Homage to messy, imperfect, complicated, needy, funny and real women like Tanya McQuoid and Moira Rose
Forget Little Miss Perfects and their Goopy lives – my feminist idols have the courage to be real.
Paltrow is a lasting symbol of how pop culture has dudded women. She is the preppy, painfully perfect woman who posts pictures of her perfect children, who went through the perfect conscious uncoupling divorce, who takes herself too seriously while making fun of, and making money from, other women’s insecurities.
Goop, her wellness and pseudoscience website, sells over-priced vagina-scented candles, extols the virtues of vaginal steaming and once promised that putting an egg-shaped piece of jade up one’s bajingo would “increase vaginal muscle tone, hormonal balance, and feminine energy in general”.
Goop paid a penalty for spreading that last bit of baloney, but Paltrow remains the archetype Little Miss Perfect celebrity who cashes in on female anxiety.
Just as the trial in Park City was about to start, Paltrow appeared on The Art of Being Well podcast hosted by “leading functional medicine expert and best-selling author” Dr Will Cole. She talked about how she stays so perfectly beautifully thin and healthy. She basically eats bone broth.
Which explains why Paltrow was hooked up to an IV drip during the podcast. Here is Paltrow talking wellness: “I love an IV! I’m an early IV adopter. Glutathione, I love to have in an IV. Kind of a random, more fringy one, phosphatidylcholine … that’s my favourite IV when I can find them. They’re quite hard to find. And those make me feel so good.” That day, Paltrow’s IV was feeding “good old-fashioned vitamins” into her body. The po-faced Paltrow should audition for a spot for the next season of White Lotus, playing herself.
Written by Mike White, the HBO series is the very best of the current crop of eat-the-rich TV where we get a ringside seat into the holiday lives of many foul characters.
There are many places to go to try to understand the human condition. For high-brow material, one could start with Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Heidegger, and Nietzsche, too. For low-brow stuff, I go to White Lotus, particularly for the very messy, endearing character of Tanya McQuoid.
Tanya is the deeply flawed, insecure, charming and warm, exasperating and self-obsessed, bossy, sulky and very funny star of the HBO show. She is every bit as narcissistic as your common variety real-life Hollywood celebrity. Unlike neat and tidy celebrities like Paltrow, Tanya owns her narcissism and her messiness.
Tanya is insecure about how she looks (she doesn’t eat bone broth, she likes Oreos for breakfast). She’s anxious about whether her husband loves her (he doesn’t). She’s worried about whether people like her (her new gay friends don’t like her; they want to kill her). And still, she’s the eternal optimist who gives herself a little pep talk as she tries to hoist herself to safety from the boat where her killer “friends” are chasing her, into a nearby dingy.
“You got this,” she says to herself. She doesn’t. Tanya falls into the ocean and drowns. But when Jennifer Coolidge accepted her Emmy in January for best supporting actress, it was as if Tanya had risen from the ocean floor. Coolidge captures Tanya because parts of her are Tanya: complex, anxious, authentically desperate for love, and very, very funny.
Coolidge, who has appeared in many movies – the sultry love interest in American Pie and the hilarious manicurist in Legally Blonde – has revealed her own insecurities: during Covid, from never having met the man of her dreams, about her appearance, and from having a less than perfect career. Authenticity in Hollywood is an oxymoron, except when it comes to Coolidge.
This, then, is a homage, to messy, imperfect women. Women who, by admitting they are complicated, needy, insecure balls of contradictions are refreshingly warm and funny and real. Women who are so far from being perfect that it’s a form of female liberation. Beware, though, there is plenty of disingenuous messiness out there. Contrived messiness a la Amy Schumer is no better than couture perfection.
If we must also settle on a few fictional women like Tanya to celebrate real-life female messiness, then so be it. Beggars can’t be choosers. Though fictional, Tanya is more real than the raft of non-fiction celebrities who pretend to share so much about their lives. Unlike them, Tanya owns her narcissism. And who doesn’t want a side of humour with that plate of life’s messiness.
