Bet that title got some people eager to share my pain….lol
Fat jibes drove me to drugs, reads the bold headline of a red top newspaper gossip column today.
‘Is it any wonder that Keane front man Tom Chaplin had a battle with drugs after the cruel jibes from other bands?’
Laughably, on the opposite page is a full length photo of the lovely Drew Barrymore entitled ‘Drewpy Bits’
You’ve guessed it..she has cellulite and that astounding fact means that we need to be shown it magnified in its half-page glory.
I wonder if she takes drugs - or feels the need now to do so.
The irony of these two stories run side by kissing side seems lost to this paper. This paper of the people.
In the last year we have seen the shredding of Jade Goody’s career. Named and shamed as a play ground bully.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not sad that I am unlikely to share an interviewer’s couch with her again in the near future, but if I were her I would have felt very confused - being rounded on with such great enthusiasm that you could almost smell the little sprays of wee coming out of the circling pack’s urethras’.
In the same columns we read stories of lonely children, their confidence shattered by humiliations, jeering and name-calling. Whose educations have been curtailed, and in some tragic cases, whose lives have been lost one way or another. We read their stories and we cry hot tears. Stamp out this bullying. Join us.
Kill the nasty fuckers!
What is happening to our young people? ponders one writer as the camera closes in on some broken hearted family.
Turn to the supplement, or not even that far and we can regularly read ‘Sorry love. You’re a mess!’
A happy girl has her picture taken on her big night out, and there she finds herself the next day marked as one big ugly zero.
This girl has been sweating, the freak.
This girl has worn the same shoes twice, the slut.
This girl has been dumped, the sad old loser.
Look at the babe now she is 60. Rip her to shreds.
Hey Dolly-shit-dress!
Fat, fat…oh glorious god thank you! She is fat.
It turns my stomach . The hideous glee that we are being encouraged to feel in the shaming of another human being. A human being. A human being.
And when that writer is a woman it sears my heart two fold. Oh the mindless misogyny from our very sex.
Hi Alison,
Just wanted to drop you a note and say how nice it was to hear “One More Time” and realize that infectious, gorgeous melodies have not been exhausted!!
Seriously, it had been awhile…
Solid album throughout, constant rotation at home…thanks much.
Ricky in Toronto
sadly that’s the state of the media now. here in the states we are bombarded with daily britney spears updates, and not just in the celebrity tabloid media but on supposed real news channels. it is getting rather appaulling to say the least. i mean they repported the other day about her trip to taco bell……they honestly believe that the collective we really want to see this crap.
Mmmh…I often think it’s all getting like the Roman amphitheatre’s all over again. No one likes to be ridiculed including these so called reporters, so why would they report to us such cruel news? It says more about them personally than their victims. And they wonder why their kids are going around Happy-Slapping and posting on You-Tube. What does the future hold? Poor sods.
Dear Alison ~ It always feels like a case of one-upmanship. It is good that you look beyond the contents of the article, working it in context with the author and with articles either preceding or following. There is a constant contradiction. The fact that these gossip rags sell and bollocky magazine interview shows rate sends a more worrying message – that the public does enjoy this stuff or else they wouldn’t be reading or watching it. It is all very well to blame the reporters, but the miserable public, too, needs to examine its hard-centred and cruel self. I try get far removed from all of that and buy practical magazines, like cooking mags, but all the while knowing that when covering “exotic” recipes, they are often reducing another culture to stereotypes. Our blinders are just too strong, I suppose. We have been inculcated to be quite prejudiced towards anything even remotely different if only to vaunt ourselves. Or so it seems.
Very tenuously related: I heard the replayed interview on the Big L (I should have liked to hear it first time around but the time difference being what it is – I live in NZ – made that difficult). When Reed wasn’t playing tracks from THE TURN, he only played early-mid 80s stuff of yours…Not that there is anything wrong with that material – it’s all fabulous. But what about “So Am I”, “Yesterday’s Flame”, and your live version of “There Are Worse Things I Could Do”? All stellar vocals…Love to hear your point of view, though – clear, unique, and not at all vapid like so many other musical celebs.
Hiya
I think that we, the public are getting led….like my hens…one runs up the garden the other worries she is missing something and tries to get ahead, quite unsure why. People don’t always know they want stuff..they are just drawn into believeing they should want it…and want happens. Cheap television, cheap stories, cheap values. I feel stupid stating anything so obvious like it was an original thought. Without doubt there is bile in society but does it need to be drawn out and celebrated. Does it have to become our defining characteristic. We are becoming inured to everything vile. I find myself understanding Mary Whitehouse better…and what a thing that is to say. Isn’t it like what they say about sex. Remember what it is that could do it for you when you first discovered it. Another door is opened and there is no returning to an earlier innocence. The stimulation needed becomes more demanding. I don’t mean to come over all mother mary, I can be as big a bastard as the next but I hate it in myself. I don’t need to believe that we are all clean, I just want to believe we desire it.. we aspire to it and clean to me is being open handed..kind..wise.
On another note…it is funny. I did an interview yesterday and someone mentioned this particular blog and i thought they were getting me. Does it make me feel bad for the kids at school, they asked, that were, how shall we say, a little overweight?
They just don’t want to see the point. This is not about fat…it is not about my personal stumbling block…it is about duplicity and a bullying media. I can see the interview now and it will be based on my fat hell…like everything i say is driven by self-pitying weight issues. Like we cannot empathise with another soul unless their gripe is identical to ours. Were we always so self-centred?
….and now to something self-centred…
Yes, it does not pass me by that radio excludes 20 years of my recorded history from its airwaves. I am just beyond waving my fist at it. I am bored by my internal whine. I have concluded that it has to be enough that only I and an open few will see me. There is little that I can do to change that and in the grand scheme of things it matters little. We live…some of us make things…we die and those things die soon after. Who cares. What point is there in caring…it eats into our sleeping hours and makes a haze of a living day.
Ha ha…I am talking bollocks…care has eaten into my sleeping hours which is why I am awake at an ungodly hour writing this…..but see back…I aspire to be clean.