This has not been a fabulous week for metrosexuality. The photographs of Prince Harry riding a motorbike in the Afghanistan desert, displaying his six-pack, sun shades and a baseball cap that read, “We do bad things to bad people”, flicking through Zoo magazine and posing with machine gun and body armour, were all a celebration of triumphant masculinity.
The photos were also a terrific advertisement for the army and thus made commentators uneasy. Plus, journalists were grumpy at being out of the loop. It was an extraordinary enterprise. The prime minister knew, as did the defence secretary, but nobody else in parliament did. Tony Blair must have felt the chill of exclusion. Journalists who stumbled upon the thread found their stories mysteriously vanishing as soon as they were referred up. CNN got the scoop and then sacrificed it in exchange for acres of footage.
At the weekend I was telephoned by Radio 4’s PM programme, asking if Harry would now enjoy life-long immunity from the press. I gave him 24 hours.
Columnists paid their dues with a lacing of arsenic. Suzanne Moore, in the Mail on Sunday, reproached Prince Harry for his “Boy’s Own adventure”. A day earlier, in the Mail, Amanda Platell had complained about the waste of money. Minette Marrin in The Sunday Times suggested that Harry’s service had not been worth the risk. Catherine Bennett in The Observer feared that the good PR glossed over the cost of war. As the week progressed, and the older male columnists piled in, hostility strengthened.
Thank heavens for The Sun, which quoted Harry’s comrades’ succinct tribute to him: “He’s here, he’s mean, his gran’s the effin’ Queen.” The coverage in the US was also more generous than in Britain.
The fact is that Prince Harry’s visit altered him for the better and was a morale-booster for the troops. He was not light-hearted about the consequences of war – he travelled home with two badly injured soldiers – but he clearly enjoyed the simplicity of men being men.
Perhaps there was a feminist note of disapproval in the slightly sour coverage by women columnists. Yet Harry bantered with a female Harrier jump jet pilot called Michelle Tompkins.
Heroism is not exclusive to the armed forces. But the cheerful bravery, free of cosy sentiment, is marked and particular. The papers have also interviewed this week the undeniably good and fearless author Asne Seierstad, author of The Bookseller of Kabul. She had witnessed war atrocities but the last thing to upset her was the sight of mice in her basement being caught in traps.
A less encouraging portrait of masculinity is There Will Be Blood. There are no main female parts in the film, apart from a small girl in a smock apron. There is male sweat and hardship. Daniel Day-Lewis thanked his grandfather and father and sons at the Oscars, prompting some surprise that his mother never got a look-in. Since he is avowedly a method actor, maybe it has taken Day-Lewis time to reacclimatise to the female sex.
It was certainly not a misogynistic film. The absence of civilising femininity turned the oilman, played quite brilliantly by Day-Lewis, into a murderous drunk with rotten table manners. Next time my husband suggests a night out with the boys, I will raise There Will Be Blood as a terrible warning.
On Wednesday I was asked to interview Kathleen Turner for a literary event at Ronnie Scott’s – perfect casting of her voice and the club’s jazz tradition. The theme of her new book, Send Yourself Roses, is liberation from sexual stereotype. As she puts it: “Fearlessness at 50 comes from having wrestled with life’s challenges and learnt from them.”
Turner was not exactly timid before she was 50. Body Heat, with its then rare full nudity, was more than 25 years ago. Turner was Jane Birkin with attitude. She attributes her lack of inhibition to her upbringing in Europe, as the daughter of a diplomat posted in Britain, contrasting the easy-going approach of Europeans to sex with the uptight hypocrisy of Americans.
This is the first time I have heard British sexual characteristics lumped together with those of the French and the Italians. To the French, of course, we are repressed and homosexual. Yet to Americans, such as Turner, we are as famous for siestas and porn stars as the Italians. It is a cheering misapprehension.
In May, I am starting a new job as the editor of Reader’s Digest UK. It is a while since I have had to fill in an employment form, to be witnessed by a pillar of the community. It made me feel nostalgic to think of London as a bigger version of Cranford, with lawyers, teachers, doctors and freemasons ready to give their stamp of respectability. In Hammersmith, west London, the community relies on our local butcher. So I asked him to sign my form, which then looked like paperwork from Sweeney Todd.
An interesting fact I have discovered about Reader’s Digest: in the UK, it is very popular among immigrants. Its tradition of learning and self-improvement appeals to them.
I recall talking to an educated Indian in London who was puzzled by the anti-Etonian jeering at David Cameron from the Labour benches. The Indian thought it was surely admirable to aspire to such a famous school. Why didn’t the Labour MPs try to work harder so that they could afford to send their children to Eton too?
Labour may still position itself as the party for immigrants but the eternal striver Margaret Thatcher remains their patron saint.
Jacqueline Wilson, the children’s author, says that childhood is being cut short by over-liberal parents. Naturally, she has a professional interest in prolonging it. I think parents who allow teenage sex under their roofs are encouraging dependency rather than speeding up adolescence. We may have distorted childhood but in its place is a Mediterranean model of the family. There is no reason for children to leave home any more, so they don’t. Rather than cutting short childhood, we are extending it indefinitely.
Sarah Sands is a journalist, broadcaster and former editor of the Sunday Telegraph
