Whether shed in obscurity or fame, all tears taste the same

Robin Williams - 1951-2014

As the world still tries to get its head around the sudden and tragic death of the comic comet that was Robin Williams, the righteous have started to creep about on Facebook, chiding those posting heartfelt expressions of shock and sadness at the news of his death on their pages, and exhorting them to spend as much time thinking about the “ordinary” victims of depression: i.e., those who suffer without fame to cushion them.

Whilst we now know that this man who made us laugh and cry across so many years as both comedian and actor was fighting the Black Dog the whole time, there have also been murmurings about his battle with drugs, and his “comfortable” life bought with the money he earned making millions of people all over the world forget their own miseries and smile for a while.

I seem to remember a similar sort of slime began to ooze all over my Facebook feed about Whitney Houston before her body was even cold. “She brought it on herself.” “Why focus on her when real people are dying of drug overdoses?” - Etc etc etc. The blazingly brilliant actor Philip Seymour Hoffman who died of a drug overdose earlier this year aged just 46 received exactly the same treatment. It made me think. We love to be diverted. We love our music and our films and our theatre nights. Most people have extensive film, and music collections. Often illegal downloads out of which the artists never make a penny. Generally speaking, the ‘ordinary’ folk just love to be entertained, but it seems that few have very much time for entertainers. Especially entertainers with problems. Such people receive "unfair" attention for their issues when ‘ordinary’ people suffer in silence. The minute a celebrity dies in tragic circumstances, it only takes a few hours before we find we are being admonished on social media for being upset about it, and told to pull ourselves together and think of the ‘ordinary’ people.

Performers don’t always “choose” their lives. Short and chubby as a kid, Robin Williams was bullied senseless in school, so used his talent at comedy to protect himself. After all, surely nobody would kick the funniest boy in the class or steal his chocolate milk, right? Good for him, he ended up making a living out of it, and in the process, gave joy to millions, but sadly it seems the demons never left him.

The fact that this final desperate act of a brilliant and world famous man might actually help to highlight the seriousness of Depression, and that sufferers can’t just “snap out of it”, seems lost on the self-righteous individuals championing the suffering of the common man and hijacking the death of a talented and tormented man to do it. All suicides are tragic, but it seems only those of the famous are accompanied by endless comment, speculation, and inevitable censure. After all, what does a famous entertainer need to be depressed about, right? Those telling us all off for being heartbroken at the loss of Robin Williams at the stupidly early age of 63 might do well to remember his wife and kids when they post. To have to read such things is something the grieving families of “ordinary” folk seldom have to suffer.

Personally speaking, as a nobody with three nervous breakdowns to my name, if I hear that someone suffers from Depression, I don’t care if it’s the road sweeper, or the President of the United States - they have my sympathy in equal amounts.

The fact is that Robin’s fame clearly didn’t “cushion” him, or he might still be here. 

 

Emmeline Wyndham

12 August 2014

The Alternative Page 3

Back in 2013, I wrote to the new Editor of The Sun, David Dinsmore, to make a suggestion. As the No More Page 3 campaign was garnering such support, perhaps there was a way he could rehash his Page 3 feature in such a way he could not only save face, he might well win himself a journalism prize to boot? All he had to do was throw the page open to the readers: drop the mute dollies exposing their breasts, and let the readers submit their own choices - people who had inspired them, people who had done great things, overcome the odds, and come up smiling. The page, I posited, could become a place where all the millions of ordinary people out there doing extraordinary things could be celebrated. He could be the man who made the change. Didn’t he want that? I asked him.

He ignored me.

I tried another address and sent it again.

He ignored me again.

So I decided to do something along similar lines myself. On Facebook. As a bit of comic relief for the serious debate going on over on No More Page 3, I decided to rip seven shades of urine out of what I considered to be the ‘Carry On’ crassness of Page 3, by featuring a different woman of accomplishment every day (except weekends – just like The Sun). A woman who had made her mark on the world using her brains, instead of just her breasts. Having heard the news somewhere that some 50-60% of girls in state education in the UK now consider studying for exams to be a waste of time when people like Katie Price have got rich by showing off a pair of surgically inflated mammary glands, I decided to try to demonstrate that there was so much more a woman could do with her life. The plan was to do this every day for a year, or until Page 3 of The Sun was consigned to this country’s embarrassing, seaside postcard past. Whichever came first.

