Sarah Harte: Attack on Nicola Coughlan shows it’s open season on women’s bodies again

It’s open season on women’s bodies again. So, business as usual you might say. Last week, a British journalist launched an attack on actress Nicola Coughlan for not being “hot”.

Coughlan starred in Derry Girls and Bridgerton, the period drama currently on Netflix.

In an article for The Spectator, under the toxic headline ‘ Bridgerton's big fantasy’, Zoe Strimpel postulated the idea that a female fictitious character in a period drama couldn’t be a romantic lead and win the attention of a handsome fictitious aristocrat because a “podgy” woman like Nicola Coughlan (her description) lacked erotic capital.

Here, she referenced British social scientist Catherine Hakim’s idea that, as women, we should accept that our “erotic capital” is a major asset in mating, marrying, and progressing professionally.

Men, Hakim theorises, have a greater interest in sex, therefore women should leverage that to their economic and social advantage.

She thinks that both the patriarchy and radical feminists have tried to make women feel bad about spending time and money on their looks. The rational thing is for women to “exploit men whenever they can”.

She is on record as citing Cleopatra as an example of somebody who did well, presumably, by doubling down on eyeliner. I’ll leave it to you, reader, to decide

Anyway, professing to enjoy Coughlan’s acting skills and “lovely face” while using demeaning words like “trundling”, Strimpel concluded: “She is not hot, and there is no escaping it, as I was reminded recently when she graced Harper’s Bazaar’s cover in a fabulous outfit that still did not change her not-hotness.”

There’s no intellectualising this observation, it’s plain nasty.

I had never heard of Zoe Strimpel, but it turns out she is a smart, accomplished, and well-educated academic. She has written for countless papers, including The Sunday Times and The Telegraph, and has an MPhil from Cambridge in gender studies. So, what’s pushing her buttons?

The jury is out, but one working hypothesis is that there might be another layer to her attack on Coughlan, because Coughlan — who has raised thousands for the relief effort in Gaza — supports a ceasefire which is unforgivable in Strimpel’s world.

In the Jewish Chronicle, she writes about how it’s okay to lose friends over Israel, and that “collateral social damage is the price of confronting those who turn out to support the destruction of the Jewish state.”

Like other commentators, she appears to conflate any objection by non-Jews to the genocide in Palestine on humanitarian grounds with antisemitism.

However, if I’m wrong and Strimpel is entirely unmotivated by Coughlan’s political stance it’s more depressing.

She took Coughlan down because, in Strimpel’s view, she isn’t hot. That kind of thinking coming from a woman is beyond disappointing

You expect that kind of balderdash from Jordan Peterson, the controversial psychologist who previously tweeted about American model Yumi Nu on the front cover of a swimsuit magazine: “Sorry. Not beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that.”

Given the schtick Peterson peddles about gender roles, his denigration of a woman for her physical appearance was unsurprising and he joins an army of men who feel entitled to do that.

What sets him apart is that he makes money from it. Could you link Strimpel’s outburst to the fact she was writing in The Spectator?

While they produce high-quality journalism, they also do a line in attention-seeking provocateurs — giving their hot take on what they consider pertinent issues.

What struck me was that, in their headline, The Spectator also ran with “fat” being “the final frontier of intersectionality”.

They were undoubtedly sending up the concept of intersectionality which has right-wingers reaching for the vapours, because they confuse social justice with the promotion of victimhood.

However, when I thought about it, I decided The Spectator has a point because fatness is a major marker for discrimination even though it doesn’t get much attention in intersectionality theory.

Intersectionality is a term first coined 34 years ago by feminist law professor Kimberle Crenshaw in the context of race and civil rights.

It’s the idea that certain identity markers like race, sexuality, gender, and disability leave you vulnerable to multiple forms of inequality or discrimination, which are compounded when they intersect.

Fundamentally, it poses questions about systemic and structural discrimination and pops up in several contexts — including domestic abuse, which is a field I work in although I was vague on the concept until learning about it on a recent course.

While intersectionality is at the forefront of conversations about feminism and racial justice and pops up in domestic abuse, anti-fat prejudice fails to receive much attention in social justice discourse even though it’s endemic in society.

No day passes without nasty comments about famous women who don’t conform to a socially legitimated size.

Being fat results in dehumanisation and marginalisation based on your body size, not entirely dissimilar to practices that are racist, misogynist, or ableist.

Fat people are routinely and systemically discriminated against.

Although sizeism affects thin women too, it predominantly swings the other way when weight stigma means that, as a woman, to be fat or bigger is the gravest sin of all.

Go to Cambridge and get a post-graduate degree, become a Nobel prize winner, or become a very successful actress, but do not dare to be bigger and expect anyone to find you attractive. Whatever your accomplishments, don’t expect to be free of unsolicited body scrutiny.

Nicola Coughlan’s response has been robust. She has asked people to stop body-shaming her and stated that she insisted on doing naked sex scenes in Bridgerton as a two-finger salute. It’s got to have been hurtful though.

I’m not going to write about how gorgeous Coughlan is as some people have done which, though well-meant, is misguided. It’s reductive and patronising.

She doesn’t need my reassurance or anyone else’s. She’s a great actress, what more is there to say?

Or, more accurately, what more should there be said? We have not gotten beyond commenting on women’s bodies as if we own them, acting like they are something to be analysed.

It’s beyond time that we put our shoulder to the wheel and had a shot at raising the next generation in a healthy environment, one in which female bodies of different sizes are allowed to go about their business rather than being celebrated or pathologised for their size. The size of your arse, whether it be fat, thin, or in-between, is not an achievement.