The rise of the decorative daughter: when did our children become permanently camera ready?
It is the season of showing off your daughter. If you are a celebrity (or Donald Trump’s lawyer) you cannot resist taking to Instagram and sharing those images. It’s prom time, look at her in her dress (Kate Beckinsale)! She’s at an Ivy League college, let’s celebrate with a tasteful underwear shot (Michael Cohen, aka “Mr Creepypants”)! It’s her birthday, the sun is out (Gwyneth Paltrow). Who needs an excuse? Nobody in possession of a beautiful child and an urge to remind the world that their genes are really something. Poor girls.
I could be quite wrong on this. It’s a very long time since my mother would have been posting pictures of me on my 13th birthday, and of course mothers couldn’t do that in those days, even if they’d wanted to. We are the generation whose parents took six photographs of us: one in the bath, one standing next to a snowman, one on the doorstep before our first day at school, one blowing out candles, one on a windy day at the beach, one holding up a very small silver cup, and, maybe, one on our graduation. They took these pictures badly, without fuss, for the same reason they saved our milk teeth and school reports and the papier mache dinosaur we made in art… for us to look back on and marvel at how far we’d come.
The photographs were records of fun times, or rites of passage, never the homages to youth and beauty and style that are now the norm. They captured us podgy and spotty, with mullets and missing teeth, slightly squinting into the sun, invariably looking awkward, because this was before the time when everyone loved the camera, when there was always something better to do than stand there gazing into a lens. This was the olden days, when you didn’t care what you looked like in a photograph – one that was anyway going straight into an album that lived on top of a tallboy – but you went along with it because it was expected. Your mother would say: “Smile! Oh that’ll have to do,” and that was it for another year or so.
Fast forward several decades and how far away that world seems. The daughters having their pictures taken now are self-aware, complicit, conscious of the light and their most flattering angle. They would never make the rookie’s mistake of showing their tonsils or giving themselves a double chin. They can do “goofy” or “kooky”, but only decoratively, and they know to look like someone who is about to be described by their Instamoms as a beautiful human being inside and out.
There’s nothing wrong with being celebrated in photographs by your adoring parents. But it would be nice if, sometimes, the daughters were knotty haired and crouched in the shade of a windbreak, or covered in midge bites, or sweating from winning a school sprint. It would be nice if, just once, these pictures weren’t about the perfect blemish-free girl living an apricot-tinted life. And nicer in the long run for them, don’t you think?
Is it ok to...
Question whether Paul McCartney’s role in the next Pirates of the Caribbean film was such a good idea? He may have a virtually non-speaking part (we’ve yet to find out) but even so, as the universal panning of David Beckham’s performance in King Arthur has reminded us, it only takes a minute to undo a lifetime of cool. Maybe it’s different when the film doesn’t take itself seriously, and no one is trying to look mean and manly in medieval armour? Maybe you can’t go wrong if it’s aimed at kids? I fear it’s still a risk not worth taking. We all remember Help! after all.
Is it just me...
Who, while laughing like a drain at the news that Donald Trump believes exercise depletes the body’s finite energy resources, must admit that I, too, have reservations about the good it does?
In my experience exercise makes you fat. You’re so hungry when it’s over, you have to eat a horse. You’re always pulling and spraining things. You’re knackered afterwards, especially if you go running. And it takes such a chunk out of the day! The getting the kit on, the activity, the shower afterwards: who has time for this? I’m with Trump on this one: approach exercise with caution.
