Be Awesome by Hadley Freeman - an extract

BE AWESOME

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FOURTH ESTATE • London

Be Awesome

Modern Life for Modern Ladies

Hadley Freeman

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™

™

First published in Great Britain in 2013 byFourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers77–85 Fulham Palace Road

London W6 8JBwww.4thestate.co.uk

Copyright © Hadley Freeman 2013

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The right of Hadley Freeman to be identifi ed as the authorof this work has been asserted by him in accordancewith the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book isavailable from the British Library

ISBN 978-0-00-748569-7

‘The Drugs Don’t Work’ words and music by Richard Ashcroft © 1996, reproduced by permission of EMI Virgin Music Ltd, London W1 9LD

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For my awesome sister Nell

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‘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

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Contents

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

aka the introduction 1

The offi ce of magical thinking 9

A day in your life in Daily Mail headlines 19

Sex tips for smart ladies 22

Movies lie – damn it, woman, they lie! 46

What to expect when your friends are expecting 77

Talking about eating disorders without using a

single photo of Kate Moss 90

Every dating guide you’ll ever need 106

You don’t need Winona Ryder to tell you how

to live your life 117

But do you like him? 124

You’re never too old for Topshop 131

The ten commandments of being an

unannoying vegetarian 138

The Forwardthinkoriums 143

How to cheer up your friend who is depressed about

being single without lying to them, patronising

them or making them feel even worse 148

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Exercise – it’s just like sex! 161

How to read women’s magazines without wanting

to grow a penis 165

There will always be something wrong with your

body, which means nothing is wrong with

your body 178

Beyond the armpit: a ten-point (plus three addenda

and some posh little footnotes) guide to being

a modern-day feminist 189

When to listen to your friends, and when not to 230

Ten signs you are having a non-awesome date

(possibly autobiographical) 232

Ten awesome women (in no particular order) 234

Five awesome fi lms and fi ve very un-awesome fi lms 245

Ten awesome books 257

Acknowledgements 266

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

‘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 fi lm taught me. But, contrary to what the Dread

Pirate Roberts/Wesley* appears to advise in this scene, I have

never believed that one should just accept it.

The Nietzschean pirate was not wrong. Life is defi nitely

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

* Look, just see the movie, OK? Not only will the whole ‘Dread Pirate Roberts/Wesley’ thing make sense but your life will be immeasurably improved.

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Story* and, call me a crazy idealist, but I’d have thought that

by the twenty-fi rst 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 infl icting these on

themselves, almost as much as some of the aforementioned

exterior agencies are about infl icting 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*2 in 2011, suggesting that

secretly women love to be reduced to their physical

appearance and only pretend they don’t because they think

* A world in which any man prefers a limpid-eyed actress playing a jewellery-obsessed hooker in the dishonest (Truman Capote’s alter ego is, for some reason, rendered straight) and racist (Mickey Rooney plays a Japanese man – let us speak no more of it) to a fl ashing-eyed woman imperiously entrancing Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant is, by defi nition, disappointing.

*2 ‘In Favour of Dirty Jokes and Risqué Remarks’, Katie Roiphe, New York Times, 12 November 2011.


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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, specifi cally, the

defi nition 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


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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.* It never ceases to amaze me how much

of a meal people still make about the defi nition 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 fulfi lling 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 fi nds 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.

Instead, one needs to confront these stereotypes and

assumptions and then one can see their stupidity clearly.

Wait a minute, ‘one’? Who talks like that, other than David

Starkey? As I am (spoiler alert) not David Starkey, I shall,

briefl y, stop hiding behind the presumptuous ‘you’ and coy

‘one’ – ‘I’. Ta da! There is not a single word in this book that is

not directed at myself. All the lessons in this book are lessons

* ‘Is Feminism Dead?’, New Statesman, 27 November 2007 and ‘Is Feminism Relevant to 21st-Century Fiction’, Independent, 13 May 2011.


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I learned by falling fl at on my Semitic-nosed face. This has

been the way of my whole career. In the daylight hours – as

opposed to the evening ones in which the majority of this

book was written – I pretend to be a newspaper columnist

and a fashion writer, and at a conservative estimate, at least

70 per cent of my fashion articles have been written when

I’ve been wearing, at best, vaguely coordinated pyjamas, by

which I mean a ‘Vote Obama 2008!’ T-shirt (customised with

tea and Marmite stains), leggings and Ugg boots. It’s how

Anna Wintour edits Vogue, you know. Those who cannot do,

teach; those who cannot teach, teach gym; those who cannot

teach gym, write bossy essays on the subjects at which they so

consistently fail.

Few can understand why they believe or are doing

something in the moment of believing or doing. That

generally comes in the sentimentalised light of retrospect or

– more brutally if more usefully – if someone else shines a

shaming spotlight on it at the time. This brings me to the tale

of what happened when Erinsborough withered under the

pitiless gaze of Gallic scorn.

