By Caroline O'Donoghue
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Whenever I meet an Australian – and, living in London, I’m liable to meet quite a few – I end up asking the same unanswerable question. “What … what is going on over there?” I don’t mean what is going on politically, economically, or even environmentally. I am mostly inquiring about pop culture. Or rather, I am mostly inquiring about myself.
In 2018, I started Sentimental Garbage, a podcast about “the culture we love that society sometimes makes us feel ashamed of”. I was fascinated by the ghetto that female-centric culture so frequently finds itself in. Why, for example, does every woman I know love The First Wives Club, despite the fact it was called “shrill and irritating” by reviewers? Why does every woman I know remember the exact wording of the blow job scene in Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl, but not a single sentence from Wolf Hall? And why do we still roll our eyes about Titanic, huff about Rose and the buoyancy of large doors, pretending as if we didn’t spend our pre-teens wearing down the double VHS tape from watching it?
In short: why are women forced to chalk up their passions to either a joke, irony or poor judgment? And in diminishing the things you love, who are you really diminishing – James Cameron, or yourself for believing him? Why are guilty pleasures seen as primarily a female thing? After all, you never hear a man saying “my guilty pleasure is watching the golf highlights”.
Author and Sentimental Garbage podcaster Caroline O’Donoghue: “Do we simply diminish anything a girl loves?”Credit: Jamie Drew
After five years and 7 million downloads I’ve finally found some answers to the questions that I had thought would remain mostly rhetorical. What I find most fascinating is how the obsessions of young men and women are distinguished from one another.
Think of a 14-year-old boy’s bedroom in, say, the year 2004: you might see a poster for Pulp Fiction, one for The Godfather and one for Arsenal football club. Fast-forward to that same man at 33. Maybe Pulp Fiction isn’t his favourite movie any more, but nothing in the cultural landscape seeks to tell him that it is a bad movie. The Godfather will still chart high in any “Best Movies of all Time” list produced by any respectable film institution. And he’s still an Arsenal fan.
Now picture a 14-year-old girl’s bedroom in the same time period. You might see Avril Lavigne on the CD stack; The Notebook or Titanic on her posters; horse riding boots packed with congealed dirt in the corner. All of those things, at one point or another in the next 20 years, she will come to feel ashamed of and detach from.
She will be put off by her favourite movies after being told they are too weepy and melodramatic. Put off Avril Lavigne for not being hard or alternative or “real” enough. Put off horse riding for vague, shameful associations of being a Horse Girl, caring too much about saddle soap and inferences from older boys that there’s something bizarrely sexual about wanting to have a pony in the first place.
Avril Lavigne in Melbourne in 2004, when her face was on the wall of many a teenage girl’s bedroom. Credit: Mario Borg
Years later, in her 20s, when she has been disappointed enough by dating and worn down enough by life, she’ll be on a weekend with friends and someone will pop My Happy Ending on in the car and the road back will begin. She will watch Titanic again and realise it’s great, actually. This is usually when Sentimental Garbage catches its listeners. When a woman has become tired of pretending.
Now. Is any of this because 14-year-old boys have inherently superior tastes to 14-year-old girls – or do we simply diminish anything a girl loves?
Part of it is rudimentary feminism: we live in a world led by men (duh) but also a world that is deeply insecure about what makes a man. With fewer and fewer ways to prove your masculinity in everyday life, we’ve created a pop culture landscape that glorifies male effort and sets itself in opposition to female frippery. We congratulate and prop up anything that simply feels manly – which is not to say that The Godfather or Pulp Fiction aren’t great, just that we have learnt to approve one form of artistic expression at the expense of everything else. What makes a man? We’re not sure, but he’s certainly not a person who watches the Barbie movie. (And if he’s Ben Shapiro, he not only encourages a boycott, but also burns Barbies in protest.)
From left, Titanic, The Godfather, Sex and the City and Pulp Fiction. Credit: Janet Briggs
As the years passed – and as lockdown quadrupled my listenership, when my friend Dolly Alderton and I recapped each season of Sex and the City – I found that, overwhelmingly, my Australian listeners were the ones most keen to engage with these issues. They were the ones digging out their Notebook DVDs, their Avril Lavigne records, their Jilly Cooper books. As the download numbers ticked upwards, the proportion of Aussies did too. I was overwhelmed not only by their market share (27 per cent, bigger than Ireland, my home country and where I was a columnist for 10 years) but also the volume and intensity of their correspondence.
“Hey,” I texted an Australian friend, one confused morning. “Do you have any idea what ‘stolen Gadigal land’ is?”
She started typing, and then stopped, and then started typing again, clearly not knowing quite where to begin with me.
