A whole GENERATION of women, maybe one and a half, we did not quite understand what the personal was political until we read How to be a woman , the book halfway between the essay and the self-fiction that made Caitlin Moran a feminist reference and planetary star in 2011. That's how grateful you have to be to the British writer. In his latest book, How to be famous , Moran tells the passage to adulthood of Johanna Morrigan, a precarious, overweight 19-year-old girl from a large, hard-working and hippy family who makes her way in London in the 1990s as a journalist musical. Despite his age, his background and the morons who crosses the road, Johanna Morrigan does not survive, lives; He does it at full speed, he eats the world with talent, pupil and salt shaker, as the couplet says. How to be famous is a story about the construction of identity and the conquest of the independence of a woman who skates from time to time, like everyone else, but who, in general, manages her social, emotional and working life successfully.
It is a young self-sufficient and full woman who is also very funny.
Other 'Carpe Diem'
Why do JLo and Shakira's asses bother you?- Ferment, ferment damn! A fashion that Aunt Asunción already knew
The protagonist of Moran represents an anomaly: she is a comic hero who is not a duck. Lately, there are few real or fictional female figures that make us laugh from a comfortable position, almost as if they were frowned upon.
Think of Fleabag . Fleabag did not excite me. There, I have already said, this is how one becomes a corpse for the purposes of feminist pop culture. If you want to stop reading and continue with your day, I will understand; If you decide to stay, here are some nuances that may save my skin.
Fleabag is a fresh but deep series, narratively original, with a hilarious script; he deserves all the Emmy he took and those who didn't, the BAFTAs too; but when Phoebe Waller-Bridge, her brilliant and visionary creator and protagonist, breaks the fourth wall in search of solidarity laughter, I look away. It's not you, Phoebe, it's me. I think I have broken the ability to laugh at the small daily failures of women from using it so much. It is possible that I do not fit in the body a single joke more about calamitous powders, social clumsiness, intake chained with anxiolytics, leagues that wear Avengers underpants, praises to the Satisfyer as if it were a totem and, in general, mishandling of the life.
Making comedy with your own miseries is liberating and intelligent. Claiming the right to shit joyfully from women in a society that has required them to fit into rigid physical and moral frameworks is very hygienic, very necessary; run away from the capitalist idea of success, too. It also fits with the basic principle of comedy that it is convenient to get below the viewer to reach your heart.
The restlessness comes when it becomes a cliché, when it seems impossible to build a sympathetic uninhibited thirtieth-century character without loading it awkwardly. What we face here is a pattern: imperfection goes from being a right to be a duty, not just for fictional characters. Screenwriters, monologuists, great viñetistas, made, balanced, recognized, of those who burn the eyelashes in front of the computer to give their best, always make the quarterly statements of the IRPF on time and have the house and mental health as the jets of gold, force stunned characters.
Hopefully the cycle will close soon and the era of the heroines that fall well without the need to wallow through the mud begin
The feeling is that we have already heard all possible misfortunes. We have seen the duckling woman — a fiction made by such capable women — getting drunk, falling, not able to find her ass in her pants… What else do we want? It is time for the bubble of the duckling woman to burst. Not for her, she is great, it takes a lot of talent to make sparks out of failures, but because of the logic that reveals her success. The insistence on this standard, the magnetism of the duckling woman, her irresistible charm make one think that the full, the happy, the cunning, the good stewards of her life are not funny to anyone. Or worse, that to make comedy is to liquidate the revolutionary tax that your life is a mess. Hopefully the cycle will close soon and the era of the heroines that fall well without the need to wallow through the mud begins.
