Hadley Freeman - Be Awesome - Modern Life for Modern Ladies

For my awesome sister Nell

‘Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim’

Nora Ephron

‘Girls, if boys say something that’s not funny, you don’t have to laugh’

Amy Poehler, American actress and comedian

‘The world is full of guys. Be a man! Don’t be a guy’

Say Anything

Contents

Title Page

Dedication For my awesome sister Nell

Epigraph ‘Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim’ Nora Ephron ‘Girls, if boys say something that’s not funny, you don’t have to laugh’ Amy Poehler, American actress and comedian ‘The world is full of guys. Be a man! Don’t be a guy’ Say Anything

Life is pain … but it doesn’t have to be painful, aka the introduction

The office of magical thinking

A day in your life in Daily Mail headlines

Sex tips for smart ladies

Movies lie – damn it, woman, they lie!

What to expect when your friends are expecting

Talking about eating disorders without using a single photo of Kate Moss

Every dating guide you’ll ever need

You don’t need Winona Ryder to tell you how to live your life

But do you like him?

You’re never too old for Topshop

The ten commandments of being an unannoying vegetarian

The Forwardthinkoriums

How to cheer up your friend who is depressed about being single without lying to them, patronising them or making them feel even worse

Exercise – it’s just like sex!

How to read women’s magazines without wanting to grow a penis

There will always be something wrong with your body, which means nothing is wrong with your body

Beyond the armpit: a ten-point (plus three addenda and some posh little footnotes) guide to being a modern-day feminist

When to listen to your friends, and when not to

Ten signs you are having a non-awesome date (possibly autobiographical)

Ten awesome women (in no particular order)

Five awesome films and five very un-awesome films

Ten awesome books

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

‘Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.’

Thus spake the Dread Pirate Roberts/Wesley to Buttercup in the glorious 1987 movie, The Princess Bride . Aside from learning that one should ‘never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line’, this is probably the most valuable lesson that wise film taught me. But, contrary to what the Dread Pirate Roberts/Wesley 1appears to advise in this scene, I have never believed that one should just accept it.

The Nietzschean pirate was not wrong. Life is definitely pain: the Daily Mail exists; there are still people in the world who believe that banning abortion will lead to happy families as opposed to mutilated women; every straight man I’ve ever met prefers boring Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s to glorious Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story 2and, call me a crazy idealist, but I’d have thought that by the twenty-first century any movie that suggests the only happy ending for a woman is marriage would be deemed as unacceptable as any movie that suggests the only jobs available to black people are maids, drug dealers, sassy best friends or Nelson Mandela. Oh. Wait a minute.

Then there are the pains that come from within and, going purely from my own experiences and observations, women are particularly enthusiastic about inflicting these on themselves, almost as much as some of the aforementioned exterior agencies are about inflicting them on them, and it is entirely possible that the two sides to this equation are not unrelated, even an ever-interlooping system. After all, bullies look for susceptible targets.

This is not to suggest that women are delicate victims who need protection, or that feminism treats them as if they are, or whatever nonsense some folk come out with to justify not confronting such things: ‘Show me a smart, competent young professional woman who is utterly derailed by … an inappropriate comment about her appearance and I will show you a rare spotted owl,’ one journalist wrote in an editorial in the New York Times 3in 2011, suggesting that secretly women love to be reduced to their physical appearance and only pretend they don’t because they think to do otherwise would be a betrayal of the Sistahz and their ‘Orwellian’ attitudes to sexual harassment. But then this journalist also seems to think that a woman’s age (‘young’) and employment status (‘professional’) are in any way relevant to her credibility as a sensible person and, rather more jarringly, suggests that only weak women can’t handle harassment (or worse), thus putting the focus and blame on the women’s reactions rather than the men’s actions (an all too common tack in a variety of contexts), so perhaps we need not waste any more of our time on this theory. Although I can’t help but regret not getting to see that owl. I do like an owl.

It’s hard to be awesome in an occasionally lame world. That so many bizarrely retrograde clichés and expectations still dominate so much of society and pop culture is depressing enough; the number of people who perpetuate them, internalise them and even enact them because, I guess, it’s easier to do this than to come up with one’s own ideas, one’s own arguments, one’s own life, can feel downright deadening on a person’s soul.

As a woman who works in the media and watches a lot of movies, I, inevitably, notice this in particular in regard to the depiction of women in the media and movies. This, I guess, is because feminism has arrived at something of an awkward place in that while equal rights (if not equal pay) are, at the very least, expected, anachronistic expectations and depictions of women remain. But to be honest, the fact that we’re even talking about feminism or, specifically, the definition thereof is depressing because it seems spectacularly lame to have to stroke one’s chin about what gender equality means. I have yet to see a single article asking, say, ‘Are Civil Rights Dead?’ or ‘Is the Fight Against Racism Relevant to Twenty-First-Century Fiction?’, to paraphrase two recent chin-strokey articles about feminism, neither of which, incidentally, came from the strawmen of daft right-wing tabloids but two ostensibly liberal and ostensibly respected British publications. 4It never ceases to amaze me how much of a meal people still make about the definition of gender equality. I’d have thought that the clue was in the name, but then I always was very literal-minded.

The ubiquitous clichés about life in general, and what one needs to do in order for it to be a fulfilling one – again, going by my personal experience – tend to impinge on one’s subconscious and fester during one’s twenties and thirties, bringing with them the four horsemen of the apocalypse: self-doubt, panic, insecurity and credulity. One knows when these have arrived because one finds oneself reading the Daily Mail website, Mail Online, and giving a toss about it.

But contrary to what a certain pirate claimed, one does not have to accept this, or insist that one is unaffected by them because to do otherwise would be a cop-out of some sort, and I swear I’m not trying to sell you anything. Well, other than this book and, seeing as you’re on the fourth page I’m assuming you’ve already bought it.