The recent Martin Amis attack on Katie Price seemed bizarre to most observers; not least because any fiction bearing her name cannot possibly sell to anyone who’d ever contemplate buying a novel with even the most modest literary pretensions. On the contrary, it seems likely that a high proportion of her readership aren’t even regular novel-readers at all; which would seem to suggest that her success shouldn’t concern those in the literary mainstream.
Like a lot of the books in the ‘chick lit’ category in which ‘her’ novels are presumably marketed, one would expect it to be mindless tosh, though; and there’s no reason to lose sight of that, just because Amis’s comments sounded misogynistic to some. There’s nothing commendable in peddling crap; simply because, for the celebrity, it’s another area in which they can effortlessly enrich themselves; while for the publisher, the cachet a celebrity’s name gives that tosh (and, in this case, all the sad aspirations with which that name is freighted for so many of her female fans, too) makes it possible to do so for a commercial return. It isn’t exactly enriching our culture, is it?
What’s more, it does seem likely that, once publishers have invested vast sums by way of an advance in order to secure a contract with a celebrity – and that includes all the tv gardeners and stand-up comics who can’t write novels – then their energies, resources, time and staff are bound to be aimed at recouping that outlay, at the expense of other projects. It may make more sense, commercially, to put all your commissioning costs into one celebrity novel, rather than, say, one hundred promising novels by new writers – and it’s the right of a capitalist enterprise to do so, (though they equally often come a cropper) – but our literary life is likely to be all the poorer for it. And Martin Amis, both as an established part of that literary life, who’s going to get his voice heard on this point – and as head of a creative writing course who has a role in nurturing new writers - not only has every right, but perhaps also a duty, to say so.
Where Martin Amis missed the point – and where the claims of misogyny arose, pushing the buttons of every other female columnist – was that he presumably thought Ms Price was popular with men, by virtue of her physical attributes. If newspaper reports of his comments are to be believed, he then struggled, as man, to account for this popularity; which he took to be the basis of her book sales. While it’s laughable to watch these liberal, intellectual women writers launch themselves, like a pack of hyenas on a tired (literary) lion, in the defence of an irritating, talentless chav, they’re at least up-to-date enough to know that Katie Price’s present appeal is to women. Otherwise, of course, she wouldn’t be any use to an unscrupulous publisher: the men whose enthusiasm for her physical assets started her career wouldn’t buy many novels, now as then.
She might be a ghastly individual in every way, but Katie Price’s attractiveness was never entirely smoke and mirrors – with or without cosmetic enhancement. It wasn’t a middle-class attractiveness and it wouldn’t necessarily have made her a fortune in a different society or different era; but to a vast body of contemporary male taste, it really was a shapely and significant chest, her face really was quite pretty, and so on. But that was then: youth is everything in glamour modelling; what is interesting about Ms Price is her longevity in the spotlight. Her attributes weren’t so very exceptional: there is generally a newer model, who can match and update them. The much more important aspect of the Price phenomenon is, of course, what goes on in Katie’s head. It’s her savvy, her clever management of her own career, her undoubted skills at self-promotion, which have served her so well – enabling her not only to survive the transience of glamour modelling, but also to successfully manipulate a celebrity culture which can be cruel and fickle, and which has taken up and abandoned less capable contenders for its attentions. In short, it’s her brain and not her bust, which is the most important asset she has going for her (witness her latest coup – a record pay-out for a reappearance on I’m a Celebrity…..,).
It’s worth making this point – one which, oddly, the female commentators didn’t seem to make – because younger women who emulate her don’t understand it. For older women fans who buy her books, her lack of real beauty or real talent is, in a sense, a plus: they see one of themselves, who has come from a background without advantage or education, struggled with relationship break-ups, the extra demands of having a disabled child, and with being a single mother; and has nevertheless transformed herself, and her fortunes, from ordinary to glamorous.
And yet, it’s a workaday glamour, at that. They don’t want someone like Catherine Zeta-Jones as a model, for example: another woman who doubtless has admirable physical assets, also from a parochial, provincial background, who has transformed her fortunes. No - because Ms Zeta-Jones really is drop-dead gorgeous, rather than looking like a drag queen, and because she can act – and they can’t aspire to either. Ms Zeta-Jones has married Hollywood royalty, wears haute couture (with, occasionally, predictably outré results), holidays on a traditional Majorcan estate. This is all too lofty to appeal. Ms Price can’t do anything much, other than talk about herself. She dates men less successful and less intelligent than herself, still looks as though she buys her clothes at New Look, and holidays in Marbella, like her fans. And because it’s about transformation, the more silicone, make-up, hair extensions, tanning parlours and heels that are involved, the better - they wouldn’t want her perfect!