On 2 July 2013, I set up a page called The Alternative Page 3. The pattern I set was that Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays would be for current / contemporary inspirations, Wednesdays would be for Historical (deceased) inspirations, with Fridays devoted to women comedians with clips of their performances - accompanied by the tagline “because of course, women can’t be funny...”

I kicked off with a picture of a brave and nameless young woman smiling for the camera and showing her double mastectomy scars. I followed with a picture of the late Diana Spencer reaching out to an AIDS sufferer, and finished my first day’s work with Maya Angelou and Aung San Suu Kyi.

But the narrative I put with these entries deliberately aped the style of Page 3. I trivialised these amazing women, almost as if I was possessed by the spirit of Sid James. I referred to them as “babes” and “corkers” and coo-coo-ed at their achievements. Of Suu Kyi, I said that the “pretty Nobel Peace Prize winner” liked to play the piano and fight for democracy in Burma; of Maya, I said she liked to write books, and quoted her on the subject of Christmas Tree lights; of Martina Navratilova, she was “tennis tottie” who liked her strawberries and cream and winning a silly amount of Grand Slam titles, and for the “History Babe” that week, Righteous Among the Nations WW2 idol, Irena Sendler, she was a babe who liked helping people, especially those under threat of mass extermination.

The idea was to demonstrate just how absurd and inappropriate it was to discuss human beings in such patronising terms - simply because they were born female. Most of the page’s supporters totally ‘got’ my approach, and laughed along with it, but it was woefully misunderstood by others, who wrote to me in shock and outrage.

“I really don’t think you should be talking about (name) in this way, it’s most disrespectful.”

“If you’re trying to challenge Page 3, why are you trivialising women?”

I answered every comment and every message, explaining again and again the purpose of the page: that it was satire, that it employed the knife under the fifth rib to rip the guts out of ingrained, lazy sexism, but secretly, I was glad I was being challenged, because it meant that the word was hitting home.

Then, as the messages of support also came in, many of them from fathers thanking me for the page because they showed it to their daughters every day, I began to realise I would be very lucky if I could wind it up in a year.

“You can’t stop! You mustn’t stop!” Entreated one.

In fact, I was delighted to see just how many men were liking and contributing to the page. It made me think just how sexism sells men short too. How it drives a wedge between genders, how it kyboshes relationships, and how it instructs men as to what they should find attractive - jeering at them if they prefer the sort of woman who can put up her own damned shelves, to the more obvious fare served up in The Sun every day.

Eventually, my year was up. I posted up a collage of as many of the women I had featured over the year as would fit, and topped it all off with a picture of a mirror. A bit cheesy, because whilst of course nobody would actually be able to actually see their own reflection in a picture of a mirror, the idea was that every single person who supported the page was just as amazing as the people featured on it.

As more messages came in begging me never to stop the page, I threw it open to the supporters, asking them to nominate their own inspirations, and encouraging them to tell me in their own words, just why they considered their choice so fabulous.

I was thrilled as the pictures, words, and ideas came in. The likes leaped up again overnight, and we’re now standing at over 4,000. Not bad for a page that was started merely as a tongue in cheek, nose-thumb at an outdated and embarrassing ‘institution’.

So yes indeed, the page will keep going, and as the world turns, and we all grow up a little bit more each day, The media might grow up a bit too. It’s not too late for David Dinsmore to take up my suggestion. Who knows? He may actually find hearing from his readers rather more interesting than showing pictures of mammary glands every day.

After all, as 52% of the population grow them at some point in their lives, it’s hardly “news”, is it...?

Emmeline Wyndham

Editor and Admin

The Alternative Page 3
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheRealPage3/

1 August 2014