Slavering cougars have left women in a cage

by India Knight

The names women choose to adopt for themselves often strike me as quite bizarre, especially when they derive from terms men use to denote women’s desirability. Such as “yummy mummy”. What does that mean — that being an ordinary mummy is revolting, but if you bimbify yourself sufficiently — bit of starvation, some highlights, heels — you’re okay? And Milf. I understand Milf used as shorthand by a certain kind of man devoted to certain kinds of websites, but I overheard yet another woman the other day saying she’d like to be one. She didn’t seem remedially stupid, but then you never know.

The newest moniker to join this happy parade is “cougar”. Cougars aren’t new — the term was first coined in America in the 1990s, but it’s now everywhere thanks to a US television series called Cougar Town, starring Courteney Cox Arquette, formerly the anally retentive one in Friends. As a result of its screening on ABC, women, it seems, are queuing up to call themselves cougars, although “total dingbat” might be more appropriate. A cougar is — well, a cougar is puma concolor, a mammal of the felidae family, native to the Americas, with a round head and erect ears.

In this context, though, a cougar is an older woman who dates younger men. In Cougar Town, Arquette plays a 45-year-old divorcée with a series of twentysomething love interests. “I hope this show is a huge hit and people love it,” she said. “Because I like playing this character more than any character I’ve ever played.”

I’m all for women celebrating being in their sexual prime and for the studios not giving all their plum parts to barely-legal ingénues. Hooray for sexual primes! Hooray for sex! Beyond that, though, I’m kind of stumped.

I’m 43 — roar — and I find the idea of having boyfriends only marginally older than my 17-year-old son a bit grim. Still, I suppose that if you’re forty-plus, female and frisky, younger men fit the bill nicely since they tend to be neither married nor broken and bald (interestingly, I’d be lynched for making this remark in reverse: “Oh yes, old blokes with very young girls, marvellous because they’re all single and innocent — it’s so modern, so refreshing, so empowered.”) But anyway: if older women want to shag younger men, good on them. Shag away, old ladies.

What bothers me, though, is the way in which women are no longer allowed (by anyone, themselves included) to be anything other than sexual. If you’re not up for it, you might as well be dead: get with it, nanna, flash us some cleavage. But what if, for instance, you’ve been reasonably happily married for a couple of decades and your children are grown up and you like Radio 4 and gardening and just pottering about? What if you’re clever and attractive and nice, but you don’t want to prowl around making big bifocal eyes at blokes young enough to be your children? What if married sex — I think we all know what I mean by married sex — suffices?

It’s the Emma Thompson v Madonna quandary: do you look lovely, live discreetly, help people — Thompson and her husband Greg Wise, a mere seven years younger than her, support a young Rwandan called Tindyebwa Agaba — or do you date models, go baby hunting in Malawi to show you’re a good person and get photographed for advertising campaigns looking as if you’ve recently orgasmed? I bet Thompson would rather chop off her head than refer to herself as a cougar; the same could probably not be said of Madonna.

The old-fashioned middle to old-aged state of contentment — tea, novels, sweet old Bagpuss of a spouse — used to be the thing that everyone aspired to. It was cosy, comfortable, familiar. I used to view my old age with extreme excitement: I was going to eat everything I wanted, make cakes, read piles of books and maybe have a pub. The question of who I’d be having sex with didn’t figure anywhere on my list.

Surely — surely? — you’re allowed to get to a point when you can just do what you like without having to worry about how hot you’re looking?

Well, yes, but only up to a point: the middle-aged to elderly world now seems to me to be split in two: cougars on the one hand, grannies on the other. Sometimes the cougars are grannies. It’s incredibly confusing. I don’t mean just to me personally, I mean in terms of society. The demarcations of age are eroding by the day and it’s not necessarily a good thing.

It’s interesting, the new age inappropriateness. It’s because we’re all going to live for so long — scientists recently announced that babies born now would live to 100 — and we haven’t quite worked out what to do with the extra decades.

We can’t reconcile what we’re like at 40 with what we remember our mothers being: it’s like being a different species, so we feel duty-bound to rewrite the book without asking what was so dreadfully wrong with the original. We take our inspiration from movies and sitcoms, so that what used to be a joke has achieved cultural dominance I’m pretty sure the caricature of the predatory older woman started as a gag in some American movie or sitcom, except now it’s become real. The thrillingly antique Mrs Robinson, as portrayed by Anne Bancroft in The Graduate, was in fact an un-cougarish 36. If the film had been set in our present day, she’d be gearing up to her first pregnancy.

