GIVE ME A BREAK:WHY DO we enjoy seeing women as victims? Why are we so much less likely to empathise with victorious women? Every day, women's victimisation is presented to us for its entertainment value. Women have their lives dissected and analysed far more often than men do and, with a disturbing regularity, women even volunteer for it.
All you need is a troubled past, a broken marriage, a difficult parent, a bout with depression, a learning disabled child, or – best of all – a spell of being "victimised" by the media. Just wheel out your woes and no matter how sharp and ambitious you are, you can make yourself unthreatening by appearing like a victim. I'm thinking of Cheryl Cole, Madonna, Oprah Winfrey, Jordan, Victoria Beckham, Elizabeth Taylor, Princess Diana and even Britain's Queen Elizabeth in her famous annus horribilisspeech . . . the list of women willing to play Little Nell in exchange for positive publicity goes on and on.
And when women are perceived as the aggressors, rather than the victims, they tend to start singing like the murderesses in Chicago, "He done me wrong."
I mention Cheryl Cole not because she’s an icon like the others, but because she’d like to be. Dressed in bunny ears in a recent photospread and apparently naked but for a stretched-out jumper arranged to look like a straitjacket while she squats forlornly with a dazed expression against a wall in a padded room, I know I’m supposed to see “vulnerable, sexy”. What I see is a disturbing depiction of acceptable ambition. Cole is a fantasy woman whose photospread comes from weeks of high-concept discussions between agents, stylists and photographers. She is, to all intents and purposes, a doll that we’re playing dress-up with.
You remember playing dolls, probably, if you’re old enough to have been doing this with real Barbies and not on your toddler laptop. You would dress Barbie up, all the while talking her through her emotions at the time, “I’m going to meet Ken! What will I wear? Oh no, Ken was killed in a car crash! Where’s my funeral outfit? Argh . . .” And so on. As adult women we keep playing dolls, except that the dolls are real people and the media do the dressing up and provide the dialogue.
Women justify objectifying and analysing celebrity women for sport by saying, “She wanted to be famous, so she was asking for it.” This is only one step behind the psychopathic rapist and murderer saying, “She was flaunting herself. She was asking for it.” When women do become actual victims of crime – as opposed to victims of fires, floods and errant husbands – our manipulation of them gets worse.
The arrest of Roman Polanski, who faces extradition to the US on charges of raping a 13-year-old girl, is revictimising the victim, whose desire not to have the case heard has been ignored. This middle-aged bookkeeper with a family has quietly triumphed to live an unremarkable life. She has said that the original crime was horrible, but not as horrible as the media’s, and now the law’s, handling of it.
Huge amounts of media money will be made out of her if her case comes to court – there will be reconstructions, TV movies, even a big screen one, if Hollywood has the courage to expose itself. And through all of that, she will be seen only as a dress-up doll. Her feelings will be acknowledged only when the lawyers and the media choose to acknowledge them.
The irony, of course, is that Polanski himself was a victim of the dress-up doll attitude to women when psychopaths murdered his film star wife, Sharon Tate, who was only an object to them. Watching a Channel 4 documentary about Jaycee Lee, who was kidnapped at the age of 11 and held for 18 years by a presumed psychopath in California, I was once again struck by how this man behaved as though he was playing with dolls. And there I was, watching this documentary, projecting my own feelings and concerns on to Jaycee Lee, as though I was playing with dolls too. We’re all susceptible to it.
Models and actresses who pose in photoshoots in victim clothing with victim faces in order to appeal to us through their vulnerability are playing a dangerous game, reinforcing the view that being victimised is when women are at their truest. Why would any woman want to make a living out of that?
