Having finally got round to reading Caitlin Moran’s ‘How to Be A Woman’, it was with both expert timing and disbelief that I watched Mantel-gate unfold across my Twitter feed earlier this week, for the mis-quoted remarks she had made about Kate Middleton in a speech and article for the London Review of Books. Expert timing as I was reading Moran's advice that when faced with some of the more ridiculous aspects of the modern female experience, the best thing to do is point a finger at them and laugh at their absurdity. So – I am – ha ha!
In many ways though, it's hard to keep that perma-grin on when it comes to the portrayal of women in the media. Short aside here: I come from an academic background. It’s been drilled into me to fully understand the nuances of an argument before I make comment on them. I also studied the topic of ‘Royal Bodies’ for my MA and it’s a particular topic of fascination. (In a very sad way the book Renaissance Bodies changed my life. I am easily pleased. Sometimes.) So this particular issue, and the outraged responses from the media, politicians and the public (who, in the main hadn’t actually read the article,) has got my blood boiling in a way that another story might not have.
For indeed, the point that Mantel was making was that throughout history, Queen’s bodies have been reduced to their constituent parts as ‘breeding machines,’ the most important aspect of them being their ability to bear children. As Moran points out, this idea still perpetuates, that if a woman hasn’t had children, she is somehow less of a woman. (Of course, meaning that trans-gendered women don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell at being ‘real women.’) The fact that the story which ran denouncing Mantel for her ‘outrageous comments’ was accompanied by images of Kate Middleton’s nascent ‘baby bump’ only served to highlight the hideous irony of the entire article.
The public’s propriety over Kate Middleton’s body as communicated through the media is strangely schizophrenic. Kate, Mantel is saying, appears to be the ideal Queen Consort because she shows very few aspects of her true personality, and we simply watch her body as it shrinks for her wedding and then grows during her pregnancy. As Mantel points out, Diana could not contain all her emotions in the same way, and she suffered for it both in the media and in her personal life. However, the tabloid’s desire to expose Kate in a variety of highly invasive pictures when she is ostensibly ‘off-duty’ – topless, or in her bikini – is at odds with the focus on her pregnancy – ‘bump watch’ – which readers have been subjected to ever since the wedding.
This clash of the 'Madonna and the Whore' stereotyping which is so prevalent in depictions of the women in the Daily Mail has an oddly bright light shone on it when it comes to the depiction of Middleton. Tellingly, it is Kate (and Clarence House’s) rejection of these sexualized depictions, rather than the rabid speculation about her pregnancy that indicates that Mantel’s hypothesis is spot on.
We could dismiss this as another Daily Mail led scandal gone mad, for, as the fabulous Esther Walker pointed out after suffering her own personal backlash after getting carried away writing for them, ‘nobody actually means what they write for the Daily Mail. Apart from Melanie Phillips.’ But these media-storms involving women don’t happen once in a blue moon; they are a daily occurrence.
As Gaby Hinsliff pointed out after Cameron’s intervention into the story ‘the PM's officially weighed into a row over a mangled version of what a novelist said about Kate's looks. I'm not making this up.’ When the Prime Minister weighs into a furore entirely created by a newspaper by deliberately mis-reading a wonderfully written article descrying media manipulation of a woman’s image, it feels, to me, as if the whole world has officially gone slightly mad.
What an article such as this does is perpetuate a stereotype of women squabbling amongst themselves about their looks, or petty jealousies. That this particular furore was created entirely by completely twisting Mantel’s sympathies towards Kate Middleton into an attack makes this particular spat all the sadder as a result. This, in its own way contributes to the continued grinding down of women by inventing arguments between two prominent figures to generate click-throughs on the Mail website so they can sell more advertising space.
Hannah Meltzer recently wrote for us about the online abuse suffered by Mary Beard, which was by turns violent, sexual and derogatory to her physical appearance. Mantel has been accused of jealousy towards Kate Middleton as can’t have children, and been denounced as 'needing her teeth sorting out' and 'fat' (her struggles with her appearence have been addressed by her movingly HERE.) The crime Mary Beard had committed? Expressing a nuanced, reasoned and academically sound argument on BBC's Question Time. Mantel’s crime? Expressing a nuanced, reasoned and academically sound argument to the audience at a London Review of Books event.
Whilst not wanting to appear alarmist, as Moran so eloquently outlined in ‘How To Be A Woman’, and start creating the idea that there is some woman-crushing illuminati lizard controlling the dissemination of the images of women, there is a definite move toward silencing women who express themselves by deliberate misquotation and highly threatening language to women’s physical weaknesses.
Beard has not taken this lying down, and has fought back against the internet trolls. What was really telling, and particularly sad about the whole situation, is that neither of the women involved, either Kate Middleton or Hilary Mantel, passed comment on the furore as it unfolded. In many ways, who can blame them if their words are going to be twisted, distorted and ridiculed – but how sad for allowing women’s voices to be heard. If the aim of the game was to silence women, reducing them to their body parts which are either ‘painfully thin’ or ‘morbidly obese,’ this particular media-storm was, sadly a resounding success.
Courtney Cooke commissions editorial for the Funny Women website and produces Funny Women's literary events. She is also a writer and blogger with a past life in politics and academia. If you have an idea for an editorial piece email her at editor@funnywomen.com
