Why Are We Not Happy for Happy Women?
Why can Tom Cruise gleefully jump on a sofa on Oprah but when J-Lo makes a movie about her own triumphs in love she is ridiculed? Then it all goes wrong and we revel in her trauma. Its gross.
I was innocently researching my PhD when I got facef**d by my own computer which thrust a Daily Mail headline in my face via the collectivised news reportings of the MSN app. The Daily Mail sidebar of shame is a NO GO AREA FOR ME. It’s like gossiping or trash talking my ex- I only ever allow myself this ferociously vacuous yet atrociously compulsive guilty pleasure once a year and I always end this ritual by proclaiming, ‘I wish him well, I really do’. (see image 2 on the effects of gossip). When I experienced this Daily Fail facef**k, I’d just finished reading three glowing Michelle De Swarte reviews of her genius new dark comedy Spent and agreed with them all, Telegraph, Guardian and my friend Flick’s endearing 250-word WhatsApp which quite rightly heralded De Swarte as a ‘tour de farce’ and a ‘tour de force’. I voice noted back that I agreed, with the knowledge that we both had absolutely zero idea what a tour de anything actually was. It was then that I went back to my tabs on the internet. (I’m the sort of gal who puts WhatsApp on my laptop because it reduces the screentime on my phone). I was planning on (rather ironically in hindsight) reading Susan Sontag’s The Double Standards of Ageing to reference in my PhD thesis. But to my utter dismay, I found my curser hovering back to ye olde MSN.
MSN I love you, in the days of yore, you were a portal to my first online dalliances with boys and now you know me so well, you know not just the beats of my heart, but how art influences my heart. You know, not just my pulse but how my impulsivity will mean that I’ll be halfway through clicking on 17 Films That Were Made Better By Having Maya Rudolph In Them only to then click through 17 reasons Why Maya Rudolph’s Success Is Not The Result of Nepotism But Because of True Comic Ingenuity. In short you don’t just know my algorithm, by drumming to the beat of my heart, you composed, conducted and orchestrated it whilst ensuring that the whole artistic process was completely collaborative. MSN, you made me who I am today: an amalgamation of typical millennial basic bitch and aspiring boss bitch, who’s definitely keen to know what happened to that woman’s body after eating broccoli marinated in dolphin collogen every day and who thinks she’s more cultured than the general population because she prefers Love is Blind to Love Island. In short, your knowledge of me is normally so en pointe (Michelle De Swarte=YES) that you once suggested I buy my own book, Daughters of the Nile in the Inspired by Your Shopping Interests section, which to this day is possibly the biggest career highlight of my life. But after giving me so much, on this very day, the algorithm failed and MSN you began to malfunction.
Now I don’t want to place the blame wholly on the messenger service network, for that’s a bit like, well, shooting the messenger. But calling out the Daily Mail for being misogynistic is a bit like calling Hitler ‘a bit ‘un-pc’. So, this article isn’t about damning the Daily Mail nor is it about the result of me farting about on the internet instead of doing my PhD. It’s about what the headline that I found on MSN while farting about on the internet says about what the world thinks about happy women. Before writing this article, I had already started a draft one about how the world hates a happy woman. It was a line used in the trailer for Anne Hathaway’s Mrs Robinson-esque rom com, The Idea of You. I felt instantly compelled to watch it, upon hearing the line, ‘people hate happy women’, (that and marvelling at Anne’s hair and her character’s ability to orgasm after 3 seconds of a guy’s hands down her pants). PEOPLE HATE HAPPY WOMEN. I couldn’t get the line out of my head, probably because it was already in my head subconsciously. And now the movie had made the misogynistic mantra that was probably drumming around the ethers of my subliminal matter anxiously attached to my internalised misogynistic beliefs that whisper through my veins via osmosis. Veins which pump not only blood round my body but pump thoughts through me like, ‘his ex is a total psycho’, or ‘his new gf is a total psycho’ and bizarrely ‘if he calls you a psycho, it means you’re really good in bed’. Alas, now this movie was bleeding, PEOPLE HATE HAPPY WOMAN into my veins, and it felt like I’d just injected myself with heroin. I sat back on the sofa and looked up at the ceiling and began to see the world more clearly. This clarity was somewhat paralysing in its profundity. The more I heard it the more I couldn’t not hear it, the more I thought about, the more I saw it.
