The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Did Mark not expect judo champion to be able to do her job?
SOMETIMES IT’S hard to be a woman. Or a girl, come to that. Especially when “girl” is taken to mean, not just the younger female of the species, but a weedy, wimpy, fusionless not-boy, somehow inferior and there to be patronised just for being what she is. And used as a put-down.
Ironic, therefore, that it was precisely because she was none of those things that judo champion Cynthia Rahming was referred to as a girl, in a very particular way.
I’m sure that cyclist and adventurer Mark Beaumont didn’t mean any of that with his somewhat rueful response – “being beaten by a 19-year-old girl” – to being easily thrown to the floor by Ms Rahming. Didn’t he expect her to be able to do her job?
Whether it was her youth or her girl-ness that was harder to take is unclear and the fact that word “girl” was later edited out has caused wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst those claiming political correctness gone mad.
I for one, as an old girl (and there’s another state of being to conjure with) am rather glad that it was and that a dig in the ribs has been meted out to those who don’t think about what they are saying, even if they think they are joking. I like to think that it was the negativity that has become attached to the word that was being airbrushed out, rather than the actual word itself.
Now, the sporting Ms Rahming took it all like a (wo)man but the fact that this kind of tone seems to come built in in certain psyches is almost as disturbing as someone going out of their way to be gratuitously controversial or simply unpleasant.
This comes, of course, in the wake of revelations about misogynistic remarks by English Premier League executive Richard Scudamore and the excuse, fielded by nowformer TV pundit John Inverdale, that it was hay fever that made him refer to Wimbledon Ladies’Singles Champion Marion Bartoli in derogatory terms based solely on her appearance.
Then there was Jeremy Paxman’s not-too-subtle skewering of Silvio Berlusconi in which he purportedly repeated back to the shamed politician his extremely graphic personal description of Angela Merkel.
I would conjecture that, even should he continue in his job as BBC interrogator in chief, the notoriously circumspect German Chancellor would give Paxo no such excuse to probe her private attitude to her disgraced colleague. I could hazard a guess that she might not think much of Signor Berlusconi, only I suspect she doesn’t think of him at all. And has better things to do.
This week, too, the Duchess of Cambridge’s peachy rear appeared in a low-brow German magazine and went, as they say, round the world.
Me, I think she was just trying to keep upsides with her younger sister but although the accompanying comments (she being a royal and therefore to be fawned over rather than have her appearance/personality/sartorial choices trashed outright) were cloying in the extreme, it shows that even those regarded as the great and the good (if they are women) can expect every aspect of their appearance to be magnified and commented upon, usually deeply unfavourably.
It was also a bad week for rising opera star Tara Erraught, who must have thought all her career Christmases had come at once when she was cast in the plum role of Octavian in Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier at Glyndebourne. Octavian is a teenage boy who at one point in the opera impersonates a girl, so you have a girl pretending to be a boy pretending to be a girl but the part is always sung by a woman. Pick the gender bones out of that.
The highly-praised young Irish mezzo then found her personal appearance filleted in the press. Weighty stars – male and female – have taken critical and public flak before of course but rarely on this scale.
Even if she didn’t live up to the principal boy fantasies of the mostly male reviewers – and bearing in mind that opera, even in the modern era, tends to require some suspension of disbelief – the comments were appalling.
All they needed to say was that she didn’t particularly look the part – and given the costume designer a hard time. Having seen pictures of Ms E in an evening frock, she has a nice shapely figure, not thin and not fat and certainly with nothing that couldn’t be sorted out by a flattering outfit.
I speak as a woman who once had to sing the title role in Carmen in a heavy brown tweed waistcoat, causing the wrong kind of smouldering. Like Ms Rahming, Ms Erraught and the rest, I like to think I rose above it.