The unfortunate aspect of this - the real problem, if you like, with a phenomenon like Katie Price and the celebrity culture of which she’s a part - is that some girls and younger women don’t understand that her best asset is inside her head. Nor do they appreciate that because she’s a sharp operator, she’s transformed herself into a ‘success’, despite her imperfections and not-inconsiderable limitations. Far too many teenage girls now contemplate cosmetic surgery (four in ten, apparently), citing pressure from celebrities; wanting a magical short-cut to the self-confidence and sex-appeal they associate with them – and, more importantly, the escapist glamour which they believe goes with it. And it now transpires that many of them – even as young as 11 – are putting their health at risk in tanning salons (a higher number in poor areas, surprise, surprise). Unfortunately, they’re admiring women in their prime, with a decade’s career management behind them, a decade’s grooming, primping and dentistry (not to mention the cosmetic surgery), a decade’s gym work-outs and dieting, with the resources of personal trainers, make-up artists and unlimited clothes budgets, for whom looking good is a full time job. And they’re doing so from the vantage-point of puberty and adolescence, when so many girls are notoriously beset by weight and hormonal changes, skin disorders and lack of confidence, leading to poor self-image.
Funnily enough, it’s Martin Amis who has the answer for them. In his 1984 novel Money, his unreliable first-person narrator, John Self, says of his girlfriend:
“Selina, she’s like a girl in a men’s magazine. She probably is a girl in a men’s magazine: there are so many these days, it’s hard to keep tabs on them all. Normal girls, they aren’t like the girls in pornographic magazines. Here’s a little-known fact: the girls in the pornographic magazines aren’t like the girls in the pornographic magazines, either. That’s the thing about pornography, that’s the thing about men – they’re always giving you the wrong ideas about women. No girls are like the girls in the men’s magazines, not even Selina, not even the girls in the men’s magazines. I’ve checked out one or two of them and I know. It transpires that everyone has their human shape, their human form. But try telling pornography that. Try telling men.”
This is what the teenagers who idolise celebrities need to be told: that “no girls are like the girls in the men’s magazines”..........; “not even the girls in the men’s magazines.”
Like a lot of the books in the ‘chick lit’ category in which ‘her’ novels are presumably marketed, one would expect it to be mindless tosh, though; and there’s no reason to lose sight of that, just because Amis’s comments sounded misogynistic to some. There’s nothing commendable in peddling crap; simply because, for the celebrity, it’s another area in which they can effortlessly enrich themselves; while for the publisher, the cachet a celebrity’s name gives that tosh (and, in this case, all the sad aspirations with which that name is freighted for so many of her female fans, too) makes it possible to do so for a commercial return. It isn’t exactly enriching our culture, is it?
What’s more, it does seem likely that, once publishers have invested vast sums by way of an advance in order to secure a contract with a celebrity – and that includes all the tv gardeners and stand-up comics who can’t write novels – then their energies, resources, time and staff are bound to be aimed at recouping that outlay, at the expense of other projects. It may make more sense, commercially, to put all your commissioning costs into one celebrity novel, rather than, say, one hundred promising novels by new writers – and it’s the right of a capitalist enterprise to do so, (though they equally often come a cropper) – but our literary life is likely to be all the poorer for it. And Martin Amis, both as an established part of that literary life, who’s going to get his voice heard on this point – and as head of a creative writing course who has a role in nurturing new writers - not only has every right, but perhaps also a duty, to say so.
Where Martin Amis missed the point – and where the claims of misogyny arose, pushing the buttons of every other female columnist – was that he presumably thought Ms Price was popular with men, by virtue of her physical attributes. If newspaper reports of his comments are to be believed, he then struggled, as man, to account for this popularity; which he took to be the basis of her book sales. While it’s laughable to watch these liberal, intellectual women writers launch themselves, like a pack of hyenas on a tired (literary) lion, in the defence of an irritating, talentless chav, they’re at least up-to-date enough to know that Katie Price’s present appeal is to women. Otherwise, of course, she wouldn’t be any use to an unscrupulous publisher: the men whose enthusiasm for her physical assets started her career wouldn’t buy many novels, now as then.
