Those who attack Nicola Sturgeon’s looks expose their own inadequacies
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Version 0 of 1. Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has told Vogue that there is a discussion about her clothes and hair “literally” every time she’s on camera. Quite how an interview and photo-shoot with Vogue is going to show this to be a bad thing remains beyond me. But a bad thing it seems to be. Related: Nicola Sturgeon and Yvette Cooper offer to house Syrian refugees Sturgeon says that comments about her appearance can be “hideous” and “cruel” and that she gets a rougher ride than Ed Miliband, even though the media’s focus on his geeky and awkward appearance was supposed to be one of the things that created a negative public perception of him. Except, of course, that the public doesn’t have a negative perception of Sturgeon. People vote for her. She wins elections. Sturgeon says she is “inured” to nasty comments about her appearance, and it appears that voters are too. Which is good. Is it surprising that women in public life get more sartorial comments than men? Women have many more choices as to how to dress and coif than men do, and it isn’t that shocking that when choices are made, people feel entitled to scrutinise them. I daresay that if Sturgeon only ever wore a few variations on the same sober outfit, like Angela Merkel does and also like most men do, people would soon run out of things to say. Sturgeon probably enjoys wearing clothes that she likes, and others probably like discussing them. The fact that people who like discussing clothes start up on Sturgeon “literally” every time she’s on camera is testament only to the fact that lots of folk are interested in women’s clothes. There are even entire magazines that are all about women’s clothes, I’m told. Enjoying lovely clothes and also enjoying the mistakes other people make with their clothes are ubiquitous human pastimes. If you don’t want people to sneer at your gear, then the easiest thing to do is play it safe. Like men mostly do. Playing it safe, of course, means conforming. Turning up with a stain on your top and your hair all over the place may tell the world that you don’t care. And maybe you really don’t. But the world cares, and they’ll soon let you know that they don’t approve. When a person attacks someone’s appearance, it’s really themselves that they are revealing But I expect that being told that green doesn’t suit her is not what irks Sturgeon. It’s comments about things people haven’t chosen or can’t change that tend to really wound. Nevertheless, there is a long tradition under which the physical imperfections of the powerful have been established as fair game. It’s called political caricature and it’s an important and respectable art form. Politicians who don’t like the way they are portrayed by cartoonists simply have to live with it. Poking fun at physical disadvantage is, I’m afraid, another thing that humans do, even though we know it’s not very nice. Are women placed under greater scrutiny than men? Of course we are. Women have been judged on their looks and not much else throughout human civilisation and longstanding bad habits are hard to break. Boorish men may be coming to realise that voicing their splendid approval with a wolf whistle isn’t the prize beyond gold that they may have imagined it to be. But women scrutinise one another as well. Every time my mother caught a glimpse of Madonna on the telly, she would say: “Well, I think she’s an ugly cow”, as if that put paid to Madonna. I daresay, had my mother ever met Madonna, she’d have refrained from delivering her otherwise unstinting verdict. Most of us, when we say nasty things about people, would be mortified if the object of our disapprobation got wind of it. My mother would have been considerably more upset than Madonna if such a thing had come to pass. And that’s the important thing to remember. When a person attacks someone’s appearance, it’s really themselves that they are revealing. Every fool who thinks they can harm Sturgeon by denigrating her looks is actually simply advertising their own inadequacy and resentment. My mother called Madonna ugly because she didn’t believe that women should wield sexual power in the way that Madonna did. Others call Sturgeon ugly because they don’t believe that women should wield political power in the way that Sturgeon does. And that means, essentially, that what they think – about dresses, politics or what you had for breakfast – doesn’t matter in the least. |