I messaged again, to clarify.
“I appear to be getting a great many messages from stolen Gadigal land.” I checked my Instagram again, to view the many women who were sending me messages from places I had not heard of. “And stolen Kulin land.”
She explained to me that a lot of young Australians were in an enormous moment of self-analysis, of questioning who they were and how they interacted with the complicated country they found themselves in. This interested me, and it went some way towards explaining why I had so many detailed messages from millennial women in Australian cities. They sent long emails about how their lives and minds were changing – whether it was through motherhood (“I feel like I’ve gone from Nancy Mitford to Marmie overnight”), through friendship (“I’ve only ever been broken-hearted by my female friends”) or through romance (“I’m not sure he loves me and I think I’ve been denying that”).
These are all direct quotes, taken from emails, all of which I have saved, read and re-read. It’s not that these Australian women were having feelings that were particularly unique to them being Australian. They were feelings that all women have, everywhere. But the urge to express themselves, to put their pain and their experience into the most beautiful, throbbing sentences that they could render, and then email those sentences to a stranger – that was the thing that the Australians had in common with each other. And it fascinated me.
As an Irish writer based in London, I am routinely asked in interviews “so – what’s going on with Irish writers? Seems to be rather a lot of you?” I’m more than familiar with how a single person can be called on to either explain or represent a country. No single answer is correct.
So, when I ask Australian friends and peers what they think is happening, their answers are naturally all different. One simply says that long drives and multiple lockdowns have forced a great deal of introspection on the populace. Another dismisses this. “That makes it sound like we’re all in the outback every day riding a kangaroo with our airpods in.”
A third colleague points out that Australian mainstream media is historically rather conservative, and that the counterculture that has risen to meet it has acquired a huge amount of power. Michelle Andrews, co-founder of Shameless Media – an entertainment platform that, like Sentimental Garbage, emphasises the importance of pop culture that might elsewhere be dismissed – agrees with this.
“Predominantly our TV and media in Australia is so … old. It’s all targeting people who are 40-plus. A lot of female radio talent are pigeonholed into talking about parenting. Which of course serves a demographic, but that’s not me. That was part of the reason that we created Shameless Media – to talk about the stuff we wanted to talk about because we didn’t see it anywhere.”
I have my own theories on all of this, based not so much in Australia – where I am finally visiting for the first time this month, for the Sentimental Garbage live tour – but in my own experience as an Irish person. Ireland and Australia are, in different ways, small countries masquerading as big countries. Ireland’s population is just over 5 million, which makes absolutely no sense relative to how famous it is, how many Irish celebrities there are and how many Irish people you’re likely to meet on a night out. Australia is an entire continent, an entire seventh in the global girl band, yet has a comparatively small population to its land mass.
Britney Spears and Sophie Turner have both been the subject of vicious stories.Credit: Getty Images
But sometimes one country, in all its histories, anxieties and grievances, can accidentally become a condensed version of a more global feeling. This, I think, is one of the reasons that so many Irish women are at the forefront of popular culture. The world, generally, is hungry for art that reflects the post-#MeToo reality; that wants to unpick sexual shame; that deals in the quiet horror show of ordinary female life; that explores how impossible communication within intimacy can be; that tells us how loving men and also being afraid of them works in tandem. Ireland is a place built on repression, dogma and sexual shame. In short: there is a fever, and we have the tulips.
Similarly, there is also a global thirst for stories about hope; for doing right by each other; for accountability; for social responsibility; for the understanding that things are unfair but that we are all big enough and brave enough to try and start again. People want to unpick why Britney was driven to the edge of her sanity, and what hand we, the public, had in it. People want to defend Sophie Turner when they see her being positioned as a bad mother for being away from her children.
There is a great deal of media literacy around the stories that are planted to destroy women and endless podcasts, TikToks, tweets and articles about why we should not capitulate to them. How we must not repeat the sins of our mid-noughties elders; how we will not hunt women or minority communities for sport.
Reading back over the Australian emails, it appears to me – a complete outsider – that these are the tulips growing here. That millennial Australians all feel wild and hopeful and hungry enough to start again, to lay their shit on the table. They are wary of tallest poppy syndrome; conscious of disliking a famous woman unless it’s for a very good reason.
This is why I was sent the emails. This is why I’m going as part of Melbourne’s Spring Fling festival, then on to Brisbane and Sydney to meet the people who sent them. To say hi, hello, I read your letter, I love you – now let’s get a drink.
Caroline O’Donoghue’s most recent book is The Rachel Incident. She speaks at the State Library of Queensland on October 11; Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre on October 12 and Capitol Theatre on October 14 (both sold out); and Sydney’s White Bay Beer Co on October 17.
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