admit to splurging on face creams in Space NK.
But I am proud to be womanly as well as brainy, and why shouldn’t I be?
Aren’t we supposed to live in a culture where women are encouraged to celebrate themselves, and where body confidence is viewed as empowering?
I have no qualms about taking off my clothes because I want to make the point that this, too, is what a feminist looks like.
It is absurd to suggest that by daring to admit I enjoy being feminine, my politics are compromised. Surely feminism means body acceptance for all women, regardless of their shape, age or size.
Unfortunately, there appear to be double standards here, because it turns out my body doesn’t fit with my politics in the minds of many women.
And I am far from alone. Earlier this year actress Emma Watson, a vociferous feminist, did a revealing photo shoot for Vanity Fair that was met with uproar. And yet, just months earlier, another actress, Girls star Lena Dunham, just as principled when it comes to equal rights for women, also went topless for a cover shoot, this time for Harper’s Bazaar.
Lena was praised for her strength in unapologetically displaying her body. There were no howls of feminist outrage.
Why the different responses? Frankly, for no better reason than that one woman — Lena — is less of a match for the conventional benchmark of what an attractive woman is supposed to look like than the other — Emma.
THERE really are more interesting battles for feminism to fight than turning on each other with so much vitriol.
It is paradoxical that women’s bodies are policed by other women, particularly as it is by the very women who demanded equality in the first place.
As an historian, my appearance used to cause a slight ripple whenever I released a new book, as though someone with my background couldn’t be pretty and blonde, and ought to be consumed with loftier matters than what’s on Net-a-Porter.
But it certainly didn’t provoke hate mail from disgruntled fellow academics. Things changed when I decided to write a novel, Maestra, whose heroine is entirely unapologetic about her sexuality. There didn’t seem to me to be anything ‘unfeminist’ about writing about sex in a way that was open, honest and realistic.
Maestra, and its sequel Domina, which have been published in 43 countries, mark a spectacular departure from the kind of books I’d written previously, but their success has provoked a surprising amount of personal abuse.
They are thrillers — part of a trilogy — with an assertive and clever female protagonist, Judith, who happens to have a ferocious sexual appetite. I describe her sexual liaisons in detail.
Readers either love or despise the murderous Judith and the way she is so blunt about her sexual predilections.
Amazon readers are divided between five-star raves or outrage. ‘If I hadn’t bought this book on Kindle, I would burn it,’ was my favourite bad review. And that’s fine — a writer can’t expect a wholesale positive response.
But what I found disappointing is that some supposedly serious reviewers tore Maestra apart on feminist grounds, while at the same time making my looks part of the equation.
Take Janet Maslin in the New York Times. She savaged Maestra after she had pointed out my academic background and claimed my departure from history was an attempt to ‘give voice to my inner babe’.
How this woman could possibly believe it was OK to critique a book from a feminist standpoint, having first objectified the author, reducing me to nothing more than ‘a babe’, is beyond me.
The fact that I am a woman who wrote about sex in a fictional work seemed to justify me being subjected to scrutiny over my own private life. Journalists demanded to know how many men I had slept with and probed my sexual predilections.
In Europe, the book was treated with a degree of seriousness, but no one in Britain asked me whether it was a social satire, a political commentary on meritocracy or just an escapist piece of entertainment.
They wanted to know about my divorces, my boyfriends, about how much of the book was autobiographical — God forbid a woman writer might have been capable of inventing something.
It’s like school again, where I was bullied for being reasonably pretty as well as rather clever.
At least then the girls punching me in the face and banging my head against brick walls — it really was that bad — were brave enough to attack me in person.
The attacks on me as a teenager were vicious. I became withdrawn and secretive, spending hours in my room crying.
BAcK then, the fashion I enjoy now as a bit of fun was a form of escape from real life. I devoured Vogue, transporting myself to a different world through its pages.
My bullies have left their mark. I respond badly to confrontation, and find myself shaking and vomiting when I have to do book talks or appear on TV.
I do it because it’s part of my job, but also because there’s still a part of me that feels I have to prove something to my detractors — that I never was, and never will be, a victim.
In Maestra, Judith responds to being objectified by men by sleeping with them and then killing them. My own response has been more phlegmatic.
We are lucky to live in a culture where women have won the freedom to lead political parties, to pursue any career and make sexual choices without prejudice.
But still, it would seem that even for feminists, our worth is perversely bound up in our appearance.
When was the last time a man’s triumph was overshadowed by his sex appeal or his hair?
So why do women continue to collude in this rubbish, trivialising ourselves and our equalitydriven beliefs in the process?
Last year, when I was publicising my first book, two female friends came to help me choose what to wear for an interview.
‘I don’t want to wear this,’ I said, holding up a practical midlength skirt and a boring grey tweed jacket.
‘I don’t want to look sensible. I want to look powerful, elegant — and maybe kind of sexy.’
‘You can’t,’ both my friends replied in unison. ‘Everyone will hate you.’ I remember sulking as I tried on an Yves Saint Laurent sequin cocktail dress.
But they were right. And it’s made me realise that women will never be as free as men until we stop judging each other.