Faint-hearted feminists? What’s Salma Hayek's problem?

What is it about the term “feminist” that still makes some women flinch and bridle, even when they are actively engaged in helping other females? Actress Salma Hayek has just been honoured at Equality Now’s “Make Equality Reality” event, for co-founding “Chime for Change”, which fights for women’s rights around the world. At the ceremony, which also honoured Gloria Steinem, Hayek said: “I am not a feminist. If men were going through the things women are going through today, I would be fighting for them with just as much passion. I believe in equality.”

Thanks Salma. I hope you chucked your award in the bin (where apparently it belongs) on the way out.

Hayek is, to put it politely, confused. Someone should explain to her that feminism is all about wanting equality. That, arguably, to divorce feminism from equality is like shaking an egg and trying to separate the yolk from the white afterwards.

I could go on, but I won’t, because I desperately want you to like me. Especially if you’re a man, I want you to think I’m fun, sweet, reasonable and not at all like one of those crazy ranting feminists who wear sensible shoes and have forgotten how to flirt. Oh no, I’m not that kind of feminist. In fact, it might be simpler just to leave feminism out of it altogether…

Sorry for that facetious lapse. However, this isn’t just about definitions of feminism, or how everyone, including Hayek, has a right to self-define as they wish.

This isn’t even about rubbishing the fallacy that “feminism equals man-hating”, because (give me a tiny break!), we should have all managed to move on from that by now.

This is about the astonishing persistence of what I’d term small-f feminist-woman. The kind of woman who isn’t necessarily stupid or ill-informed, who, in fact, often talks and behaves in a “feminist” way, yet she still recoils from the term “feminist” as if she’d just found a scorpion nestling in her shoe. The kind of woman, such as Hayek, who accepts an award for helping women at an event also honouring Gloria Steinem (Gloria Steinem!) and then has the graceless gall to use it as an opportunity to announce that she isn’t a feminist.

Some might use the “actions speak louder than words” argument – that what someone such as Hayek does, namely her charity, is more important than what she says. Phooey. Hayek’s denouncement and dismissal of feminism, before the global media, was an action. By doing this, to my mind, Hayek exhibited classic small-f characteristics – on a night when she was rightly being celebrated for helping other women, she seemed almost embarrassed to be “caught at it”.

You have to wonder – what’s with these women and their seemingly all-consuming need to distance themselves from feminism? An unworthy thought crawls through my brain: is this a man-pleasing exercise – are they afraid that men might find even the slightest whiff of feminism a turn-off, so they bang on about “equality” to keep everything safely gender-neutral and “sexy”?

Or does it go yet deeper, darker, than that, into the realms of female self-hatred? Where the cause of womankind in itself is just not good enough, interesting enough and so men must be prominently included, feted and appeased, even at a female-celebrating event? While I’m all for inclusivity, something has to explain why some women seem to feel that good instincts to support other females have to be disguised and reframed for public consumption.

I honestly hoped that we had moved forward – from a time where feminism was not so much a dirty word, as (worse!) a forgotten one. However, for some, it appears to have swung full circle back to being a dirty one again. While some may view this as an overreaction to some red carpet waffling, to me, this is about small-f feminist-woman and how her unique brand of self-hatred is taking far too long to die out.

P-p-please save me from these soppy penguins

It’s that time of year when one must reach for the test tube and measure out the precise amount of tears shed watching the John Lewis Christmas advert, to gauge the emotional state of the nation.

This year, once again, I’m dry-eyed. Some stupid penguin wants to cop off with another stupid penguin. The penguin happens to be available at (what do you know?) John Lewis. The tagline: “Give someone the Christmas they’ve been dreaming of”. What: penguins coupling? If this is what you’ve been dreaming of, may I urge you to seek urgent psychiatric attention.

Last year’s John Lewis advert was unpardonably lame (a cartoon bear woken up by an alarm clock) but this one is pure parental buzzkill. Once again, John Lewis needs to learn that its market isn’t children, it’s stressed parents – we’re the ones who need some “sugar”.

That’s why that advert a few years ago about a child excitedly giving his parents a present on Christmas morning was such a killer. There was the kid we wanted, the life we wanted, even the Liberty print duvet covers we wanted. Where do soppy stuffed penguins come into any of this, even if they are available in-store?

Who you gonna call? Not these killjoys

Swiss scientists have concluded that ghosts are an illusion of the mind. The scientists conjured up artificial apparitions, or a “feeling of presence”, so convincing and disturbing that some participants in the experiment asked for it to stop.

Cue the “science bit” about how mentally unstable or stressed people can lose track of the location of their body, which gives them the feeling that someone or something else is there with them. There was also some stuff about robot arms tapping people on the shoulder, out of sync, which all sounds very academic and intellectual and not sub-Scooby-Doo, or a risible waste of money, at all.

What these scientists don’t seem to have factored in is the concept of self-willed gullibility, in that some people actively enjoy believing in ghosts and won’t be talked out of it. I’m not referring to those awful con-artist mediums who pretend that they can speak to the dead, mentally torturing grieving relatives. This is about people who believe in ghosts for their own innocent, spine-tingling entertainment and wouldn’t necessarily need them to be proved or disproved.

There is a part of the human psyche that prefers to remain a gasping, tantalised idiot. When I see the spooky twins appear in the corridor in The Shining, I don’t want someone in a lab coat appearing in a corner of the screen, explaining just why this could never really happen.

In the same way, no one ever got on to a ghost train wishing that someone would turn the lights right up and spoil the whole thing. Sometimes it’s not that people are credulous, rather that they’re happy to go along with believing, for personal entertainment purposes. Science needs to go away and stop trying to spoil everyone’s fun.