Let’s stop getting our big pants in a twist over Bridget

DEAR diary, it’s inevitable really, with a brand new Bridget Jones movie in the cinema, that already there’s a whole string of voices out to declare her one of the worst female role models ever. So this is probably going to look like an entry I could have written three years ago when the third Helen Fielding book, Mad About The Boy, hit the shelves, or back in 2004 round about the release of the film of the second book, The Edge Of Reason.

Were Bridget to keep her own diary of this phenomenon, entries might read something like this: “September 2013: 1 article by The Guardian’s Suzanne Moore saying why she ‘hates’ me and thinks I am anti-feminist.” Or: “September 2016: 1 article in which the Daily Mail’s Libby Purves says I am ‘no role model’. 1 article in which The Telegraph’s Allison Pearson says that, by getting pregnant at 43, am ‘party to the Big Fertility Lie’. And 1 article from The Observer’s Barbara Ellen declaring that I ‘can no longer claim to represent Everywoman’. (Who’s claiming?) Plus quite a few nice reviews from film critics, most of whom say am ‘heartwarming’ or ‘hilarious’.”

Each time Bridge resurfaces for another book or film outing, this happens, and each time it seems necessary to point out that actually, fictional characters aren’t trying to be role models, and that even if there are women out there who have jokingly declared “I am Bridget Jones,” that is not because they are following her example, or that they admire her way of life.

Personally I don’t know any women who say they are Bridget. They may occasionally have worn big pants or kept a weight-loss diary, drunk too much or accidentally made a strange colour of soup, but that doesn’t mean they thought they were her, or took her diary as a how-to manual.

But, really, the problem here isn’t Bridget herself. It’s the disheartening way in which almost any female comedy character, from Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw to Hannah Horvath from HBO’s Girls, is decried for being either anti-feminist or a poor example of her entire sex. Amy Schumer experienced this not long ago when her movie Trainwreck, loved by some feminists for being a post-feminist critique or dystopia, was also condemned by others.

Katie Yoder, for instance, who on Fox News wrote that Amy Schumer “does not speak for me” and that what women needed was “a role model who exemplifies dignity, has morals, and maybe just a bit of class”.

Lena Dunham, creator of Girls, who also plays Horvath, was so harangued for providing poor role models in the series that she felt the need to say: “When someone asks, ‘Are the girls on Girls good role models?’ I’m like, ‘Are the guys on Entourage good role models? Is Larry David a good role model? Is Woody Allen a good role model?’”

And, here in the UK, there was Miranda Hart’s comic creation Miranda, also described, like Bridget Jones, as an everywoman, by Fiona Sturges in The Independent, and then criticised for “conveying the message that, deep down, we women are all neurotic, incapable of behaving like sentient grown-ups and deserving of pity”.

One of the big traps here is the concept of the “everywoman”. Get a successful female character to the screen and, almost immediately, it seems that’s what she is being defined as. Never mind that the rest of the world isn’t all (choose your category) white, middle-class, single, shoe-obsessed, alcoholic, straight, ditzy or slightly posh.

As soon as that word “everywoman” slips on to the scene, it’s open season for both criticism about her feminist credentials and demands that she literally be like all the women in the world, which she isn’t and can never be.

We don’t hear people going on about the role-model value of Breaking Bad character Walter White, or Episodes’ Matt LeBlanc, or Mad Men’s Don Draper. We don’t hear Adam Sandler, Jim Carrey, Louis CK or Will Ferrell being criticised for being a poor everyman and not sufficiently “like me”. But when women start doing comedy, we become tone deaf – we seem to ignore the satirical elements of their characters, choosing to focus on them as failures of realism (as in the frequent criticism that Bridget “no longer represents me”) or bad feminist examples.

Of course comedians and writers may play into this – in fact we as a whole society buy into the everywoman notion. There’s an obsession, particularly when it comes to cultural products pitched at women, with making oneself or one’s fictional character relatable.

Hadley Freeman in The Guardian last week observed how this comes across in the recent vogue for “femoirs” by comedians, which include anecdotes and tales revolving around how much like the reader the author is, such as Amy Schumer’s The Girl With The Lower Back Tattoo. Freeman notes: “The limitations of the femoir reveal how narrow the parameters still are for women in the public eye, who are expected to be exceptional but also an everywoman.”

So the problem is not Bridget or Miranda or Amy. The problem is someone rather more vague and less entertaining – the wishy-washy everywoman. Possibly one of the most powerfully feminist things we can do is drop her as a concept, banish her from our language, on the grounds that feminism is a failed project if it demands that we all see ourselves as entirely the same.

Everywoman? There’s no such thing. And if she did exist, why would we then want someone as ordinary as her as a role model?