I hate you so much right now…
May 17, 2008 by Polly Styrene
I just love Amy Winehouse and the reason why is above - I don’t care how many drugs she does, or even if she hangs round with Pete Doherty (who should probably burn in hell, not least for giving cocaine to his cat), she is fabulously talented. However it seems that this is not a view I share with everyone. The BBC website recently reported on the most liked and most hated celebrities - who are as follows:
Most liked slebs:
Most hated slebs:
Now there’s a curious phenomenon here which even the BBC has spotted. Not only is Paul ‘try him now for crimes against humanity ‘ McCartney the most liked sleb, but all the most liked list are male and all but one of the most hated list are female.
There are several possible conclusions - the poll was conducted among a sample of clearly barmy people being the most obvious if they actually like McCartney. But even the BBC has spotted that it might actually be something to do with misogyny in the way these women are presented.
As the first commenter on the article points out, it is fairly irrational in any case to say you hate someone you have never met. What people hate is the media representations of these people. When I say I love Amy Winehouse, I mean I love her music. But Keith Richards has done as many drugs as Winehouse has over far longer periods, and is regarded as a national treasure, whereas the paparazzi hound every step Amy Winehouse takes, and her weight, drug consumption, mental health, relationships are endlessly dissected, everyone just laughs when Richards falls out of a tree. Is it any wonder Amy Winehouse slapped someone when every night out she has is like this…
The hate directed at Amy Winehouse just for the crime of being female, doing drugs and being hounded by the press is incredible - take this comment on you tube “I could just slap that discusting slutty druggy in the face! “. Ok comments on you tube not exactly the height of witty repartee in any case, but that is from the mild end of the misogyny…
If you put “Amy Winehouse” into the Daily Mail’s search engine you get over 2,600 articles. If anyone is genuinely concerned about her, (as the Male claims it is of course) and cares about her welfare, why not leave her the fuck alone and stop hounding her?
Heather Mills - no 1 hated female sleb, is probably harder to warm to due to having no discernible talent and complaining about having to travel with the little people on planes. But still she has suffered from the traditional labelling of ‘hysterical woman’ -
“Her emotional stances on press intrusion and the specifics of her divorce battle, not to mention her defiant drenching of McCartney’s lawyer, facilitates her categorisation as the traditional hysteric, with the resultant labelling of Mills as an attention seeker encountering established cultural prejudice concerning ‘unfeminine’ behaviour.”
The immediate assumption when Mills claimed that McCartney had been violent and abusive was that she must be lying - ok no evidence was produced of this, but why do we immediately assume it is impossible for a famous man to be violent?
There is a lot of other academic justification for why women make up the ‘hated’ figures in the BBC article,
“There has been a conspicuous trend in the last five years towards the production of negatively-valued women in the public sphere. People respond to the pleasures of hating these kinds of figures.
“There is incredible ambivalence in a post-feminist culture towards women in the public sphere.”
In a nutshell, despite years of equal opportunities, the media - and the people who watch and read - prefer the stay-at-home mother over a woman who lives her life in public, particularly one who is overtly ambitious or successful in making money. There is great satisfaction among many people in seeing them humbled
Stuff about women being in the public sphere still not being acceptable seems a bit bizarre when most women have jobs - surely the real reason is that purely and simply it’s acceptable to hate women. And therefore women hate women as well - because it’s culturally endorsed. But the vile comments directed at Amy Winehouse on you tube (most of them with some sexual content) are mostly from men. Misogyny is acceptable and the media foster it, it’s as simple as that really.
Amy Winehouse is more hated than Simon Cowell??? The Simon Cowell that has given the world “Poop Idol(ize)” and a whole variety of other shit??? WHAT IS WRONG WITH THE WORLD???
I don’t buy the whole “hating Amy Winehouse because she does drugs”. Kate Moss does drugs as well and there she is. Perhaps what bothers men is that Amy is not a “sex toy” and she doesn’t want to be one?
And what’s with the whole “doing drugs” business? Everyone of Amy’s generation and below has done drugs at some point or other.
And yeah, hating someone you haven’t met is irrational. Unless that someone is Simon Cowell.
Or Paul McCartney. I reserve the right to hate Paul McCartney. Yeah I think a lot of the Amy hating has to be to do with her not being a pretty, blonde, conventional girls aloud type, (and there could be soupcon of anti semitism in there as well of course). And it has grown exponentially in relation to her success. Of course most of the london meeja types who write about her probably shove half the gross national product of colombia up their noses on a weekend as well (it always makes me laugh when there is a ’scandal’ about a sleb doing drugs, even St. Paul does them)….but seriously why do they wonder she gets stressed when she can’t step out her front door without being followed by half the British press.