She might be a ghastly individual in every way, but Katie Price’s attractiveness was never entirely smoke and mirrors – with or without cosmetic enhancement. It wasn’t a middle-class attractiveness and it wouldn’t necessarily have made her a fortune in a different society or different era; but to a vast body of contemporary male taste, it really was a shapely and significant chest, her face really was quite pretty, and so on. But that was then: youth is everything in glamour modelling; what is interesting about Ms Price is her longevity in the spotlight. Her attributes weren’t so very exceptional: there is generally a newer model, who can match and update them. The much more important aspect of the Price phenomenon is, of course, what goes on in Katie’s head. It’s her savvy, her clever management of her own career, her undoubted skills at self-promotion, which have served her so well – enabling her not only to survive the transience of glamour modelling, but also to successfully manipulate a celebrity culture which can be cruel and fickle, and which has taken up and abandoned less capable contenders for its attentions. In short, it’s her brain and not her bust, which is the most important asset she has going for her (witness her latest coup – a record pay-out for a reappearance on I’m a Celebrity…..,).
It’s worth making this point – one which, oddly, the female commentators didn’t seem to make – because younger women who emulate her don’t understand it. For older women fans who buy her books, her lack of real beauty or real talent is, in a sense, a plus: they see one of themselves, who has come from a background without advantage or education, struggled with relationship break-ups, the extra demands of having a disabled child, and with being a single mother; and has nevertheless transformed herself, and her fortunes, from ordinary to glamorous.
And yet, it’s a workaday glamour, at that. They don’t want someone like Catherine Zeta-Jones as a model, for example: another woman who doubtless has admirable physical assets, also from a parochial, provincial background, who has transformed her fortunes. No - because Ms Zeta-Jones really is drop-dead gorgeous, rather than looking like a drag queen, and because she can act – and they can’t aspire to either. Ms Zeta-Jones has married Hollywood royalty, wears haute couture (with, occasionally, predictably outré results), holidays on a traditional Majorcan estate. This is all too lofty to appeal. Ms Price can’t do anything much, other than talk about herself. She dates men less successful and less intelligent than herself, still looks as though she buys her clothes at New Look, and holidays in Marbella, like her fans. And because it’s about transformation, the more silicone, make-up, hair extensions, tanning parlours and heels that are involved, the better - they wouldn’t want her perfect!
The unfortunate aspect of this - the real problem, if you like, with a phenomenon like Katie Price and the celebrity culture of which she’s a part - is that some girls and younger women don’t understand that her best asset is inside her head. Nor do they appreciate that because she’s a sharp operator, she’s transformed herself into a ‘success’, despite her imperfections and not-inconsiderable limitations. Far too many teenage girls now contemplate cosmetic surgery (four in ten, apparently), citing pressure from celebrities; wanting a magical short-cut to the self-confidence and sex-appeal they associate with them – and, more importantly, the escapist glamour which they believe goes with it. And it now transpires that many of them – even as young as 11 – are putting their health at risk in tanning salons (a higher number in poor areas, surprise, surprise). Unfortunately, they’re admiring women in their prime, with a decade’s career management behind them, a decade’s grooming, primping and dentistry (not to mention the cosmetic surgery), a decade’s gym work-outs and dieting, with the resources of personal trainers, make-up artists and unlimited clothes budgets, for whom looking good is a full time job. And they’re doing so from the vantage-point of puberty and adolescence, when so many girls are notoriously beset by weight and hormonal changes, skin disorders and lack of confidence, leading to poor self-image.
Funnily enough, it’s Martin Amis who has the answer for them. In his 1984 novel Money, his unreliable first-person narrator, John Self, says of his girlfriend:
“Selina, she’s like a girl in a men’s magazine. She probably is a girl in a men’s magazine: there are so many these days, it’s hard to keep tabs on them all. Normal girls, they aren’t like the girls in pornographic magazines. Here’s a little-known fact: the girls in the pornographic magazines aren’t like the girls in the pornographic magazines, either. That’s the thing about pornography, that’s the thing about men – they’re always giving you the wrong ideas about women. No girls are like the girls in the men’s magazines, not even Selina, not even the girls in the men’s magazines. I’ve checked out one or two of them and I know. It transpires that everyone has their human shape, their human form. But try telling pornography that. Try telling men.”
This is what the teenagers who idolise celebrities need to be told: that “no girls are like the girls in the men’s magazines”..........; “not even the girls in the men’s magazines.”