Moira Rose, the star of Schitt’s Creek, is another deeply flawed woman who explains the human condition by being an only slightly more hammed up version of real-life narcissists.
The Canadian TV series, written by father and son team Eugene and Dan Levy, follows the Rose family who move to a dingy motel in a dingy small town after they are turfed out of their mansion when their accountant sends them bankrupt. The Roses, who bought the town as a joke, discover that their last remaining asset is their first chance to live as a family, in all their hilariously dysfunctional splendour. Matriarch Moira – played by Catherine O’Hara – is the star. Not just for her peculiarly enchanting grasp of the English language, from frippets to pettifogging.
Like Tanya, Moira is neurotic, selfish, warm, needy, narcissistic and very funny. Pop culture has finally given us something real in Tanya and Moira. These messy women are a salve to all the faux perfection around us.
Pop culture has been rotten for women – apart from a few more female actors winning an Oscar, a few more women writing self-help books, and women like Paltrow selling garbage on Goop. Every possible media platform continues to advise us how to be the perfect woman, the perfect cook, perfect wife, perfect mother, doing perfect work in the perfect career, never a comma, cup or hair out of place. Social media has merely added salt to the wound.
We read Germaine Greer’s Female Eunuch to be the perfectly smart feminist; we gawked at Cindy Crawford on the catwalk to dream of being the perfectly sexy woman; we dipped into Eat Pray Love to wonder about self-realisation and the perfect love.
In short, feminism hasn’t progressed as it might have. The work that women like Gwyneth Paltrow or Nicole Kidman or Victoria Beckham put into looking perfect, sounding perfect, is disempowering. These women, along with most of their celebrity sisters, who poo-poo toxic cultures caused by men, have conspired to create a mindless culture of po-faced, faultless, celebrity perfection. The kids are perfect. Their relationships are perfect. When it’s Mother’s Day, we hear about Kidman’s perfectly lovely mother-daughter relationship.
Let me count the ways I love Tanya sobbing into the wind as she tosses her mum’s ashes into the sea in season 1: “Oh, mother, mother, mother, mother. My mother … told me I would never be a ballerina, and that was when I was skinny. My poor mother, she … she just couldn’t handle her jealousy. She had to take me down. And what’s weird is I miss my mother … even though she was a big jerk.”
On perfection, I stand with Jane Austen. When her niece Fanny Knight mentions in a letter to her aunt that one of her suitors took issue with Austen’s female characters, Austen wrote back, in March 1814: “Pictures of perfection, as you know, make me sick and wicked.”
Speaking of which, on the River Cafe Table 4 podcast last year, David Beckham spoke about how he wished he could share his love of good food with his wife. “Unfortunately,” he said, “I’m married to someone who has eaten the same thing for the last 25 years. Since I met Victoria, she only eats grilled fish, steamed vegetables.”
Women who take a bolt cutter to these exhausting, constraining chains of perfection are nothing short of exhilarating. Messy women, like Coolidge.
She doesn’t have an exercise regime. She relaxes by watching TV in bed with her dog.
And, she eats pizza.
More Coverage
Women’s rights vs trans rights: how I was drawn into a very modern battle
When Sall Grover’s online platform was flooded with trans activists, she asked herself this question: as profoundly fraught as the trans issue is, why should women’s rights come second?
Why wasn’t childcare abuse a focus of the royal commission?
The matter of child safety while in institutional childcare should have been leading the news bulletins and on the front pages at least a decade ago.
We all know that Gwyneth Paltrow is innocent. But, gosh, that was no reason to end her live-streamed trial. It’s hard to disagree with whoever wrote that on Twitter this week. Paltrow, the defendant, was great TV. When asked how the crash on the slopes of Utah’s Deer Valley affected her, she said, “Well, I did miss half a day of skiing.”