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When I was a student, my friends and I had a dartboard and a destructive amount of free time. Consequently, a favourite hobby – particularly after a few glasses of finest papsak – was to rip pictures of our most hated celebrities out of magazines, stick ‘em on the dartboard, and spray them with our arrows. Our aim wasn’t exactly world-class, so our hapless targets generally escaped the full voodoo treatment we intended.
Our victims were never chosen with any worthy justification. We didn’t have war-criminals up there. On the contrary, we had a parade of probably perfectly nice, almost exclusively female filmstars who had earned our displeasure for misdeeds ranging from “having an irritating face” to “just radiating bitch”.
I’m not proud of this. We were young and silly, and had not yet matured into the raging, militant, occasionally hypocritical feminists we are today. But I was thinking of our dartboard last weekend, when I read an almost full-page spread in the Sunday Times devoted to the urgent investigation of how Gwyneth Paltrow “became the world’s most divisive woman”.
The fact that an actress whose major failing appears to be “living too healthily” is now considered pretty much the globe’s worst person is, self-evidently, something that should make us all beat ourselves with thorny branches twice a day out of pure shame. Women 24 editor Lili Radloff considered what academics are calling ‘the Gwynnie problem’ in her column last week, and concluded that the issue may largely be one of jealousy.
But the matter intrigued me enough to carry out a small scientific study of my own. I asked 40 women of my acquaintance to tell me which celebrities they hated the most – both female and male, stressing that there need be no actual basis for this dislike. Only two listed Gwyneth Paltrow, suggesting that we South Africans like to swim upstream in the river of baseless hatred. Far more popular picks were Mariah Carey, Kristen Stewart, Natalie Portman, Kim Kardashian and Nicole Kidman.
The reasons they gave for their choices were, frankly, not the kind of justifications that would stand up in a court of law. “Chirpy Southern moonface”. “Sulky madam”. “Her nose is pointy”. “She thinks she is so edgy because she dated Ellen.” You get the idea.
Don’t misunderstand me: there is absolutely zero judgement from this corner. I hate Keira Knightley so much, for literally no good reason, that I want to punch my TV screen in every time I get to that bit in ‘Love Actually’ where her character simpers: “I look quite pretty, actually”. Even thinking about it now is making my eyes mist up with blood.
But the weird thing was that when it came to their most reviled male celebrities, they had – objectively speaking – some perfectly solid picks. Almost every one of them named some combination of Chris Brown, Tom Cruise, and Mel Gibson. Because the first one is a woman-basher, the second is a creepy Scientologist, and the third is a genocidal bigot. Those are totally good reasons to dislike someone! I can almost see the UN nodding approvingly.
Why don’t we generally view male celebrities through the same lens? I cannot imagine for a second that a mainstream newspaper would print a full-page rundown of the many and varied ways in which Ashton Kutcher gets on our collective tits. Sure, the likes of Kanye West get slated, but the West-bashing only really picked up steam when he shackled himself to a despised woman. Women, we need to check ourselves. Hate equally – or do it quietly. It’s what Gwynnie would want.
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Our victims were never chosen with any worthy justification. We didn’t have war-criminals up there. On the contrary, we had a parade of probably perfectly nice, almost exclusively female filmstars who had earned our displeasure for misdeeds ranging from “having an irritating face” to “just radiating bitch”.
I’m not proud of this. We were young and silly, and had not yet matured into the raging, militant, occasionally hypocritical feminists we are today. But I was thinking of our dartboard last weekend, when I read an almost full-page spread in the Sunday Times devoted to the urgent investigation of how Gwyneth Paltrow “became the world’s most divisive woman”.
The fact that an actress whose major failing appears to be “living too healthily” is now considered pretty much the globe’s worst person is, self-evidently, something that should make us all beat ourselves with thorny branches twice a day out of pure shame. Women 24 editor Lili Radloff considered what academics are calling ‘the Gwynnie problem’ in her column last week, and concluded that the issue may largely be one of jealousy.
But the matter intrigued me enough to carry out a small scientific study of my own. I asked 40 women of my acquaintance to tell me which celebrities they hated the most – both female and male, stressing that there need be no actual basis for this dislike. Only two listed Gwyneth Paltrow, suggesting that we South Africans like to swim upstream in the river of baseless hatred. Far more popular picks were Mariah Carey, Kristen Stewart, Natalie Portman, Kim Kardashian and Nicole Kidman.
The reasons they gave for their choices were, frankly, not the kind of justifications that would stand up in a court of law. “Chirpy Southern moonface”. “Sulky madam”. “Her nose is pointy”. “She thinks she is so edgy because she dated Ellen.” You get the idea.
Don’t misunderstand me: there is absolutely zero judgement from this corner. I hate Keira Knightley so much, for literally no good reason, that I want to punch my TV screen in every time I get to that bit in ‘Love Actually’ where her character simpers: “I look quite pretty, actually”. Even thinking about it now is making my eyes mist up with blood.
But the weird thing was that when it came to their most reviled male celebrities, they had – objectively speaking – some perfectly solid picks. Almost every one of them named some combination of Chris Brown, Tom Cruise, and Mel Gibson. Because the first one is a woman-basher, the second is a creepy Scientologist, and the third is a genocidal bigot. Those are totally good reasons to dislike someone! I can almost see the UN nodding approvingly.
Why don’t we generally view male celebrities through the same lens? I cannot imagine for a second that a mainstream newspaper would print a full-page rundown of the many and varied ways in which Ashton Kutcher gets on our collective tits. Sure, the likes of Kanye West get slated, but the West-bashing only really picked up steam when he shackled himself to a despised woman. Women, we need to check ourselves. Hate equally – or do it quietly. It’s what Gwynnie would want.
Follow Rebecca on Twitter
