Still Life

This is a guest blog by Alice Thomas - historian, lawyer, award-winning public speaker and baker extraordinaire, who also takes mighty fine photographs, but not usually of women in bikinis. She tweets as @AliceBThomas. Because that is her name.

It was a phenomenal day. But a less than generous photo.

If I could do one thing to improve British women's body image, I would ban cameras.  I'd have an amnesty, collect them all up, and melt them down – possibly to make a giant sculpture of a happy, scruffy woman.

Why? Because cameras are the main way that paparazzi, porn, and magazines – the three corners of the Bermuda triangle of a modern woman's self-esteem – filter into everyday life. It starts with airbrushed cover shots. Then there are the sweat-patches, spots and (whisper it) body hair all properly circled and captioned – “Eurgh! Disgusting!” – so women know what they have to be ashamed. Finally, there are the 25 shots of Imogen Thomas in a bikini, just to remind you that even if you get a few good pictures, someone will wait until you forget to suck it all in to snap another one. Famous women have to be unnaturally perfect from every angle all the time.

That shouldn't matter. Most of us aren't Angelina Jolie and even if the Imogen Thomases of this world clearly like having bikini shots taken, the rest of us aren't obliged to join in. But it does matter, because we are surrounded by cameras all the time. The camera on my phone has more megapixels than Lady Gaga has twitter followers, and any time I go out there are at least 30 photos on Facebook the next day. My experience seems to be pretty standard. The constant expectation that we will be photographed, along with the unrealistic expectations we have of those photographs, can seriously fuck with how we feel about ourselves.

The pressure to look photo-ready is starting to filter through to beauty advice. I was reading a blog post on a bridal site (don't ask) that suggested that even women who never wear makeup should get the full clown-face on their big day because otherwise they'll look 'washed out' and 'anaemic' in the photographs. There was nothing about feeling comfortable and being yourself on your wedding day. Brides just had to remember that if you can pull off full Essex Friday night warpaint and put up with the itching all day, you'll look great twenty years later in the photos.

The article that actually prompted this one, though, was a list of 'women's ideal bikini bodies' that  explained how most of the women in their photographs were actually underweight. Gwyneth Paltrow, the favourite bikini body on the list, is at risk from osteoporosis because her diet is so restrictive her bones are brittle. I remember thinking that my sister looks awesome in a bikini – she's all blonde and curvy with Christina-Hendricks skin – but if you look at photos of her, she looks chubby and pale. I reckon if I saw these 'ideal' bodies in real life, they would look like skeletons or children or bodybuilders.

I'm not trying to suggest that 'bodybuilder', or 'child', or even 'Essex warpaint' is a bad look if that's what a woman aims to look like all the time (I draw the line at 'skeleton'). It just seems that so much of what women do to their bodies and their faces is a response to the idea that the most important part of a night out or a holiday is the photos afterwards. We have been deluded into thinking that, since so much of our life is photographed, the photographs are life.

We should be living our lives for the 99% that's actually living, not the 1% that's stored on a memory card. In the real world, if you're a healthy weight, you get a bit of exercise, you don't live off cake (unless you're Mary Berry), and you don't think about how you might look on camera every second, you're pretty much doing fine. If we can't do that, maybe we should stop asking the women to get thinner or flatter or browner, and start asking Nikon to make more accurate cameras.

'Mena, I made this pie for you'....

So Never Mind the Buzzcocks is back. This makes me fairly to quite happy - not as happy as it would have done in days gone past, in the days when Bill Bailey was a team captain and the show could still pull relatively interesting guests. But it’s half an hour of fairly amusing, ‘irreverant’ entertainment that lasts approximately as long as it takes me to paint my nails and gives me another choice of background telly while I’m eating dinner.

This week, Jack Whitehall is the host, and, surprisingly, the show has managed to pull the relatively impressive feat of booking Mena Suvari - actress of American Pie and American Beauty proportions - to sit side by side with Noel Fielding, and this is pretty exciting. Man, that woman must have some stories - and american guests are always fun, partly because you get the sense they’ve never seen the show, and thus are unprepared when the bizarre and mocking questions start coming their way.

Unfortunately, Whitehall failed to make the most of this mega-booking (though the writers certainly didn’t, making nearly every feature in some way American Beauty/Pie related). Instead, he spent the majority of the show making lewd sexual jokes at Suvari, at one point presenting her with a ‘drawing’ he’d done of his cock encircling her like a snake, and in another instance giving her a pie, apparently decorated with her face, but with a hole at her pastry mouth, in reference to that infamous pie-fucking scene.

When Shooting Stars was in its heyday, there was a bit where Vic Reeves would go up to an attractive female contestant and come on to her by rubbing his knees and making strange faces. It was hilarious. Reeves was ridiculous and ineffectual, not predatory and powerful, and it was funny without being threatening. No-one was ridiculing the woman. The audience (and often the woman being ‘rubbed’ at) was laughing at Reeves.

On the other hand, Buzzcocks jokes were fairly lazy, not massively funny, weirdly sinister and, oh my god, so relentless. Throughout the whole show, Suvari was low-level sexually harassed in a way that was making her seem visibly uncomfortable. And Whitehall hardly had two words to say to the other female panellist - Celia Pacquola - an Australian comic who was all but edited out of the show. It reminded me of an insight Caitlin Moran shared in an interview with Tim Minchin on Radio 4 a few months ago; Moran has been repeatedly asked to appear on panel shows but consistently refuses because they’re ‘a boys game’. And I think she’s probably right. A little bit of ribbing, sure. But maybe vary your content just a little bit. Half an hour of sex jokes and you just wind up looking boring and a little bit sinister.

All in all, getting a woman onto your panel show to simply sit and be the butt of your sex-jokes is not ok. And, unfortunately, unless you’re a connoisseur of LADbanter, it’s unlikely to be that funny, either.