In the trailer and the film, (yes, I watched the film, even though trailers are usually way better), Hathaway’s character gets assassinated by the press simply for being smug as a bug in a rug for not only bagging a younger man but basically banging the biggest music star on the planet who is supposedly based on Harry Styles. Despairing at the denigrations-despite this being an American movie it showcased UK levels of press derision, Anne Hathaway declares, “I didn’t know my being happy would piss so many people off”. Then her bestie delivers the devastating aforementioned line: “People hate happy women”. Cue: Anne Hathaway looking quizzical for a moment before just like me adding it up in her head, looking up the ceiling and nodding.
It comes as a surprise at first that the world hates a happy woman. After all, us resting bitch faces are told to cheer up love several times a week when we walk down the street with our mouths completely horizontal. But look at the viciously victorious vitriol we’re all revelling in simply by the reporting of J-Lo’s SECOND split from Ben Affleck. Such revelling has even accrued a term of its own- J-Lo Schadenfreude. The Oxford Dictionary defines the term as a woman who has been previously portrayed as having her cake and eating it-encased in manically grinning total euphoric happiness (think Cherie Blair parading the streets like a Cheshire Cat as Labour won in 1997). But Cherie didn’t experience J-Lo Schadenfreude because she was only that happy for a day (and then for the rest of eternity she has to be married to Tony). So, we let her have her happiness for a day. But J-Lo, dares to be happy for years, living not only a life of bling and revolving hot boyfriends but gets back together with the very handsome Hollywood actor beau that she was with in her twenties in her fifties and NOT ONLY THIS if you google image the couple you CANNOT TELL THE DIFFERENCE IN TIME ERAS BECAUSE SHE LOOKS EXACTLY THE SAME. That sort of happiness is a criminal offence. She’s rich, beautiful and blessed and then dares to make a movie length multimillion feature length music video which bangs on about how she is not only rich and beautiful and blessed but is completely and utterly in love and wants to tell the world about her happy ending. When I think about it, she was totally asking for it. A woman cannot possibly be this happy and get away with proclaiming it from the Hollywood hilltops. So, when she suddenly experiences extreme misfortune, in the form of a breakup, the word takes absolute delight in the happiest woman in the world suddenly becoming the unhappiest. Because what we love nothing more as a society is to watch a happy woman become unhappy. But as we know the world doesn’t want us to be miserable, as the reductive term ‘resting bitch face’ denotes.
Instead, society determines when a woman can be euphorically happy on key days in her life and the rest, she must be inconspicuously content with her lot. These key days where a woman can express her unadulterated happiness to the world are on her wedding day and when she gives birth. Only then can she gush about never experiencing a love like this before (coincidentally a title of a J-Lo track), never felt such happiness, yada yada yada conveniently forgetting that three years ago she had VIP tickets to a Taylor Swift concert. Happiness is on patriarchal terms. A happy single woman? Preposterous! A happy career woman? WHAT? A woman happy with her weight? Unless you’re Lizzo-ABSOLUTELY NOT. And dare to have it all by being happy in all these areas plus achieve Maslow’s highest hierarchy of needs: self-actualisation? You cross the line towards annoyingly smug and are fated to the brand of happy woman that we call FUCKING ANNOYING. See Keira Knightley et al.
(Me with my J-Lo mic about to make a v. important point about Love Island.)
We can only be happy if our happiness isn’t taking up too much space. Our happiness cannot be gregarious. Anne Hathaway, you’re Julia Roberts decibel of smile is never going to do you any good. Our happiness has to be non-threatening to the patriarchal status quo- a sort of sleepy subdued sort of happiness. We absolutely cannot go on Oprah and jump on a sofa. Instead, we can only go on Ellen to talk about our fantastic lives and only if its done in a self-deprecating way by caveating our fifth Oscar win with the fact that we also have had just as many miscarriages. Because you certainly can’t just be deliriously happy. It pisses so many people off.
Back to THAT ENRAGING DAILY MAIL ARTICLE. I suppose I should be thanking the Daily Mail because the misogynistic headline made me see the exception to the woman can’t be too happy rule. It showed that you can be euphorically happy on the internet (and it’s not only allowed for women eating salads) for the Daily Mail article showed just that: Jennifer Aniston and Reece Witherspoon looking deliriously happy to be working together looking like two very happy bestie millionaire colleagues. And the world still loves them. Why? How are they getting away with this manic happiness? Thanks, Daily Mail I see it all so clearly now. ‘Jennifer Aniston, 55, and Reese Witherspoon, 48, are wrinkle-free beauties’ A woman can only be this level of happiness if she is wrinkle free at middle age. GOT IT. Now back to the Susan Sontag paper on The Double Standards of Ageing.
