Keris Stainton continues the search for a modern feminist icon...
A recent survey to find the following Top 10 inspirational female celebrities had Kylie Minogue at number one.
You can’t really argue with Kylie as inspirational, can you? She’s always been portrayed as strong, a survivor, and her recent battle with breast cancer only reinforced that. Yes, the press frequently likes to paint her as sad, lonely and desperate for a baby, but we’ve no way of knowing if that’s true (and of course the press is happy to tar any successful woman with the “yes, but she can’t keep a man” brush).
What we do know is that Kylie is ambitious, talented, stylish and confident. Like Madonna, she constantly reinvents herself and is arguably more relevant - and popular - now than at any than at any other time in her 20 year career. 20 years, can you believe it? Think back to her dancing round the bed in that strange bib-dress, singing I Should Be So Lucky. Did anyone seriously imagine she’d be the Kylie she is today?
She started out as a manufactured, “pop puppet” - the "singing budgie" - but didn’t like the direction her career was going and so left Stock, Aitken & Waterman and struck out on her own. It hasn’t always gone well (her Impossible Princess album was never released, for example), but she’s always trodden her own path, hasn’t she?
Well, perhaps not. The high points of Kylie’s career have tended to be associated with men. There was Jason Donovan (and SAW), then Michael Hutchence was credited with turning her into “Sex Kylie”. Since then there’s been her “creative director” William Baker who has shaped her image for the past 15 years, even choosing the iconic gold "Spinning Around" hot pants.
Writing in The Independent in November 2003, feminist critic Joan Smith said, “Naturally this raises questions as to whether anything about the public Kylie is authentic, or whether she is just another passive receptacle for male fantasy.”
Again in 2003, Jim O'Neill, chairman of the Professional Association of Teachers, warned that the innocence of childhood is being eroded by the sexual imagery of stars, lumping Kylie and Britney Spears in together and adding, "Kylie Minogue might be a great singer but in many of these things you can see more of her bottom than you hear of her voice." But the thing is, we all know Kylie's not a great singer and, like Madonna, she's used other, better, attributes to get ahead.
And there’s the crux. Can any artist who actively markets their sexuality be a role model? Don’t even male artists trade heavily on their sexuality these days (Justin Timberlake springs to mind). Isn’t it just a fact that sex sells and the fact that Kylie accepts and understands that should preclude her from being a feminist icon?
In 2005 Paul Morley wrote, “[Kylie] does whatever she wants with her body because it is no-one’s but her own. She never goes all the way, postponing constantly the moment of deliverance, mocking the chaotic immediacy of lust by never rushing, always promising, maintaining erotic allure without yielding, and giving everything away. To give everything away risks revealing that there is nothing to give away. It risks disappointment. Kylie’s success is based around this notion that she is always in the middle of foreplay, always preparing us for action, always leading us on, and then somehow never quite letting us down.”
I’m afraid I can’t buy into the it’s up to Kylie to do what she wants with her body argument because that seems to me like just another example of passing off male fantasy as empowerment (or as a friend put it to me recently, “doing the very things that men/teenage boys most want women to do because by doing so, we will actually be achieving fulfillment.”)
Julie Burchill makes a similar point to Morley's, but one closer to my own opinion of Kylie. “Kylie, though, due to her devilish discretion, becomes more of an enigma as the decades go by. And the more Kylie takes off kit-wise, the more patently 'decent' she reveals herself to be. She literally has nothing to hide - but, at the same time, she shows nothing.”
Of course, Kylie’s image is sexual. There are the hot pants, the underwear range (and its accompanying steamy advert) and now the bikinis, so I have the same problem with that aspect of her image as I do with Britney’s, but the difference between Kylie and Britney is that Kylie comes across as a tease rather than a sleaze. Plus it seems like she’s in control (and tongue-in-cheek) - and pretty much always has. Whether that control is an illusion is perhaps irrelevant.
Of course, Kylie, because she’s far from stupid, is aware of the problem, telling Vogue in 2003, "I look at all the girls on MTV and everything is so graphic and I think I might have started all that with the gold hot pants and by presenting myself in such a sexy way on the last album."
So, again, it’s hard to come to any sort of conclusion. I guess if you believe taking your clothes off is empowering - or that Kylie's knowingness excuses it - then yay for Kylie. If not, then I’ll work my way down that top ten list. But I’m warning you now, it doesn’t get much better.
Keris co-edits Shiny Media’s fabulous women’s fiction blog, Trashionista and contributes to TV Scoop and The Bag Lady. "Especially For You" is one of her favourite songs of all time.