On top of that, we’re so horrified by the idea of “old age” that we run screaming in the other direction — “I’m 73 years young! I’ve still got good legs!” — instead of embracing what it might have to offer. I don’t remember my very beloved grandparents writhing about in OAP misery: as far as I could see, they had a lovely time by adhering to the tried and tested method: when you’re young, you’re looked after, when you’re in the middle, you look after other people, when you’re old, other people look after you again. (As opposed to when you’re old, you run about shagging people you met on the internet.) The more I think about it, the more I find old-school old age massively appealing. Never mind the cougars — let’s hear it for the … what shall we call ourselves? Possums, I think; patron saint: E Thompson.

via http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/india_knight/article6869422.ece

Miss behaving

The St Trinian’s girls are back on screen, and the gymslip sirens have been updated with chavs, geeks and posh totty. It’s a class act — and proof that female camaraderie has never gone away.

by India Knight

Could there be room for Ealing Studios’ anarchic ethos in Gordon Brown’s prudent Britain? I’ll say. What could be a more appropriate – and welcome – corrective than the risqué jokes and wild exuberance of the new St Trinian’s film? Its stellar cast includes Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Mischa Barton, Russell Brand, Celia Imrie, Girls Aloud, Stephen Fry, and an army of schoolgirls aged 11 to 18. The film draws inspiration from its predecessors (The Belles of St Trinian’s, 1954; Blue Murder at St Trinian’s, 1957; The Pure Hell of St Trinian’s, 1960; and The Great St Trinian’s Train Robbery, 1966), but also from Ronald Searle’s darkly funny cartoons, which are often – incorrectly – used as shorthand to suggest provocative schoolgirlhood, as though they occupied the same territory as a teenaged Britney Spears writhing saucily in her school uniform for the 1998 video of …Baby One More Time (which sold 9m copies. There’s nothing like girls in uniform for bringing in the punters, especially if the uniform suggests jail bait).

In fact, Searle’s drawings were conceived while he was held in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, in particularly horrific conditions: the “girls” are the prisoners and the “mistresses” their jailers and tormenters. In one drawing, a school mistress hangs from a tree (captioned “Okay, now where’s old Stinks?”). Vultures sometimes circle overhead. Jolly hockey sticks and Thelwell ponies seem a million miles away. As well as echoing some of this darkness, the old St Trinian’s movies were startlingly full-on, all stocking-tops and anarchy where one might, given their subject matter, have expected demure gentility and angst about prep. Searle’s schoolgirls and their cinematic counterparts were the antithesis of nicely brought up, middle-class young “ladies” – they were the equivalent of Asbo-wielding, gin-guzzling, fag-loving chavs who happened to be boarders; brash, mouthy, aggressive, and precociously sexually confident – alarmingly so, one imagines, in the context of the times. Plus ça change.

With this in mind, and given the fascination gangs of girls exert on the public, one can see how Barnaby Thompson and Oliver Parker, the film’s directors (Thompson and his business partners bought Ealing Studios in 2000), found themselves thinking that a St Trinian’s remake might be more than an exercise in nostalgia, and might have real resonance in 2007 – for 15-year-old girls, but also for a broader public, aware of

St Trinian’s place in English cinematic history. Thompson credits Rupert Everett, who plays both the headmistress, Miss Fritton, and her brother Carnaby in the new film, with the initial idea: “We’d worked with him on a couple of films – when we did The Importance of Being Earnest, he suggested he play every part, which actually he’d have done very well. He’s a lovely boy, and he makes a lovely girl. He’s so wonderful in this film – it must have been fairly terrifying to follow in Alastair Sim’s footsteps, but he’s made it his own. Anyway, he said, ‘You should do a remake of St Trinian’s.’ And it was a brilliant idea. The problem was always going to be the script. The old St Trinian’s films have maintained their edginess, so coming up with a modern version was tricky – it needed to be sufficiently authentic, so people could relate to it, but also sufficiently comedic. We kept going back to Searle’s cartoons for inspiration.” Did they meet Searle, who lives in France? “We got his blessing. We nearly went to see him when we were in Cannes,” says Parker. “But he’s old, and he’d been quite sick. I’d love to meet him.”

Were the directors not put off by the boarding-school setting of the story – or, rather, with the class-ridden baggage the words “boarding school” trail in their wake today? “In the old movies, the school had a kind of classlessness,” says Thompson. “We’ve adopted that. You’re not for one moment under the impression that it’s posh, and when you meet the girls, they come from a variety of backgrounds. One reason that the school is always in financial trouble is that Miss Fritton brokers a kind of socialism, where those who can pay do, and those who can’t don’t. She has the almost impossible task of uniting all these disparate characters – in our film they break down into the chavs, the emo kids, the geeks, and the posh totty – you know, the Kate Middleton types: young, but with expensively styled hair. The story is about them all coming together to pull something off.”

