The Nicole Bashing Has To Stop. Apparently.

I have been thinking about this for a while in the way I do before I write a column. It's been slow cooking. And some of the comments from TheRealSydney and Temmy among others about the Nicole-On-David-Letterman post below have drawn attention to the issue of Nicole Bashing.
Guilty. So guilty.
And I struggle with this. Coco at the moment is all about 'hate'.
"I HATE this show!"
"I HATE chops!"
"I HATE Luca!"
"I HATE brushing my hair!"
And I'm all 'We don't hate, darling. Hate is a very strong word. Let's think of another way to say it." She's usually wandered off by this point but I still make that speech on a regular basis.
I'm trying to hate less in my own life even though I am horribly judgemental. It is not my best quality and would not make me a good Buddhist were I wishing to become one.
BUT.
There's Nicole. Why does she inspire such anger in me?

I have thought so long and hard about that and I think the answer is that she's not real. Why do I care if she has surgery? I don't. But I care when she says "I only use sunscreen and I've never done anything to my face." I think that any woman who is not honest about herself does a great disservice to other women. That's why I'm so against re-touching and pretending you don't have a nanny and lying about surgery and lying about not exercising and lying about how you get pregnant etc etc etc.

And no, I'm not aiming all those accusations at Nicole – I want to move past that – but rather at every high profile woman who pretends it's easy and effortless WHEN IT ISN'T.
Because it makes me feel old and ugly and like a failure. Perhaps that's my problem. Clearly it's not theirs.

For me, it's not a jealousy thing. Or envy. More power to any celebrity who is beautiful and successful and talented and rich and happy and married to Brad Pitt. Ahem. Or whoever.

For me? It's a fake thing. And Nicole – who I am sure is a lovely, kind, talented, caring person – lost me when she started looking fake and lying about it. I think she was beautiful before. I think she was talented before. I think she's still talented although the fake thing distracts me madly from that talent.

Still. Hate is a strong word and I don't want to be angry about something that has nothing to do with me. I also don't want this blog to become about bashing anyone. Except Sam Newman.

There was an interesting article in the Times a while back about which celebrities inspire hate in other women……

Think of Keira Knightley. Now, what are you getting? Pretty in The Duchess?
Ravishing in that green Atonement dress? Nope? Didn’t think so. Because, if
you are like 90% of the female population, you thought of Keira Knightley
and went straight to irritation, even hate. “Ugh! I can’t stand Keira,” is
the customary reaction. It’s so common, in fact, that even Keira has spoken
about her reputation for bringing women together in bonding bile-fests.
“Well, I’m doing a good thing for women all over the country, then,” she
said this summer. “I think that’s a very positive thing.”

….

“It’s all about insecurity,” reckons the PR guru Max Clifford. “You get a
pretty girl, and the women will say, ‘Look at the size of her bum.’ It’s
getting worse, because it’s increasingly difficult to be a woman these days
— there are so many more opportunities for self-improvement, and the more
pressure women feel, the nastier it gets.”

The media has to take some of the blame, with gossip magazines encouraging us
to focus on women’s looks, bodies and clothes, rather than on the attributes
we should be celebrating, such as kindness and wit. “Feminism provided the
culture to admire women for their qualities, not their visual appearance,”
says the psychologist Jacqui Marson. “Now the whole celebrity-magazine
culture has given us permission to direct our gaze at women’s minute
physical flaws and choices, and to pick them apart. There has been a big
shift, and the feeling of sisterhood we used to have doesn’t exist any
more.”

So who are the sort of women who find themselves in the firing line? Maureen
Rice, the editor of Psychologies magazine, whose recent cover stars include
Marcia Cross, Julianne Moore and Jerry Hall (all women we love), claims
there is a definite checklist of do’s and don’ts. “We don’t like it if women
have success very easily. We like talent, tenacity, savvy, a woman who has
earned it. And we like a journey — women who have been through the mill and
back.” This element of struggle is the key. We can celebrate beauty and
success, but only if it has been hard won. “Look at Victoria Beckham. She
has been hated, and recently won us back, because we love a woman who gets
knocked down and keeps on getting back up. The problem with Keira is it all
looks too easy. Where is the suffering? Where is the implicit recognition
that she owes it to us?”

You can read the rest here… then come back and tell me which celebs make you angry and why……also, who do you love?