This is the weekly Amplify newsletter, where you can be inspired and challenged by the voices, opinions and insights of women at The Globe and Mail.
This week’s newsletter was written by Rebecca Tucker, deputy Arts editor at The Globe and Mail.
Last month, during comedian Jo Koy’s disastrous Golden Globe Awards hosting monologue, I found myself thinking about something I was surprised my brain had even bothered to catalogue: Seth MacFarlane’s Oscars-hosting stint, in 2013.
The memory came when Koy reduced Greta Gerwig’s Barbie – a movie with feminist bona fides – to a movie about “a plastic doll with big boobies.” That’s when I remembered that, 11 years ago, MacFarlane opened the Academy Awards with a song-and-dance number cataloguing the actresses who’d gone topless on film. The song was called We Saw Your Boobs.
Plus ça change, in other words.
The fact that Koy’s joke was more widely, immediately maligned than MacFarlane’s jingle could be read as proof that, in the #MeToo era, boob jokes that punch down carry little to no weight. Extended further, maybe it’s also proof that some sort of rehabilitation has taken place, and that the types of jokes once easily, readily and openly made at women’s expense are now verboten. But I’m not so sure.
I’ve been thinking about this as I read Canadian journalist and editor Lisa Whittington-Hill’s excellent Girls, Interrupted. Her book makes the same case I’m making here: that pop culture has not only failed women, but continues to do so.
Take, for instance, coverage of The Woman in Me, Britney Spears’s 2023 memoir. While Spears almost certainly wrote the book to correct the record on her wretched mistreatment by the media, coverage of the memoir echoed the misogynist feeding frenzy that dogged her during the early 2000s. Most headlines focused on salacious revelations and “bombshells,” zeroing in on clickable information and once again denying Spears the opportunity to control her own narrative – so much so that, just last week, Spears appeared to apologize for revealing she had an abortion during her relationship with Justin Timberlake, saying she was “deeply sorry” if she caused any offence, and noting how much she enjoyed Timberlake’s new song.
And Timberlake? During a performance just days later, he seemed to respond when he took the opportunity on stage to apologize to “absolutely” nobody.
Last year was a golden year for female celebrity memoirs: Aside from Spears, there were autobiographies from Pamela Anderson, Jada Pinkett Smith and Paris Hilton and, in most cases, coverage of these memoirs – meant to allow these women to set the record straight – took the chance instead to focus on their past missteps, largely involving their relationships with men.
In Girls, Interrupted, Whittington-Hill writes of how Demi Moore’s memoir Inside Out, released in 2019, was met with similar reactions to Spears’s, while Elton John’s autobiography, released just weeks later, contained explicit admissions of poor behaviour, but was reviewed with a much more forgiving critical lens. “If we examine the media’s reaction to female celebrity memoirs,” Whittington-Hill writes, “it becomes painfully clear that this redemption narrative is strictly reserved for the boys.”
The early months of the year are not, traditionally, the time when publishers release their hottest titles, so there aren’t many female-celebrity-penned memoirs on the docket for the coming weeks. What is on the docket, however, is the Super Bowl; while most sports fans’ eyes will be on the match itself, many of the rest of us will be watching the sidelines for Taylor Swift, there to support her boyfriend, Travis Kelce.
We’d do well to watch the headlines surrounding the event, too. Swift can date whoever she wants, unless you ask certain NFL fans, who view Swift’s sudden association with the game via her boyfriend as a distraction at best, or a ploy to attract more women to the sport at worst. And you can’t help but wonder if the same pundits wringing their hands over Swifties being invited to the Super Bowl party are the same folks who were aghast that Swift didn’t thank Kelce during either of her Grammys speeches last week.
Women, in other words, still can’t win. But there are small moments of hope – and, yes, true moments of redemption. At this year’s Grammys, singer Annie Lennox performed Sinead O’Connor’s song Nothing Compares 2 U during the show’s In Memoriam segment. O’Connor was famously torn down and had her career sabotaged after speaking out against the Catholic Church, most famously during a Saturday Night Live performance in 1992. Writing in The Globe after O’Connor’s death in July last year, Whittington-Hill noted that “Ms. O’Connor refused to play the role of the polite female singer, there to just otherwise shut up and perform, and for this she was punished. Her anger scared people, as female rage often does.”
At the end of her performance, Lennox called for a ceasefire in the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. Lennox is one of more than 300 artists who published a letter in October urging the U.S. Congress and President Joe Biden to call for an immediate ceasefire, but to me, the gesture also read as one of posthumous solidarity with O’Connor; a public demonstration of courage, without fear of reprisal. So long, I think, as women are working to uphold one another, the tide will continue to turn.
What else we’re thinking about:
The new Mr. & Mrs Smith is a stylish, updated take on the 2005 Brangelina film of the same name. But where that movie was all pomp and flash – and behind-the-scenes drama – the Prime Video version, starring Maya Erskine and Donald Glover, who co-created the series alongside Glover’s Atlanta collaborator Francesca Sloane, is a slick, understated meditation on (as writer Aparita Bhandari wrote in her review of the series for The Globe) what constitutes true intimacy.
Marianne
Marianne Kushmaniuk for The Globe and Mail
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