Did Bridget Jones really liberate US.

Contemporary men’s movements are taking part in a process of reassessment, reflecting upon what ’being a man’ means. Unfortunately, many of these ’men in crisis’ fall into the easy trap of blaming women’s growing advantages as the cause of their malaise. Women too, continue to reassess traditional notions of masculinity and femininity through pop culture.

While men are in crisis, many women continue to flick through the glossies and self-help manuals in an attempt to find their own problems, their own complex identities, reflected there. If some male commentators are suggesting that women, in their will to power, have taken a little bit of men’s essential selves with them, women are recognising that ’having it all’ demands some complex navigation between what is seen as masculine and what is seen as feminine.

The world of work and public life is so steeped in its masculine image and language that it is difficult for women not to become infected, and as a result be perceived as unhealthy ’masculine’ for simply trying to do their work as well as a man.

Good men are hard to find, if the common-sense aphorisms of popular culture are to be believed; in fact any available men seem to be in short supply. Belief in this ’fact’ shapes the agenda for women’s magazines. Having a career is all well and good, but not if it is at the expense of finding Mr. Right. All warn implicitly that the heady days of youth, glamour and social freedom are all too soon replaced by the lengthy twilight of terminal single status.

The ’singleton’ is, perhaps, the elder sister of the ladette. Once she has reached a certain level in her career, the biological imperative to ‘nest’ takes over. It is only then that the singleton realises her success in other fields has been at the expense of the one thing that ‘really’ matters — finding a man.

Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) is one of those books which is credited with catching the mood of the period in its story of a young woman and her friends negotiating the obstacles of contemporary heterosexual courtship. Bridget neatly expresses the tensions of a woman who recognises the rhetoric of feminism and empowerment, but isn’t always able to relate this to her fulsome desire for a hero from a Jane Austen novel. The book revives the belief that a good romance thrives on conflict and antagonism between the sexes — all engendered by misunderstandings about the various modes of courtship adopted by each party. Helen Fielding’s use of an Austenesque plot dynamic affirms that this ’truth’ was known by Jane Austen when she wrote Pride and Prejudice. As Aminatta Forna observes, “It is now assumed that unequal relationships between men and women are the result of biology, ” an idea which is supported by TV series such as Men Don’t Iron, aired on Channel 4 in 1998. Even if people don’t really believe that relationships are governed by some intrinsic Darwinian logic, increasing weight is given to the notion that man and woman simply think and express their emotions differently, and the popularity of John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (1993) is testament to this.

The Diary addresses the perspective of gender by affirming that men are different, if equal, and that to ‘survive’ (in other words to conform and enter heterosexual monogamous bliss) one must learn to speak their language whilst celebrating the peculiarities of one’s own sex. In the case of women these include the overwhelming desire for coupledom based on a Cosmopolitan view of single womanhood, sexuality and sacrifice.

The second crucial lesson is that ‘after all, there is nothing so unattractive to a man as strident feminism.’

As a flawed character Bridget Jones is engaging and certainly many readers’ responses are those of empathy and recognition of their own feelings; more than this she is contemporary womanhood packaged and polished by the women’s glossies such as Cosmopolitan. What glossies are good at, after all, is the stimulation of desire for what we haven’t got and the creation of anxiety about our own attributes; they wish us to believe that our aspirations are attainable with a little judicious remodelling and investment in the kinds of commodities advertised within their pages.

Bridget Jones and its ilk paint a bleak picture of the contemporary singles scene, with women seeking control through the dutiful accounting of the days ‘sins’ — calorie intake, cigarettes, alcohol. What is most depressing about the Bridget Jones effect is that because people find echoes of their own struggles with femininity in it, it somehow legitimates the measuring of ones own inadequacies through the body.

a) How are the notions “feminine” and “masculine” perceived nowadays?

b) How is the perspective of gender described in the text?