It’s a tricky time to be a man writing about women. The Mistress America star Lola Kirke objected last week to the “glib” terms in which she was described by Anthony Lane, film critic of the New Yorker, in his review of her movie Gemini. “To deem unflattering the ‘big jeans’ and ‘baggy grey top’ I wear throughout the film is to suggest a preference for heroines in more tight-fitting clothes,” she wrote. “We need to see female characters be powerful and beautiful in ways that don’t rely on outdated representations of women.”
Her complaint is likely to prompt male writers to mentally scour their archives for those instances when they made similar judgements in ink. Evocative description is what writers do. Where it errs is in introducing notes of arbitration or admonishment, as Lane did. To say Kirke’s costumes are “hardly flattering” seems implicitly to ask: “Why hide that fetching, shapely figure where I can’t see it?”
The subject of how men write about women has also been raised by the singer Tracey Thorn, who reflected in the New Statesman recently on more than 35 years of being described by male journalists as “not conventionally pretty”, “curiously attractive” and “quirky”. Naturally, the first thing I did after reading it was to check my own review of an Everything But the Girl concert from 1997. Fortunately there were no physical descriptions. I have to say I’m surprised. All writers have professional embarrassments that spring starkly back into the memory when they wake at 3am, and mine come exclusively from a period in my mid-20s when I sometimes described celebrities in unflattering terms, striving for a comic effect that I realise now was merely virulent.
Writing about a Radiohead gig in 1995, I praised the musicianship, yet still felt it necessary to say that Thom Yorke had “a voice, if not a face, that you’d like to wake up beside”. Reviewing the bubblegum-pop trio Hanson, I insulted the older of the three brothers, Isaac, by suggesting that while his siblings could pass for the love-children of Jean Shrimpton and Joe Dallesandro, his own face indicated that John Merrick’s genes had got a look-in. No editor ever said: “Too much.” And I kidded myself that the nature of pop, its reliance on image and physical perfection, meant a musician’s appearance was fair game. But it doesn’t wash.
Like any form of bullying, I suspect the reason for my youthful insensitivity lay partly in insecurity: trying to distract from my own physical shortcomings, real or perceived, by drawing attention to unconventional qualities in others. Did I dislike my appearance so much that I had to compare an actual living person to the Elephant Man? Perhaps I did.
So it isn’t exclusively a men-describing-women problem, though there is certainly that element to it, as Kirke and Thorn are right to point out. It is also a people-judging-people one. My words released into the atmosphere a few drops of concentrated toxicity. They made discourse, and the world, a slightly uglier place.
Mocking physical characteristics denies not just complexity or nuance but also humanity. What the best writers can do is capture a physical essence without any corresponding disparagement. It has been 20 years since the film critic Charlotte O’Sullivan described Jodie Foster as looking always “as if she is being attacked by a flock of invisible birds” and yet that image endures, evoking perfectly Foster’s taut and hunted air.
I was taken to task online last year for pointing out that when the actor Katherine Waterston folded “her long legs” under her chair, she looked “exaggeratedly S-shaped.” Was that hurtful, sexist or mean? I did genuinely notice that she formed an S-shape, and wanted to convey that. As a gay man I may be guiltier of objectifying men. Was I wrong to call Chadwick Boseman “molten-eyed” when I interviewed him recently, or to notice that Armie Hammer was “cartoonishly handsome, with a big square slab of jaw”? Maybe I did go too far in my appreciation of the actor Larenz Tate. He had, I said: “an enviable pair of sleepy, inviting eyes that are not so much ‘come-to-bed’ as ‘come back to bed, I haven’t finished with you yet.’” What can I say? Reader, I would have married him.