It is this girl-power element that will, I think, ensure the success of the film and give Ealing Studios mark II their biggest hit to date. When I went on set in the spring, they were filming a scene where one of the girls gets a makeover in the dorm. I was milling about watching on a monitor downstairs, relatively peacefully, until they broke for lunch. Suddenly, schoolgirls were everywhere – tiny little 11-year-old ones, chic 18-year-old ones, tall ones, short ones, geeky ones, emo ones, a lone posh one, chavvy ones, and the model Lily Cole, looking like a giraffe with her hair in bunches – “there’s a clique for everyone to connect with,” as Juno Temple, 18, who plays “loner trustafarian” Celia, told me.

Gemma Arterton, 21, who plays the head girl, Kelly, agreed: “The film is partly a detailed look at teenage tribes – you get a good sense of British teenage culture.” They were all running about chatting and giggling, huddled against the rain, and for one mad moment it felt as though I was at an actual school. “It does feel like that, because you’re working with people your own age,” said Arterton. “It’s lovely and cosy; between takes we’re chilling out on the dorm beds, talking about boys.” Talulah Riley, who plays Annabelle Fritton, a square posh girl, says the same thing: “The casting is genius. We all get on really well.” “The energy on set is just extraordinary,” Oliver Parker agrees. “We were shooting a scene in Leicester Square, and the girls had to come out of a bus and convey that energy. We wondered if they’d do it. Then the bus doors opened, and they came tumbling out and raaaah… They’re a force of nature. You have to stand back so you don’t get mowed down.”

Parker and Thompson visited a series of real schools – state and private – when they were researching the film. “What’s interesting,” says Parker, “is that when you talk to the various girls, they’re obviously different for the first couple of minutes – some are clearly posh, some less so. But the moment they began talking about the delineation of the various groups in their particular schools – the emos, the chavs, whatever – there was a huge amount of overlap, and the girls’ attitude to life was broadly similar. It was fascinating spending time with them, because they were all so strong-minded.”

On set near Henley-on-Thames, all the girls I spoke to made a point of mentioning how pleased they were to be playing powerful girls who were masters of their own destiny, not sidekicks or love interests. “The most amazing thing,” says Thompson, “is it’s been 50 years since the old St Trinian’s movies, and girls have come a long way, but in the film world they’re still basically playing girl friends. It’s hard to name five movies that are just about girls. Ours isn’t just that, it’s also a heist movie [the girls steal a painting to save the school]. It’s probably the first girls’ heist movie, which seems incredible in 2007.” Parker adds: “I think it was Godard who said, ‘All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.’ We’re saying, ‘Give the girl the gun.’ ”

It would be overly coy to deny that some of our fascination with gaggles of teenage girls is to do with what creepy old men like to call “burgeoning sexuality”. How do the directors, who both have 11-year-old daughters, marry that to an anticipated 12A certificate and a family audience? The original films were hardly tame.

“The first one was, relatively,” says Thompson. “They got worse as they went along. You put girls in school uniform and suspenders and it’s difficult for that not to be sexy. But there’s a sharp divide between the first-formers, who are just a cloud of energy, and the older girls, who are around 18 and very confident with their own image. Hopefully, what one is doing is empowering them by making them look so good, accentuating the fact that they are the ones running the show.”

Nevertheless, didn’t they occasionally feel like pervs? “We had to be very careful,” says Thompson. “We surrounded ourselves with as many women – adult women – as possible: editors, costume designers, make-up artists and so on – and we kind of let them run with it. So they’d go away with the actress and present her to us, and one or two times we said, ‘That’s a bit much, tone it down.’ There are jokes that seem risqué on the page but less so in the delivery and within the boundaries of the film. Both our daughters are in the film, so we tried to be conscious of how they would experience it. And we have strong mothers, and strong wives/girl friends, who’d be all over us if we crossed that line. It’s hard enough to explain getting up at 6am to spend the day with schoolgirls. It was a delicate area, but I think we got it right.” Parker adds: “The main thing is, the film is about the girls being in charge, and as long as they’re in charge, then it’s okay. But it’s also, of course, about creating the right degree of glamour. The message of St Trinian’s as delivered by Miss Fritton is ‘Our job is not to turn you into what we are, but into what you are.’ It’s important.”

This leads us neatly to girl power. Thompson directed the Spice Girls’ film Spice World, in 1997, and observed the phenomenon first-hand.

“They changed a lot,” he says. “They were the first representation of ordinary girls [as opposed to politicised adult women] doing it for themselves. I remember going to one of their concerts with my wife, who’s American. She said when she was growing up, there was only boys’ music, and she would try and force herself to like it, to keep up with the boys. What happened with the Spice Girls, and for that generation of young women, was, suddenly, it was all about girls, expressly for girls. Suddenly, they were dressing for each other, not for men. You’d go to a club and see girls dancing on tables and realise they weren’t doing it for you, or for the men in the room – they were doing it to please themselves. I know girl power has become a cliché, but it marked a huge change in the way girls thought about themselves.”

