What female celebrity should I be looking towards to explain my life to me these days? Everyone, apparently
Excellent question, Everyone! There is always one woman who becomes the prism through which all concerns about modern women are refracted, whether it’s about sexuality, motherhood, social media or eating. I call her the Ur-Woman. A million years ago it was Madonna. Since then, it has been, among many others, Beyoncé, Gwyneth Paltrow and, most recently, Kim Kardashian, all of whom were at difference times meant to represent everything that is wrong with women today, but also all the pain that is foisted upon all women throughout all time. Now it is the turn of Serena Williams.
I realised Williams had become the Ur-Woman only after I inadvertently perpetuated her Ur-ness. A few weeks ago I wrote a column for this paper defending Williams’s frequent references to her daughter, for which I had noticed she was increasingly being criticised.
Now, I stand by every word of this column, and in fact if I was writing it now, I would go even further and say Williams is to be downright applauded for talking about how annoying her pregnancy was, how awful her childbirth was and how much she now misses her child as a working mother. Women, I say, as I climb up on my soapbox, on the one hand are told their lives have no meaning if they don’t have children, but on the other are expected to pretend to be utterly unaffected by the maternity experience. They should snap back into their jeans three minutes after giving birth, never mention how awful childbirth was lest they upset anyone around them, take as little time as possible off work for maternity leave, then never talk about their kid at workand basically pretend everything is entirely hunky dory, even though a child has been literally ripped out of their body and they are now in charge of keeping that child alive. So I say, and will always say, bravo to Williams for doing precisely the opposite of all that nonsense.
But then something weird happened. By the time my piece was published, people were still (obviously) talking about Williams, but they were now talking about other things: what her anger as a woman meant, what herbeing pals with Meghan Markle said about female friendship, whether she and her husband are too demonstrative in their affection to one another on social media. And that was when I realised that Williams doesn’t represent working women, or angry women, or women on social media – she represents ALL women. Every single one of us.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
