Poor Kylie. Poor lonely, brave, desperate again Kylie. And while we’re at it, poor Sadie, poor Patsy and, most gruesomely of all, poor Liza. All the lonely women! But let’s not get distracted here: Focus again on “brave” (Evening Standard), “miserable” (Daily Mail), “distraught” (Sun) Kylie — heck, everyone else is.
Never mind her insistence that all is peachy in her relationship with French actor Olivier Martinez and that she is unconcerned about “love rival” Angelina Jolie (who, anyway, has since been photographed with Uma Thurman’s husband, Ethan Hawke. Let’s all say it together: Poor Uma!). Nope, the verdict has been made: Poor Kylie.
I haven’t a clue what is going on chez Minogue and Martinez. Nor do I have the inside schtick on whether “stunning” Nicole Kidman was to blame for the end of Jude Law and “vulnerable” Sadie Frost’s marriage, an unfounded claim repeated so often that Kidman eventually sued the Daily Mail to shut it up.
But one thing’s for sure: After a week in which one tabloid made a handy cut-out-and-keep guide to “Lovelorn celebrities” (all female) and another has kept Minogue as a front page story despite her insistence that there is no story, the media sure do like their heartbroken women. Even Minogue’s posing for “saucy” photos was seen by one paper as a desperate “bid to keep her man”. (They were, alas, actually for a magazine shoot but, hey, it was a thought, right?)
Just as a woman’s age will be mentioned much higher in an article than a man’s, so will her relationship status.
When Renee Zellwegger was in London, there was not one interview in which she was not asked about how difficult she found it to be a single woman. Compare that with, say, Zellwegger’s ex-boyfriend, Jim Carrey, also on the recent publicity circuit, whose single status was not questioned once.
To get in a huff about the tabloids being a bit weird about women and sex is as pointless as wondering why Big Brother contestants are so inane. But their goggle-eyed determination to depict women as heartbroken and distraught this year indicates something more specific (and specifically annoying).
Interestingly, the snake-like temptresses Jolie and Kidman were themselves not so long ago cast in the role of lonely, brave, etc, women in the wake of their divorces, but have since been hastily re-assigned as temptresses after being photographed respectively at one too many basketball games and barbecues with members of the opposite sex. When it comes to recently single women, it seems, two pantomime-like fates await — lonely victim or calculating seductress. There are three intimations here. First, no matter how successful, wealthy or stupidly famous a woman is, the most important thing about her is whoever she is sleeping with. If she is single, this “failure” obliterates everything else; and, in fact, that “everything else” is just a time-filler as she waits around for the man.
Second, if a female celebrity dares to have - gasp! — more than one relationship in her life, she cuts a lonely Bridget Jones figure, haplessly looking for a man she can convince to marry her. It is a slight, and somehow more depressing, twist on the old truism that where a man is a playboy, a woman is a slut; in this instance a woman’s varied — “turbulent and complicated”, to use the tabloid parlance — love life is suggestive that she is a psychological mess (whereas others might see it as the woman simply not acting like a character in a Dickens adaptation and marrying the first person who helps her out of the carriage).
- Arab News Features 7 August 2003
