We all love Amal… or do we? “There’s been a new Amal sighting” was an actua

We all love Amal… or do we? “There’s been a new Amal sighting” was an actual topic of conversation I had over the credenza at work last week. Amal Clooney was jetting out of Heathrow airport in an Autumn/Winter 2014 Dolce & Gabbana flocked metallic matelassé mini-dress too stunning not to be discussed. Among the women I speak to and on the Internet I read, Amal Clooney has become a classic case of girl crush. Lena Dunham defines “girl crush” in Not that Kind of Girl, before rejecting the term as misogynistic, possibly homophobic, as: “women whose career arc excites me, whose ease of expression is impressive, whose mastery of party banter has me simultaneously hostile and rapt. I’m not jealous in traditional ways […] but I do covet other women’s style of being”. In Clooney’s case: impressive degrees, a job-that-makes-a-difference-to-the-world at a top London law firm, self-assurance and an amazing wardrobe. And that husband, who I am starting to find a lot more interesting now she’s married him. Common wisdom, backed by (some) psychological studies, has it that women are jealous of each other. Yet there is no jealousy in the conversations I have about Clooney, nor in the articles I read. Most echo George Clooney’s declaration that he was “marrying up”. Part of it might be because the people I speak to and the content I read, in between luxury, feminism and foreign policy, aren’t prone to disliking high-achieving women. I like to think, however, that it is because, as Helene Leblanc of The Luxe Chronicles puts it, “The ‘women driven by jealousy’ narrative tends to get overplayed. I’m not suggesting that it doesn’t exist but I see plenty of women helping other women. You just don’t hear about them all that much. It may be a generational thing. I think that as more women accede to positions of power and influence, the media will be forced to focus on a new narrative. I look forward to that day.” Last month Chris, of Christian blog In The Waiting Room, wrote: “one of the struggles of being a woman, is learning how to be happy for other women”. To illustrate her point, she takes the example of Amal Clooney. Until Clooney arrived on the scene she says, she could be happy for pretty women because she tended to think that they weren’t all that bright. This isn’t possible with Clooney, which might be why not every reaction to her has been positive. Case in point: my barre class in Fulham, where for most of September and October, attendees made a point of saying how fed up they were with seeing Clooney everywhere while reading Grazia or Hello articles about her, an attitude I struggle to understand in the same way I don’t understand why people bother to leave comments saying they couldn’t care less. News and entertainment websites know immediately how interested their market is in what they cover thanks to analytics. If they keep writing about any topic, it’s because it’s good click-bait, especially on entertainment or lifestyle sites that don’t have to talk hard news. Just my blog, with its average 3,000+ monthly hits, gathered 27 Tumblr interactions in 48 hours on a post I published about Clooney’s fashion (a record for me). Clooney broke on the media stage at a time when the interweb, or at least the slice of it I read, was ready to re-jig its coverage of heterosexual relationships. The Alamuddin-Clooney wedding, with its unusual, at least for Hollywood, storyline of a man dating waitresses/models/ but eventually settling down for a lawyer - albeit a hot one - was the perfect chance for it. In The Guardian, Hadley Freeman highlighted how different coverage is when an actor settles down vs. when an actress chooses to. She compared the narrative of the Alamuddin-Clooney engagement to the one of the Jennifer Aniston-Justin Theroux engagement: “‘Debonair’ George has been ‘tamed’ while ‘tragic’ Jen was ‘saved’”. The Business Woman Media was lauded for claiming “Internationally acclaimed barrister Amal Alamuddin marries an actor”. By the website’s own count, the article has been shared 422.7k times in just over two months and, according to The Guardian, it was trending for a while on Twitter. It still pops up on my Tumblr dashboard on a daily basis. The “she’s better than him” tone was such a feature of the Alamuddin-Clooney nuptial coverage that even late night US show hosts Seth Meyers and David Letterman had their little jokes on the topic. I hope Tina Fey and Amy Poehler joke about it at the next Golden Globes. It would make a nice follow-up to last year’s dig at George Clooney: “Gravity is the story of how George Clooney would rather float away into space and die than spend one more minute with a woman his own age.” It probably helps that Clooney, with her slim, tall figure and shiny hair, looks like she could have just stepped out of a glossy magazine. When I asked Leblanc if she thought Clooney might be the start of a new way to represent women in the media, she was hopeful but not adamant: “That would be awfully nice, but women in the news don’t all look like Amal Clooney nor are they married to global celebrities. Consider the misogynistic abuse that gets routinely lobbed at women in politics and business generally. Nothing is off limits whether it’s weight, hair, clothing, childcare choices or the state of their marriage. I think the press has always tended to favour women who are stylish, attractive and thin and Clooney is all those things.” As Ruchika Tulshyan, journalist and Forbes blogger pointed out, Clooney isn’t just a woman portrayed in a positive light in the press; she is a woman of colour portrayed in a positive light in the press, an even rarer occurrence. “I am happy to see a woman of Middle Eastern heritage become so popular. There is still a dearth of women of colour covered by the Western media,” Tulshyan rejoiced. With the exception of The Daily Mail which managed to turn this into a scandal when it alleged Clooney’s mother opposed her marriage for religious reasons, her Lebanese birth is a mere footnote. Not that all coverage has been that forward. Articles question how much work Clooney actually gets done, considering how often she has been papped, or how serious a lawyer she is considering the clothes she wears, things that would rarely get levelled against a male professional. As a former lawyer, Leblanc has some experienced thoughts on the topic: “The pressures on associates and partners in law firms both in terms of workload and commitment are generally pretty gruelling. There is very little time left over for anything else. It helps that Clooney is independently wealthy. She’s probably insulated from the typical law firm pressures.” Just over two months after the wedding though, it seems coverage has died down. After a highly publicised trip to Greece to get the Parthenon marbles back to Athens, Clooney went under the radar. I’m pretty sure she turned up to work every day, but there wasn’t a single pap to immortalise it, as should be the way. Despite her job, despite signs of a more forward equal coverage of women, the gossip sites have mostly gone back to their usual narrative of women, between bump-watch and bitch fights, suggesting the couple was pregnant or ready to adopt and that Clooney and Angelina Jolie were either hating on each other or best friends. Just like we lauded The Business Woman Media and clicked on articles about how amazing Clooney is, we need to not click on those pieces to show that this way of covering women is of no interest to the public. -- source link

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