Rosamund Pike showed up at the Golden Globes last week wearing a virtually backless, strappy white dress by Vera Wang. Pike, who was nominated for her role in Gone Girl, had given birth to a baby five weeks prior. So what? Who cares? Well, apparently loads of people did because, if they weren't sighing over the less-than-perfect fit of the dress, they were discussing how 'brave' and 'daring' she was to wear it. Something about showing a body so soon after baby and breast-feeding made it a high risk situation.
One writer wondered if people had forgotten the meaning of the word. 'Calling a gorgeous actress "brave" for doing nothing but daring to drape a dress over a body that just made a baby makes the rest of us feel like crap.'
It's not the first time a female celebrity has been served with this most auspicious of backhanded compliments. Creator and star of Girls, Lena Dunham, has often been described as brave, mostly for showing a lot of her normal body sans clothes on television. But as Dunham has pointed out, being naked onscreen is not her 'particular zone of terror'. More recently, Lisa Kudrow unpacked what being called a 'brave actress' meant to her, saying 'I had no idea I'd put myself in harm's way.'
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So this is where we are in 2015: a woman is brave for embodying anything resembling normalcy.
Well, I'd love to shout at everyone for their reactive, narrow thinking and general stupidity but, at the risk of sounding cynical, I think that the slightly awkward praise for bravery is not altogether misplaced.
As author and academic Roxanne Gay told Salon on Wednesday,
'We ... criticise famous women who spend their entire lives crafting and sculpting their bodies into perfection and that's still not good enough.'
I'll give you an example. Gwyneth Paltrow turned up on Jimmy Fallon the other day wearing a jumpsuit and spanx. The woman who popularised juice cleanses and manic exercise regimes; who is in possession of possibly the longest, leanest limbs in showbiz, was shot down for wearing an allegedly unflattering outfit, even though she had on control underwear. Forgive me, but I'm in shock about this so I'm going to repeat myself: Gwyneth Paltrow wears control underwear.
Criticising a female celebrity's body and what she puts on it is not a sub-genre of the entertainment game - it is the game. 'Best and Worst Dressed' at award shows are really just fantasy football leagues for pop culture obsessives, (guilty). We love to evaluate, to dissect and yes, tear down these women in the name of 'good taste' and 'fashion'. We're watching and waiting and sniffing for a perceived fall from grace so that we may turn our internalised fat-hatred outward and focus the harsh lamp of body dissatisfaction onto a woman who we believe is pretty enough to deserve our ire.
But what if she's not? What if she's as normal as we are? Well, then it's stacks on! How dare a woman who is not subscribing to an impossible ideal garner attention and awards! Even curvy women know the rules - always dress for your 'body type', talk about your 'workout routine' a lot. And make sure your curves are in all the right places.
If this all seems like an over-dramatisation, consider the fact that on the night Dunham was nominated for two Golden Globes, she deleted her twitter account from her phone. That might give you an idea of the level of abuse she was exposed to just for showing up.
I know that these ladies are not struggling to survive in warring nations or refugee camps; I know they are not dismantling bombs for a living.
But is bravery limited to grand acts? Can't it also be found in the everyday, especially when you exist - and dare to create - in a space that is systemically, brutally, consistently cruel to women? Oh! But there are such great roles out there for the ladies! Thank you, Russell Crowe. But in order to get those roles the ladies must adhere very closely to a certain set of rules that in almost every other arena, are considered ridiculously regressive. Like dressing a certain way in public.
Oscar campaigns are now at a level akin to electoral campaigns. They don't depend on how good the movie is; they depend on perception. An average of $10 million is spent just on the promotion of a movie. (Double what it was two years ago). Part of the promotion includes how the only cast member nominated - that would be Rosamund Pike, who just scored an Oscar nod - dresses. It shouldn't matter what a woman wears, baby or not. But it does. And to dare to go outside the norm when the norm is stiflingly narrow and millions of dollars are riding on you and hundreds of millions of people are looking at you and you still want to make a living? And stay half-way sane? ... Yeah, I'm going to call it brave.
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