Did bridget jones really liberate us?

Contemporary men’s movements are taking part in a process of reassessment, reflecting upon what ’being a man’ means. Unfortunately, many of these ’men in crisis’ fall into the easy trap of blaming women’s growing advantages as the cause of their malaise. Women too, continue to reassess traditional notions of masculinity and femininity through pop culture.

While men are in crisis, many women continue to flick through the glossies and self-help manuals in an attempt to find their own problems, their own complex identities, reflected there. If some male commentators are suggesting that women, in their will to power, have taken a little bit of men’s essential selves with them, women are recognising that ’having it all’ demands some complex navigation between what is seen as masculine and what is seen as feminine.

The world of work and public life is so steeped in its masculine image and language that it is difficult for women not to become infected, and as a result be perceived as unhealthy ’masculine’ for simply trying to do their work as well as a man.

Good men are hard to find, if the common-sense aphorisms of popular culture are to be believed; in fact any available men seem to be in short supply. Belief in this ’fact’ shapes the agenda for women’s magazines. Having a career is all well and good, but not if it is at the expense of finding Mr. Right. All warn implicitly that the heady days of youth, glamour and social freedom are all too soon replaced by the lengthy twilight of terminal single status.

The ’singleton’ is, perhaps, the elder sister of the ladette. Once she has reached a certain level in her career, the biological imperative to ‘nest’ takes over. It is only then that the singleton realises her success in other fields has been at the expense of the one thing that ‘really’ matters — finding a man.

Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) is one of those books which is credited with catching the mood of the period in its story of a young woman and her friends negotiating the obstacles of contemporary heterosexual courtship. Bridget neatly expresses the tensions of a woman who recognises the rhetoric of feminism and empowerment, but isn’t always able to relate this to her fulsome desire for a hero from a Jane Austen novel. The book revives the belief that a good romance thrives on conflict and antagonism between the sexes — all engendered by misunderstandings about the various modes of courtship adopted by each party. Helen Fielding’s use of an Austenesque plot dynamic affirms that this ’truth’ was known by Jane Austen when she wrote Pride and Prejudice. As Aminatta Forna observes, “It is now assumed that unequal relationships between men and women are the result of biology,” an idea which is supported by TV series such as Men Don’t Iron, aired on Channel 4 in 1998. Even if people don’t really believe that relationships are governed by some intrinsic Darwinian logic, increasing weight is given to the notion that man and woman simply think and express their emotions differently, and the popularity of John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (1993) is testament to this.

The Diary addresses the perspective of gender by affirming that men are different, if equal, and that to ‘survive’ (in other words to conform and enter heterosexual monogamous bliss) one must learn to speak their language whilst celebrating the peculiarities of one’s own sex. In the case of women these include the overwhelming desire for coupledom based on a Cosmopolitan view of single womanhood, sexuality and sacrifice.

The second crucial lesson is that ‘after all, there is nothing so unattractive to a man as strident feminism.’

As a flawed character Bridget Jones is engaging and certainly many readers’ responses are those of empathy and recognition of their own feelings; more than this she is contemporary womanhood packaged and polished by the women’s glossies such as Cosmopolitan. What glossies are good at, after all, is the stimulation of desire for what we haven’t got and the creation of anxiety about our own attributes; they wish us to believe that our aspirations are attainable with a little judicious remodelling and investment in the kinds of commodities advertised within their pages.

Bridget Jones and its ilk paint a bleak picture of the contemporary singles scene, with women seeking control through the dutiful accounting of the days ‘sins’ — calorie intake, cigarettes, alcohol. What is most depressing about the Bridget Jones effect is that because people find echoes of their own struggles with femininity in it, it somehow legitimates the measuring of ones own inadequacies through the body.

a) How are the notions “feminine” and “masculine” perceived nowadays?

b) How is the perspective of gender described in the text?

Extract 2

Interview: Pamela Paul discusses singledom

Veils, flowers, music, bills ― chances are, someone close to you is having a June wedding. But Morning Edition will spend Tuesdays this month examining singleness. Americans are living longer, marrying later and outliving spouses for more years thanks to medical advances. So NPR special correspondent Susan Stamberg decided to walk down the aisle of the unmarried where ‘I do’ is not necessarily the goal.

