If Bono, being a man, is not everyone’s ideal Woman of the Year, the publishers of Glamour magazine, Condé Nast, should be congratulated on stimulating a sudden surge of interest in a title that, contending with a generally declining sector, amid a welter of competing awards, definitely needed the attention. Take a bow, Condé Nast executives Charles, Robert, Anna (Wintour), David and Fred. Like Bono, you guys (and Anna) remind us, in the words of Glamour’s editor, of the “many men who really are doing wonderful things for women these days”.
The only difficulty will come next year, when Glamour must outdo itself to get noticed or appear to go backwards. Maybe it could make the whole Women of the Year list male, or feature a few brave pets or children in the line-up, assuming that has not already been attempted, given the acute talented woman shortage, by its rivals.
Anyway, thousands must have rushed to the Glamour website, the better to comprehend how Bono, the singer, humanitarian and pious tax-avoider, had beaten all contenders, male and female to this honour, and then stayed, as I did, to read its Love Horoscopes. It was like going back to 1980. “November starts off with Venus travelling through your ambition angle, increasing the appeal of powerful or older men.” Not, you gather, that the current editors of Glamour appear to need any encouragement in that respect.
Explaining the Bono award, Cindi Leive, the magazine’s editor, pointed out that this powerful older man, unlike Glamour’s female winners, “could select any cause in the world to call his own”. Name a noble cause – peace, the climate, saving honey bees – and Bono might have chosen it. Yet, like a Mills and Boon surgeon or mighty sheikh, entitled to date only the beautiful, Bono, the tireless philanthropist, a man as revered by world leaders as he is by top accountants, has actively chosen to spend time with the poorest, mousiest, most bespectacled of all causes: women.
Can it be true? Yes, writes Cindi: “When a major male rock star who could do anything at all with his life decides to focus on the rights of women and girls worldwide – well, all that’s worth celebrating.”
Glamour contributor Christiane Amanpour underlined to readers the true significance of this compliment. “Bono is making clear that powerful men can, and should, take on these deep-rooted issues.” If his message catches on, maybe the whole feminist business could ultimately be outsourced to powerful men, at least until women get better at doing it themselves?
The prizewinner sounded willing enough. “I’m grateful for this award as a chance to say the battle for gender equality can’t be won unless men lead it as well as women,” Bono said. Perhaps aware that this might not sound ideally he-for-she, or even plausible, given the history of, say, the male-dominated, gender-equalising Labour party, he explained: “We’re largely responsible for the problem, so we have to be involved in the solutions.” Maybe he’s not up to speed with Liam Fox, post-Brexit.
So what does gender-equality leadership mean to Bono? By way of a clue, he recently, as an ally of the pope, urged us to “listen to Papa Francisco”. Specifically, on eradicating poverty and ending corruption.
Though the contrast between Bono’s fascinating taxation arrangements and his objections to those of, say, Exxon Mobil will not disqualify him, in all women’s eyes, from being their gender-equality leader, Glamour might have looked more closely at Papa Francisco’s latest statements on women priests. With a notable unwillingness, unlike Glamour’s Women of the Year judges, to challenge tradition, the pope has just reaffirmed that since Jesus’s apostles were men, women must forever be second-class believers.
Then again, with Glamour’s new interest in paternalism, we can’t rule out the possibility that the pope is bang on trend. The idea that men enjoy too much power, and thus have no place on all-women shortlists, is, Cindi Leive explained, “an outdated way of looking at things”. Actually, Glamour’s excitement about getting its hands on Bono was more redolent than anything of Cosmo, in the magazine era when Helen Gurley Brown was writing articles such as “How to Get Men to Give You Presents”. “He talks, you listen,” she once said, on pleasing men. “You can talk to your girlfriends, your boss, your secretary. But you may not do all the talking you would like to do with him.” It was a process she called “sinking in”. For all Gurley Brown’s boosterish words on female independence, her biographer, Gerri Hirshey, has written: “She was a realist, not a revolutionary.”
To be fair to Glamour’s judges, though no previous woman’s award panel has done as much to reach out to the rich, entitled, white men routinely excluded from all-women awards, they were not the first to suggest that the women’s movement could benefit from alpha – even beta – male approval.
Had they sounded more like Emma Watson, or picked Obama, rather than Papa Francisco’s co-worker, as their first-ever male woman of the year, the magazine might have enjoyed the sort of delirious reception that recently greeted the president’s identification of himself as a male feminist. It would be difficult for any feminist to resist that quality of leadership alliance, not that Obama would have been so tone deaf as to propose one. Maybe it does not need saying, outside Glamour, that any male feminist who volunteers to represent feminists, as opposed to join them, either does not get feminism or is having a laugh.
As with Glamour snagging Bono, and campaigners who believed Russell Brand to be an anti-Page 3 asset, Elle and the Fawcett Society were well pleased, a couple of years ago, when they got Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg, and assorted successful men, to model This is What a Feminist Looks Like T-shirts.
Even then, there was an obvious issue of quality control, not to speak of the contradictions. If a man owed his prominence to discrimination against women, why seek his blessing? And whether or not you liked, or respected them, how was the support of two doomed losers – Miliband being already among the most unpopular Labour leaders in history – not more advantageous to them than to feminism? How comically mediocre did men have to be before it outweighed the great prize of their maleness? Miliband, whose traceless ascent came courtesy of all-male Blair and Brown elites, went on to demonstrate his feminist commitment by relying on almost exclusively male advice in his tragic “Ed Stone” election campaign. The legacy of his fellow feminist, Clegg, would be a party of eight men and another discarded T-shirt.
As for the more sought-after male feminists, notably Benedict Cumberbatch, the very exultation over their recruitment only added to an impression of girlish longing for male approval: see, an important man likes us! Bono likes us! There’s glamour for you.
