Would you describe Amal Clooney as ‘homely’? Her husband George did

‘Homely’ Amal Clooney with husband George. Picture: Getty

Showing your age, sir. Looking at you, George Clooney. Recently that gorgeous specimen of masculinity declared his wife was, wait for it, “homely”. Correct. That word that implies the human equivalent of a slipper. The label with connotations of mousiness and mumsiness, the little housewife and little lady, balls and chains and trouble and strife. The word that’s on a slippery slope to servitude and subservience, all those dispiriting scenarios on the home front that womanhood is waking up to and not wanting a bar of.

And we’re talking Amal Clooney here. Goddess of working mothers with six-year-old twins under her feet, who just happens to be the planet’s most famous human rights lawyer now that Geoffrey Robertson is reaching his dotage. This is the Lebanese/British barrister striding the world stage, representing the likes of former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, Julian Assange and the entire country of Armenia. That brilliant legal mind has led to various appointments within the UN and the UK government; in her spare time she’s also an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School. Exhausted yet?

Amal Clooney just happens to be the planet’s most famous human rights lawyer now that Geoffrey Robinson is reaching his dotage.

And her dear husband reduces all that to … “homely”. Let’s hope he was joking. But George has form – he’s described a previous girlfriend as homely too. Hmm, likes the word, how it sounds, what it implies. Wishful thinking? But the unfortunate message attached to it is: Back in your box, woman. Where you belong.

We see this ghosting, reducing, denigrating of female achievement again and again. With women who dare to be different. Who challenge the norms expected of them. Who have the loudest voices, the sharpest questions, the surfeit of curiosity. Who tell uncomfortable truths. Who do not cultivate male approval. The Barbie movie – that smart, feminist, cultural juggernaut that trampled on everything in its wake and changed cinema history – did not get a best director Academy Award nomination for its creator, Greta Gerwig, and Margot Robbie did not get an acting nod. But of course Ken did. At the Golden Globes the film got a tokenistic award of Cinematic and Box Office Achievement and one really lame joke from host Jo Koy, about Oppenheimer being based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning book – and Barbie “on a plastic doll with big boobies”. Lovely.

Barbie stars Margot Robbie, right, and Ryan Gosling. Picture: Getty

Koy and the Academy were called out for it, and it’s what women must do, continually, alongside the good men among us. Call it out, and keep on calling it out, because females no longer belong in that quieter, lesser, subservient place. Back in your box? No thanks.

Decades after Sylvia Plath’s death her husband, Ted Hughes, wrote movingly about the woman hated, belittled and scorned by the establishment. In his last volume of poems, Birthday Letters, he wrote how Plath was confronted by “the mystery of hatred”; how “they” let her know, again and again, the contempt for everything she attempted. She had enormous courage to keep going, to strap herself to the brutal god of creation; she wouldn’t give up her writing no matter what was flung, disparagingly, in her way.

Plath wrote in her novel The Bell Jar: “I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs Willard’s kitchen mat.”

Is there something of the Clooney psyche in that? It’s the mentality of “back in your place, woman, back to the kitchen and where’s my dinner”. Old man talk. Which the Academy’s elderly directing voters seem to chime with, alongside the Jo Koys of the world. But younger generations are cottoning on and calling it out. Loudly, in fury and scorn. As they should.