Amber McNaught's weekly column on all the things that make her see red...
So, have you been watching Big Brother? No wait, that was a silly question: of course you haven't. If all of the people who've told me they're boycotting it this year are anything to go by, no one is watching Big Brother right now. Except me, obviously. I keep on watching it, partly so that I can blog about it, but mostly because I like whining about stupid people, and trust me, there are a lot of stupid people on Big Brother. In fact, if they took everyone who attends the auditions, and somehow prevented them from breeding, I suspect we could solve a whole lot of society's problems in one go. Food for thought for next year...
This year, of course, the big news was the fact that the series kicked off with an all-female house. Predictably, there has been bitching, boasting and one-upmanship a-plenty from "the girls", who are mostly concerned with such pressing issues as "who is the prettiest housemate of all?" and "who does the single male contestant fancy?" None of this is surprising. We already know that most Big Brother contestants spend more time talking to their own reflection in the mirror than talking to each other. What has surprised me, though - and to be honest, I'm not really sure why - is the sheer lack of ambition these women have.
That's not, of course, to say that they don't have any ambitions, because they do. They all want to be famous. The twins, for instance, want to be social workers or some such thing. Chanelle wants to be a speech therapist. Most of all, however, they want to be WAGs - the wives or girlfriends of footballers. So, while it's perhaps unfair to say that these women have no ambition, they certainly don't seem to have any ambitions for themselves. Rather than actually finding success in their own lives, they'd rather just attach themselves to a successful man, and live off him. And they'd prefer it if the man in question could be a footballer, thanks very much.
This desire to marry a rich man and be kept by him for the rest of your life isn't a new one, of course. But it's the kind of ambition that's been stigmatised for a long time now. Most women these days will at least pay lip service to the idea of doing something more with their life than just "marrying well" - or at least they did until the WAG culture kicked off. Now, being even vaguely connected to a footballer is seen as something really quite special, and young women are happy to admit that all they want from life is the opportunity to shop 'til they drop, and be photographed doing it. When it was suggested to Big Brother's Chanelle, for instance, that she could be rich and successful by becoming a lawyer, she discounted the idea because "the paparazzi don't follow lawyers around, do they?" And as we all know, there's not much point in doing something unless you're going to be seen doing it in the newspaper the next day.
Luckily, the Big Brother contestants aren't exactly representative of women in general, and we thank the Lord for that. But this glorification of women who've done nothing more than marry a footballer is a strange one, I think. And, if you happened to be a footballer, a pretty damn scary one...
Amber McNaught is a freelance writer and regular Shiny contributor. Really, she only wrote this column because she's jealous she didn't marry a footballer.