Bravo Polly - you cracked it in one. It doesn’t take rocket science to see that the reason these women are hated so much is because they are women!!! Misogyny is so widespread it has become normalised and accepted. As for the media well all they are interested in is initially putting women on pedastals and then systematically knocking them down when these women prove they are not godesses but yes just like men are human.
But - and this is a big but - men are allowed to make mistakes. Men are individuals - men are human but women - well women are women and therefore they must on no account make mistakes or do stupid things. In other words women must be controlled and policed because this is how the patriarchy keeps women subordinated. By constantly telling women how bad they are; how they can’t behave themselves (according to male standards), how they mustn’t be ambitious; get angry. No matter what women do the media and patriarchy will always find fault. It is called blame women for every social ill.
Or we can just call it by its true name - MISOGYNY which is so visible it is invisible.
The Amy hating continues in this morning’s Male with the news that she and Doherty filmed a ‘bizarre video’ with baby mice and put it on You Tube. Now it is apparently a bad thing to pick up baby mice, because if their scent changes their mother might eat them. However despite the fact that Amy Winehouse is not an animal behaviourist and could hardly be expected to know this, and the fact that both PETA and the RSPCA says she handles them ‘gently’, she is needless to say being castigated.
http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/pages/live/articles/showbiz/showbiznews.html?in_article_id=567012&in_page_id=1773
Doherty on the other hand is still allowed to care for animals despite his cat having cocaine in its bloodstream. Oh and he said he was going to kill it with a shovel at one point…
I spluttered out my drink over the keyboard reading “post-feminist culture”. Oh but I forgot, we are so equal now, so don’t need it any more. I’ll just ignore the gap in my paypacket. Silly hysterical woman that I am.
I can’t believe that Doherty is still allowed to keep animals, any animals, after the coke/shovel business. Non-slebs would be automatically banned for at least seven years.
My favourite moment in the career of St Paul was the second time he got caught with dope. At the first time he ‘promised not to do it again’. The second time he said “so, I lied”. Priceless. One of the Sunday papers was giving away St Paul’s latest album free today. Any wonder. Whilst he was a good part of the pre-fab four (Rutles reference), he was pretty sucky solo. CowBlog has already featured Mull of Kintyre as some sort of crime against humanity. That helicopter crash couldn’t have done the place much good PR either.
Jenn’s comment: “MISOGYNY which is so visible it is invisible.” Totally. Not only that, it is fashionable too.
Anyway, we live in a topsy turvy world. Everything is bizzaro. When student unions *need* to debate “Is Jordan a feminist icon?” no further proof is necessary.
That Sunday paper was indeed the Male on Sunday, what else. No John Lennon was the talented one in the Beatles, and George Harrison - and Ringo Starr - god knows even Octopuses’ Garden beat the shit out of The Frog Chorus.
George was always my favourite.
While my guitar gently weeps is a top tune. Hey ho.
Amy Winehouse made a lad mag’s list of the “unsexiest women”. Probably what’s even worse and contributes to more of the hatred against her - I think it must be worse in the UK than in the US - is that not only is her behavior rebellious and not feminine, but she isn’t considered attractive by men. Other “bad girls” who have similar substance-abuse and legal woes, such as Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan, even though they’re cruelly ridiculed, are attractive enough to have men interested in sleazily rubbernecking at them.
(Interestingly, Britney Spears also made the list of unsexy women. She used to be in the Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan category, but since she stopped dyeing her hair blonde, shaved her head and gained weight, she’s not considered attractive anymore.)
Well interestingly -even though the comments on You Tube about her are abusive, they all also seem to contain something along the line of “I’d do her though”. Amy Winehouse actually is very attractive - obviously she is underweight and ill now, because she is as the tabloids like to say ‘troubled’ - or as I’d say being hounded to her death by the press (just like Britney Spears). But she is of course jewish (as I said above, I think there’s more than a bit of anti semitism going on here) - ie not blonde, anglo saxon and conventionally ‘pretty’ - and awesomely talented (she won five grammys in case anyone’s forgotten that already). So she can’t possibly be ’sexy’ as well. Amy baiting just seems to be a sport for the tabloids over here - probably because she does relatively normal things - like goes to her local pub - which makes her a lot easier to hound.
It is those (coke-heads) at the meeja that orchestrate this whole thing.
As was said, Britney was the little darling for a while, she was young, blonde, and dressed in the schoolgirl outfit. Then she started asserting her independence outside the straightjacketed role that the meeja had set for her, then they turned like a pack of rabid hounds.
Any female that is not ‘Lad Mag pretty’ gets a rough time of it.
It’s so predictable. I could set my watch by it. If I wore a watch.