Susan Stamberg (reporting). Bridget Jones is not alone in her fear of aloneness. Her biological clock is ticking. She’s on the wrong side of 30 and still not married. Lots of us are alone a lot. The year 2000 census found 82 million unmarried Americans. Of those, some 20 million were divorced, 13 1/2 million were widowed, and more than 48 million had never married. Over at American Demographics magazine, editor Pamela Paul finds these figures sobering but misleading.

Ms. Pamela Paul (Editor, American Demographics Magazine). Women still get married at an average age of 25 in this country; men get married at 27. Now that’s only three years older than they did in 1890. And I think sometimes, there’s a misperception that people are getting married a lot later because among certain demographics, among sort of older, more urban, more educated people, they’re putting marriage off longer. But the vast majority of Americans continue to get married at a fairly early age.

Stamberg. But still, in certain circles anyway, single has become the new norm. So is there a way to see it as not simply a holding pattern but something of value in and of itself?

Ms. Paul. Well, I think it should be seen as something more than a holding pattern because we do know, for example, that the later you wait to get married, the more likely your marriage is to last. And so if people really regarded that period of dating as a time for self-exploration, I think that they would have a lot better time before they get married.

Stamberg. But you’re thinking still about marriage as the norm and this extended period of time as not the norm just a way to get your chops in shape for when you get married.

Ms. Paul. Right. There’s very little attitude of being single for single’s sake. Most people think of singledom as a stage that is a step towards marriage, the same way that people think of cohabitation and living together before marriage generally as a testing ground and not an end in and of itself.

Stamberg.There’s certainly a stigma to being single.

Ms. Paul. Absolutely. And one of the greatest misperceptions, I think, about our culture is that, you know, a lot of cultural critics will say, `Oh, it’s such an anti-marriage culture, and marriage is so disparaged.’ And the opposite is the case. I mean, all of these single TV shows and single books really are marriage bibles. I mean, if you look at Bridget Jones’s Diary or Ally McBeal, all of those women really wanted to get married. And then when you even look at something like Seinfeld, which is about urban singles, I mean, these people are depicted as downright neurotic.

Stamberg.It’s interesting, though, that this pull to marriage, this ultimate wish not to be single really still exists because so many of the reasons for marriage itself have changed. You know, you don’t have to get married to survive in North Dakota anymore as the pioneer. You don’t have to get married to have a sex life. I mean, there’s much more sexual freedom these days. There are reliable contraceptives so you don’t have to marry to make babies. Roles have changed so that women run corporations, men cook great dinners, and yet here marriage remains the expected state.

Ms. Paul. Definitely. I mean, it’s so interesting. Marriage has really gone from being a job for women – and that was really how you got your economic security – to being a choice. And yet, the overwhelming majority of women still say they want to get married. If you look at public opinion polls, 90 percent of high school seniors say they want to get married; 50 percent of high school seniors say they want to get married within five years which is pretty surprising.

Stamberg.I find as an old married lady, 40 years, that this is all very encouraging. I must say it’s sort of sweet, isn’t it, this poll to coupleness.

Ms. Paul. Right. And I think what you’re seeing with Generation X is a kind of neo-traditionalism because on the one hand, there is this longing for these traditional institutions. And that, I think, in large part is a reaction against the baby boomers who were the ultimate rebels. They rebelled against every formal institution. Gen Xers, by no means, want to revert back to traditional roles within marriage. I mean, they’re not looking for the homemaker mother and the breadwinner husband. And men, as much as women, don’t want that. In fact, men very much want their wives to work. They want their wives to have independent lives, and they no longer want the responsibility of carrying the economic burden on their own.

Stamberg.What would it take to erase the stigma, to get us thinking in new ways about this state of singledom?

Ms. Paul. I think that if there was more of a realistic discussion about marriage in this country, about what marriage can and cannot offer, then I think that people would really accept the state of singlehood much more for what it is. And what it really is, is a time for yourself. It’s a time to figure out who you are, where you stand in your world and what you want in another person. And to jump into marriage before you’ve established all that, I can tell from my own experience and from the experience of other divorcees I’ve talked to, is a huge mistake. Even if they don’t get married until the age of 32, given the life expectancy today, they’re still going to have 50 years of marriage. So there’s no rush.

a) Why has being single become the new norm?

b) Is modern culture really anti-marriage?

c) What are the advantages and disadvantages of marriage and singledom?

Extract 3

The Bridget Jones Economy