Musings of an Inappropriate Woman

‘Everything’s cool as long as I’m getting thinner’: how Karl de-fanged Lily Allen

I felt strangely sad when I read about Lily Allen’s big debut onto the fashion scene, performing at the Chanel show in Paris last week.

Strange because, well, she certainly seemed happy about. She’s ‘one of them’ now: friends with Kate Moss, one of Karl Lagerfeld’s British darlings. I wouldn’t call it ‘selling out’, because it’s not like it has affected her music - or like she ever wasn’t a mainstream pop star to begin with. And yes, she does look pretty fabulous in the photo above.

But I’m wondering if this newfound ‘fabulousness’ comes at too high a price - namely, her shrinking body. In this week’s Grazia, Maxine Frith writes:

After the show, Karl gave Lily a massive bunch of roses and told her she was a Chanel girl now. Her appearance came after months of dieting and exercise to ensure she looked her best.

“She and Karl had been talking for ages about what she should do for the show,” says an inside source. “Lily’s really slimmed down but she’s never going to be a size zero so she didn’t want to walk the runway and be compared to the models.

Now, Grazia is the classiest of the weekly magazines, but I’d be silly if I didn’t consider that the above was probably at least a bit made up - like most celebrity gossip stories. But the overall narrative strikes me as true. Allen has dropped a dress size or two over the past year or so.

And, well, ew. It’s not like she’s alone in her body shrinking as her fame grows (the same could be said of almost any female celebrity), but there’s something particularly uncomfortable about it in her case, because she’s always been so open about her insecurities - in her lyrics, her blog posts and her comments to the media.

I wish my life was a little less seedy
Why am I always so greedy?
Wish I looked just like Cheryl Tweedy
I know I never will

One thing some people seem to miss about Lily Allen’s lyrics (I’m thinking all those people who hate the song 22 here) is that they tend to be three things at once: part facetious comment on society, part facetious comment on her own shortcomings, and part painfully honest admission of her insecurities.

So in the case of 22, when she says of a woman in her late-20s “it’s sad but it’s true that society says her life is already over”, I don’t think she’s saying that she, Lily Allen, thinks that women are “past it” once they hit 30. I think she’s saying that certain segments of society imply this is the case, and that if you’re the kind of woman who believes that her value resides entirely in her looks, ‘it girl’ qualities and ability to attract a man, there’s an element of truth to it.

Similarly, when she sings “I’m not a saint, and I’m not a sinner, now everything’s cool as long as I’m getting thinner”, she’s a making a social comment, yes, but it’s a comment that works because it’s something a lot of women actually think, if only secretly. Including, I’m willing to bet, Lily Allen.

Which is why the Karl Lagerfeld connection is so off-putting. Because it hinges on her meeting his ridiculous body standards. And because it backs up what her lyrics suggest she has long believed, at least on an emotional level - that social acceptance and affirmation come from being as thin as possible.

First published in New Matilda.

If you grew up in Australia in the early 1990s, the rubber bracelets above probably look familiar.

Known as “pash bands” — or “fuck bands” if you wanted to be really naughty — the idea was that each coloured bracelet symbolised a different sex act. According to an article published in a UK paper last weekend: “Yellow represents a hug, while pink means a love bite and orange or purple for a kiss, before moving through different sex acts until black, which means full sex”. Some people would joke that purple actually stood for marriage, being the colour of sexual frustration.

If somebody broke your bracelet, you were supposed to perform the corresponding act on them.

Nobody ever actually did it, of course. Even the most sexually precocious kids I went to primary school with didn’t do more than attempt an unsatisfying first kiss in the playground after school. (To my knowledge, no pash bands were involved in these incidents.) When I was in high school, they made a brief retro resurgence, and my best friend and I at the time bought the black ones — known as “fuck bands” — which we vowed to wear until we lost our virginity.

We lost the rubber bands long before that happened.

Pash bands — or “shag bands” as they’re apparently now known — have always been about shits and giggles, about kids playing at being grown-ups. The humour comes from the fact that most primary school kids think sex is icky. Accordingly, it’s fun for them to talk about it, and gross their friends out by teasing them that they might partake in it someday.

If you read the Courier-Mail over the weekend, however, they represent a rather more sinister — and “new”, which usually seems to correlate with dangerous — trend; “a parent’s worst nightmare”. According to conservative “feminist” commentator Melinda Tankard-Reist, they “[set] up girls as service stations for boys” and “invite sexual assault”. Because nothing invites sexual assault like wearing a coloured bracelet — and nothing says “feminist” like suggesting kids “invite” sexual assault.

Given that most people aged between 25 and 55 having either worn one or parented someone who has, it amazes me that any journalist could find these innocuous pieces of plastic worthy of such fear mongering.

But our readiness to jump on the moral panic train says a lot about our tendency to assume the worst of people younger than us. Even in my own research, which aims to unpack media myths about young adults’ sexual behaviours, the 20-somethings I speak to bemoan how much more “out there” today’s teens are than they were 10 years ago — conveniently forgetting that the same complaints were made about them less than a decade ago. Talk to some actual teenagers, and you’ll get a far more nuanced story.

Tankard-Reist has a new book to promote, about the sexualisation of girls, and if the recent extract on New Matilda is any indication, she has some interesting and relevant arguments to make on the subject. It’s hard to muster up the enthusiasm to listen to them though when she, and others like her, persist in discrediting themselves by participating in this kind of shrill — and factually incorrect — hysteria.

The sexualisation of children is a real issue, but as UQ academic Karen Brooks showed in her 2008 book Consuming Innocence, it’s about a lot more than sex. It’s certainly about a lot more than kids having sex — which, by the way, most of them aren’t. And I’ll tell you one thing: it’s got very little to do with the humble pash band.