True, but even the Spice Girls had male managers, male accountants and male advisers. “Of course. And there are still a lot of men selling the same concept in different forms. It’s murky water. What we wanted to try and do with St Trinian’s was to be a clear, refreshing pool. We’ve also got people like Lily Allen, Kate Nash, Remi Nicole on the soundtrack – girl singers who are 100% themselves, singing these vignettes of girl life. They’re just fantastic.”

The film couldn’t be more British, not least in how it very Britishly – or perhaps Englishly – plays around with class and gender. “Well,” says Thompson, “we did initially go and see Harvey Weinstein [co-founder of Miramax, now at Weinstein Company]. He liked the concept, but asked why we couldn’t have Judi Dench playing the headmistress, instead of Rupert in drag. He just didn’t get it, and if people don’t get it, there’s no point trying to explain. But, certainly, part of our point was to celebrate the Englishness of it, the eccentricity.”

“There is this amazing dichotomy in the English,” adds Parker, “where on one hand they’re tremendously Establishment, but on the other they’re completely anti – that old thing of wearing both the bowler hat and the frilly knickers. We wanted to celebrate that, and St Trinian’s is the perfect expression of it.”

It is also the perfect expression of the enduring appeal of gaggles of girls. If you’re female, you want to be part of the gang. If you’re male, you want to sleep with half of it – but that’s not all: there is something about female camaraderie that appeals enormously to men, stuck as they are with the rather truncated (beer, sex, sport, jokes) male version. It is interesting that films that involve male friendships seldom involve the heroes actually achieving anything as a result of their intimacy: they defuse the bomb, win the girl, save the planet despite having friends, not because of it – though, more often than not, they’re friendless loners in the first place. Films about female friendships, on the other hand, use that camaraderie to illustrate the point that, provided you have your girl friends by your side, anything is possible. Men going to see St Trinian’s to check out the eye candy may be surprised to find themselves awed into timidity by it, because while there’s no denying that the girls look wonderful – and, yes, sexy – the film’s chief concern is celebrating grounded, powerful, self-knowing girls doing exactly as they please, palling up, and triumphing against the odds.

The school uniforms may look cutely retro; what’s going on underneath is anything but.

From The Sunday Times November 25, 2007

(via http://ronaldsearle.blogspot.com/2007_11_01_archive.html)

Ursula and Lotty were normal enough girls. They fought over sitting in the front seat of the car. They were late for school. At lunchtime they threw peanuts in the air, and counted leaves. They sat in hot schoolrooms waving away flies. At home they were scolded for losing their lunchboxes, and forced to apologise to each other for fighting. They lived normal enough lives.

But then the carnival had come into town like a hot exhale of breath. Lotty had dragged her sister through the gates, past the hot dog stands and ticket booths, between the brightly coloured tents, swirling and clicking in the sun. They ran under rainbow coloured awnings, dodging children with sticky mouths and giant lollypops, trailing rainbow ribbons.

Gypsies winked at them as they went past and giant bubbles floated through the air. They made faces at a boy crouched under a painted wooden cart until his mother shooed them away with her fan and they were frightened by the birthmark covering her face.

In between the chattering the crowd they followed sounds of buskers and carousel music, the smell of popcorn and fairy-floss. They paused at the front of the crowd to watch dancing bears, jumping horses, trapeze artists and juggling clowns.  Around them the tents emptied and filled like lungs.

To get away from the sweltering heat they ducked inside the deep folds of a dark purple tent, panting and out of breath. Ursula held her sister back, pointing to the centre of the tent where a magician sat serene under heavy robes telling stories to a group of children crammed in between dusty shelves.

Ursula and Lotty loved the magician. His skin was etched with the marks of other people’s lives. His eyes were like dusk and his voice seemed to hold the secrets of human souls. He told stories of far away places and promised to make wishes come true, exchanging dreams for lollypops.

His tent was lined with rows of strange objects made of metal, felt and leather sat a large crystal ball filled with swirling orange dust, showing cities and mountains scattered across a large red desert.

The girls returned every day to listen to his stories and each night their dreams became more vivid and their games more real than ever, until one day everything switched. Dreams became games, and games became dreams, and nothing else was real.

Their world started slowly spinning until one day they disappeared. They heard the magician’s tinkling laugh. They saw his shadow moving deep and dark as they spun into a vortex of swirling glass, through solid and liquid space, through fantasy and dream, until the spinning made them both unconscious.