One afternoon when I was thirteen I signed up for the

French exchange programme at my school, presumably

having hit my head very hard in PE that morning. This brief

act of insanity resulted in some random French kid coming

to stay with me for two weeks and then I went to stay with

her for another two weeks. We were paired together purely by

our corresponding ages and, I strongly suspect, our shared

religion, or maybe it was just a coincidence that our schools

just happened to put together the only two Jewish girls in the

programme. Contrary to what our teachers perhaps

envisioned, this French girl, who I will call Fifi for no

defensible reason, and I did not do renditions of dance


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routines from Fiddler on the Roof and debate the fi ner points

of the Talmud while sitting round a campfi re made of

Chanukah candles. We hated one another as only two

teenagers who don’t speak one another’s language and are

forced to spend a solid month with one another can.

Yet while I returned from the experience with no greater

understanding of the perfect and imperfect tenses than I had

at the start, Fifi did teach me something else that had nothing

to do with linguistics. On her fi rst day, I brought Fifi to

school with me and, afterwards, being an extremely cool and

cutting-edge teenager, brought her directly home afterwards

so as not to miss even the opening notes of the theme song

for the essential daily viewing of Neighbours and Home and

Away. As I sat there on the sofa, bowl of grated cheese in my

lap (‘L’après école repas du choix,’ I explained to a nauseated-

looking Fifi ), mouth possibly a little slack with excitement at

the gripping storylines involving someone not paying for a

caravan in Summer Bay, and Madge and Harold going on a

hot date in Lou’s Place, I felt what would soon be a familiar

sensation: Fifi ’s disapproving eyes upon my face.

‘What is this?’ she asked in an accent I’m just about

resisting rendering phonetically.

‘Oh, they two are TV movies in Australia,’ is what I said in

French. Speaking one another’s language badly was how Fifi

and I communicated for the whole of the month, meaning

that we were not only never speaking the same language, we

were hardly ever speaking any language at all.

‘They are good?’

‘They super cool.’

‘They do not please me.’

‘OK. They please me.’

‘What stories they tell, please?’


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‘Much stories. This one, two old people eat dinner in an

expensive restaurant. Other, a person did not pay for a car.’

‘That sound not interesting. Why you watch?’

The reason I watched them was the reason I did pretty

much anything when I was thirteen: because all my peers did.

These shows were what everyone in class talked about at

school; I don’t think I ever even considered whether I liked

them any more than I’d ever considered whether I liked

water: they were a vital part of my existence, a part of my

survival. But at that moment, Fifi became the little boy

pointing out the royal nudity, the Australian soaps were the

naked emperor and I was the heretofore duped villager, and I

saw them for what they were: ridiculous pantomimes with

cardboard scenery that I spent fi ve hours a week watching. As

much as I’d like to say at this point that I promptly gave up

watching the Australian soaps and never again bought a

Neighbours Annual book, that would be a lie (come on –

we’re talking social ostracism in the fourth form here). But I

was at least now a little discomfi ted by it and it did make me

become more self-aware and questioning about why I did

things. So merci, Fifi . It almost makes up for the weekend you

made me spend at Eurodisney.

This, in a sense, is what I’ve tried to do with this book: be

like my French exchange and point out that some things do

not need to be. And as for the things that do unavoidably

need to be, I’ll suggest ways in which they can be rendered

more bearable.

Now, before you dive off from the steps of this

introduction and into the swimming pool of the book itself, I

must warn you of something. There is a fair amount of sex

talk in this book. Sorry, Mum and Dad/You’re welcome,

everyone else! This was not exactly my intention when I set


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out to write this book, and, in fact, I didn’t even notice it

until I reread the fi nished product and I’ll admit I was, if not

clutching a white lace handkerchief to my lipsticked mouth, a

touch surprised. My general attitude to sex is similar to the

one I have to exotic travel: happy to experience it as an

activity, somewhat less interested in reading about it.

But then, it was inevitable (maybe). My conscious

intention in writing this book was to address some of the

clichés and tropes that can, all too easily, shape one’s

expectations of life and oneself, and Lord knows there are a

lot of clichés about sex and how it should feature in a

woman’s life. So what I’m saying is this: I’ve written the

words ‘blow job’ a number of times here, but it’s purely for

professional purposes. And just to clarify, I don’t mean that

in a prostitutional way.

Seeing as I started this introduction with an eighties fi lm

quote, I’d like to end with one. It took Bill S. Preston esquire,

Ted Theodore Logan and Abraham Lincoln a journey

through time in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure to learn the

lesson that one should ‘Be excellent to one another.’ It’s not a

bad motto to live by, but I’d timorously like to suggest that

there is something else that is arguably more important. I

know a lot of women who are excellent to other people but

feel less than excellent in themselves. Anyway, ‘excellent’

suggests, to me, perfection. Fuck that. Be strong, be

confi dent, be good to yourself. Be awesome.


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