Jackie Danicki has been on a roll lately. Her last two posts about women and life—“Truman Capote and the rewards of the mundane and unexpected” and “The real meaning of ‘equality’, and why most feminists are anything but ‘pro-choice’“—have been gems. A lot of female newspaper columnists follow the “Polly Filler” template of complaining for five paragraphs about the terrible burdens of being a rich metropolitan mum with an even richer husband, imagining this somehow makes them representative of Women In Britain, and then demanding that the government do something about their “problems”. Jackie’s approach is more like: “Life is hard and involves unavoidable trade-offs; my life is mostly a good one; my happiness is neither the government’s responsibility nor its business; get over it.” I might even start buying a “serious” newspaper again if one of the broadsheets hired someone like her. Go, girl!
(Do you think I could get a column in The Guardian called something like “How the White Man gone done me wrong and that’s why He now owes me a livin'”? Hmm. Possibly not while Gary Younge is still working there.)
I’m hoping to get a Groan column where I can blather on witlessly about my misunderstandings of economics. I’m not sure whether it really is tough competition or whether there’s always room for one more.
(Georges, Zoe, Madeleine, Polly…..)
Or is it that I misunderstand it in the wrong way?
I know this isn’t entirely on topic here but where else am I going to get it off my chest …
Despite deep indifference to Kate Moss’s lifestyle and career prospects, I found myself reading a story about it on the BBC website. In it I found this quote:
“Fashion academic Jeremy Baker, of London Metropolitan University, told BBC Breakfast that Moss had every prospect of a successful future career if she repented.
“Kate Moss has got to suffer, throw herself to public opinion and plead for mercy and then she can rebuild her career,” he said. ”
You could really only get that sort of insight from a fashion academic.
The damage done to Kate Moss’s career by her being caught snorting coke is probably as devastating as that done to her boyfriend’s by reports of his own drug habit or L’il’ Kim’s by media coverage of her being jailed. I mean, whatever happened to Mick Jagger after his promising start in popular music in the 60s? What heights might he have reached if he had resisted the temptations of fame?
No, it’s different. For Pete Doherty (btw someone whose career I care about even less than his girfriend’s), Lil Kim or Sir Mick, drugs or jail enhance the rock star “mystique”. Unless she’s looking for contracts from, say, the Medellin Cartel, a model has to project a clean image. The equivalent for Doherty, Kim or Sir Mick (at the early stage of his career at least … he’s cast iron now whatever he does short of bothering children) would be, perhaps, to accept an honorary doctorate or assume the Presidency of the Royal Horticultural Society.