Jane Birkin, who died this week at the age of 76, appeared to be a delightful woman – attractive, adventurous and stoic. Nevertheless, I had to look twice at the Daily Mail headline on Monday which screeched ‘Jane Birkin, a true style icon who put today’s trashy celebs to shame’.
Are they talking about the same Jane Birkin, I wonder? The one whose first film role, when still a teenager, was as a naked, nameless model ‘romping’ in a threesome with David Hemmings and Gillian Hills? I mean, talk about nice work if you can get it – but pretty ‘trashy’ if you want to fling around words like that about actual human beings, which I generally don’t.
Even men who were not sexually interested in her fetishised her lack of self-esteem
The same goes for that awful cheesy horror of a pop song ‘Je t’aime… moi non plus’ which Serge Gainsbourg originally wrote for his married lover Brigitte Bardot and recorded with her before she demanded that it not be released after her husband indicated his displeasure. Gainsbourg also asked Marianne Faithfull to do the honours: ‘He asked everybody’, she said. When he finally got round to Birkin, he told her to sing an octave higher than Bardot ‘so you’ll sound like a little boy’. He would later confide that he had been ‘afraid’ of the magnificent Bardot but was not scared of Birkin as she was flat-chested. What an ocean-going weirdo.
And was it not rather trashy that her Svengali would, at a whim, divest her of her clothing, chain her to a radiator and take photographs of her, one batch of which ended up in Oui magazine? ‘It must have been hard for the children’, Birkin said of the incident. It’s a surprise social services didn’t take them into care. But according to drooling obituarists, Birkin was the opposite of trashy; she was ‘classy’.
As with Audrey Hepburn, there’s something a little creepy about this equation: posh + flat-chested + self-deprecating + preferably dead = classy. It’s a way of thinking which has led the fashion industry in particular to promote such an unfeminine ideal of beauty that – quelle surprise – some designers have jumped on the trans bandwagon with indecent haste. Who wants trashy old tits spoiling the line when you can put a nice skinny boy in a frock?
Topless in the photo which accompanies the weird Mail headline, Birkin has a sad and scared look on her face. It’s the same look she wears in most of her nude shots: my clothes fell off accidentally – please don’t hurt me! The piece is a veritable finger buffet of self-loathing – ‘I must have been a DISASTER in bed!’; ‘When a man loves you, it changes everything’; ‘How much talent did I really have? Not that much’; and the prurient lip-licking of various men, including the writer of this vile piece – ‘When Jane Birkin’s husband left her, she blamed herself’. At 17, Graham Greene cast her as deaf-mute in his play Carving A Statue and for most of her life she was seen and not heard; she looked like a woman who had had her feelings hurt a lot, from being bullied at boarding school to being repeatedly jilted by Gainsbourg. Whether jumping into the Seine or being dipped naked into plastic, she was a victim-waif of the kind preferred in the 1960s. People were shocked when Gainsbourg later recorded a song about incest with his daughter, but he was surely hiding in plain sight his taste for extreme youth in females when he pictured Birkin naked and hugging a stuffed toy for the sleeve of his record Histoire de Melody Nelson.
Even men who were not sexually interested in her fetishised her lack of self-esteem. Rufus Wainwright said: ‘What was most fascinating was how impervious she was regarding her success and unparalleled beauty.’ A trashy woman demands the spotlight; a classy woman erases herself, wants to Be Kind above all else, and surrenders her spaces and her trophies. A trashy woman enjoys stripping off; a classy woman has it imposed upon her. When Kate Moss posed in a very similar setting to the Oui sessions early in her career, she was subjected to mass tut-ins by the press and scoldings about promoting ‘heroin chic’. But I’d wager that Kate Moss’s daughter never had to witness her mother being chained naked to a radiator by her father so he could take mucky photos of her.
A trashy woman demands the spotlight; a classy woman erases herself, wants to Be Kind above all else, and surrenders her spaces and her trophies
Is ‘trashy’ a word women use about other women? Not generally, but there are ignoble exceptions. One imagines that Jackie Kennedy found Marilyn Monroe trashy – until she sold herself to the highest bidder, Mr Onassis. I have former sex worker friends who are hilariously judgmental of other women’s sexual mores, seeming to presume that anyone who doesn’t charge for it is a slut. And then there’s what I have named ‘When the nipples go south, the nose goes north’ syndrome: high-profile women who would strip off at the drop of a hat when young and perky coming over all moral once they’ve been mugged by gravity. Helen Mirren said while publicising her film The Queen that the former monarch existed in ‘a world of duty, sacrifice and honour meeting up with the Walkers crisps generation of consumer celebrity, going to Ibiza, taking your top off and staggering about boasting about how many guys you shagged that night’. The singer Annie Lennox, who was once more than happy to prance about in her scanties, has said: ‘Nowadays, women are sexually explicit and they use this as a tool to get popular, and I find this very one-dimensional.’
‘Trashy’ is such an ugly word, comparing people to rubbish, and we all know who it was aimed at in this instance – the young women who appear on Love Island and the OnlyFans lot and the Kardashians. But like many misogynistic words, the use says more about the person who uses it than it does about the person it is used of. From women, it often indicates envy; from men, a thwarted desire to have or be the target of their contempt. It’s always grubby. But the weaponising of a dead woman in order to attack and diminish living women is surely the best definition of the word ‘trashy’ imaginable.
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