All the woman hating serves a double purpose - it allows the men to indulge in alpha male fantasies - oh no she’s too ugly for me even though she’s rich and famous (and in reality said male is never likely to get anywhere near the female in question) and women to indulge in ’superiority’ fantasies - I’m more desirable than her even though she’s rich and famous. It’s a pile of crap though - it’s like Harry Enfield’s self righteous brothers - Oy Winehouse No!!! And when did we last see a list of the five most undesirable men?
What’s with all these dumbass lists anyway.
Teh sexiest, the least sexiest.
Who really gives a damn other than editors filling column inches?
But you are right, the alpha male fantasy (and those that indulge are about the least likely alpha males, FFS, I’m more alpha male than a lot of these losers). The artificial competition among women has been around for a long time, and is based on the false competition for ‘a husband’.
My brain wanders to fish and bicycles about now.
When Britney Spears shaved her head it was represented as ‘oh no, this is proof that she’s completely lost it’. But what I think she was actually doing (consciously or unconsciously) was deliberately rebelling against the image she’d been forced into.
My daughter has just informed me that Amy is a bit of a role-model (minus the drugs) for loads of young wimms in her set.
Let me just say that the more and more the media hates on Amy Winehouse for the reasons they do makes me like her more and more
And her voice is just awesome. Yeah, I have noticed the exceptionally blatant amount of hatred shown to female celebrities in the media lately. It’s brutal and relentless. If I were Amy Winehouse I would go fucking insane. I’d just whip out a bazooka on those paparazzi, seriously.
And I agree with Polly this definitely has to do, in part, with her being Jewish. I knew from her name that she was Jewish, but if I didn’t know any better I could have thought she was Lebanese or Syrian. And we all know that women who are not super white, with blonde/ish hair and blue eyes are considered “unworthy” and “unsexy.” On a related but rather unimportant note, I think she’s really hot.
I am thinking perhaps in the UK anti-Semitism is less taboo than in the US? Here in the US anti-Semitism is an absolute no-no in the media, even though I think a lot of Americans are still anti-Semitist, and might make anti-Semitist jokes behind closed doors.
Nobody actually mentions the fact that Amy Winehouse is Jewish - it’s all you ugly disgusting druggy etc. We do actually have laws against inciting racial hatred over here (unlike the what I understand the situation to be in the US where apparently the Ku Klux klan can say anything they want in the name of free speech) and to publish anything overtly anti-semitic would be illegal. But she is, as you point out Lara, quite middle eastern looking, has dark hair and eyes, and is therefore ”ethnic”. She really gets treated in the UK the way Britney Spears does in the US, relentless hounding. And then gets arrested when she slaps somebody who was harassing her - I can’t imagine the police would even bother if it was anyone else.
Yes a load of young women do love her sparks (I think the poll must have been conducted amongst a sample of Daily Male readers given the people they chose) - I think because she is so talented, but also (unlike Joss Stone who I alluded to elsewhere) she is real. Which is why I think she’s got such a brilliant soul voice, all real soul singers put emotion into what they sing.
OK, this is the second time I’ve heard you say negative things about Paul McCartney (I haven’t been reading your blog for that long, so you’ve probably said more). Has he done something recently that I don’t know about? (I don’t have a TV).
I almost don’t want to know, because I love the Beatles.
He’s just generally not very good - mull of kintyre, the frog chorus - do you need more? He recently had an ‘eco car’ flown several thousand miles. And in his divorce battle his ex wife was represented in the media as the evol bitch queen from hell, whilst he was apparently a saint. Which I don’t really buy personally - Heather Mills the ex wife is no 1 on the most hated list if you look. I think no matter what did/didn’t go on the misogynist portrayal of her, and the portrayal of him as a wronged saintly figure is just slightly unbalanced….
Oh and he supports PETA of course….
Lara - “we all know that women who are not super white, with blonde/ish hair and blue eyes are considered “unworthy” and “unsexy.””
Indeed, at the women’s pop culture blog Jezebel, they noted that the top two women on Maxim’s unsexiest women list - Amy Winehouse and Sarah Jessica Parker - both have Jewish heritage and large noses. The third woman on the list is Sandra Oh, who is very “ethnic” looking (with small, narrow eyes and a small-boned, super-thin body). Plus Madonna because she is now too old, and Britney Spears because she “let herself go”.
A lot of the coverage of celebrity “bad girls” in the US also makes fun of them for being dumb blondes (in addition to the titillating factor), like Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, who are respectively a starlet and socialite. Because Amy Winehouse is obviously talented and has substance, that must enrage sexists even more.
Check out the amount of misogyny directed at Hillary Clinton by the mainstream US media:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcdnlNZg2iM