What a year it’s been for women. And NOT in a good way. We’ve had to watch a smart, capable woman being bullied by, frankly, a total arse of a man for months. Remember those TV debates with Trump lurking oddly behind Clinton like a mad orange stalker, or blurting out that she was a horrible woman, like a four-year-old who can’t keep a thought in his head? Then he only went and won.
As if that wasn’t depressing enough, Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, usually quite a bastion of sense, has put Bridget Jones on its power list of influential women from the last seventy years. Bridget Jones, in case you hadn’t noticed, is not real. Gah, as she might herself say. Has she really influenced women? For the better? I don’t think so.
Much as I’ve enjoyed the books and films, Bridget is lovable chiefly because she is such a car crash. She is no threat to anybody. She successfully makes everyone feel a bit better about themselves. All the women watching or reading leave the stories feeling that, if a perpetually accident-prone idiot like Bridget can hold down what she would call a ‘top job’, then they can. And the men, in the film and watching/reading, have it confirmed: women are incompetent, not threatening and thus adorable. Bless them!
Added to Bono winning another of the ‘women of the year’ prizes (I can’t remember which one and I’m too annoyed to look it up) and Wonder Woman briefly becoming a UN Ambassador and any sane woman might well think it’s time to pack it all in. It can’t get any worse, can it?