Sharon Horgan is a true talent. In her excellent new drama which she created, wrote and executive produced, she stars as chaotic 50-something literary agent Alex, sandwiched between a troubled teenage son and ageing parents, unlucky in love and negotiating a challenging career. Pulled in all directions as her body begins to misbehave, Alex is a kind of middle-aged everywoman. There’s just one problem. Because she’s played by Horgan, she is distractingly gorgeous rather than, say, relatably frazzled, or just normal.
This is the opposite of a problem for radiant, charismatic Horgan, who deserves all the admiration in the world – yet, for an audience poised to identify with her, it’s inevitably somewhat rebuffing. Writing, producing and starring in shows is a formula Horgan has honed over years, not least in the inimitable and but watching her blaze through ’s every scene, I couldn’t help but wish she’d handed the role to someone less, er, stunning. After all: if this successful, beautiful character can’t catch a break, then what hope have the rest of us got?
Before I get too high on my horse, it’s true that a sexy comedy starring a woman in her fifties is progressive in and of itself, no matter who’s playing her; while there’s been a recent flurry of interest in women’s stories across books, film and TV, the idea that one over 40 could have a sex life at all was positively revolutionary until about five minutes ago.
So, credit where credit is due. Yet, this inching forwards has yet to shake its most foundational, insidious assumption; namely, that women (on TV or otherwise) need to be extraordinarily good-looking to justify being there at all. It’s a trope that stretches back to western visual culture’s earliest days, when the male gaze went entirely uncontested. In this new era of tentative push-back, continuing to cater to it feels almost compensatory, an implicit apology for stepping beyond patriarchy’s bounds elsewhere: sorry this female character has complex motivations and agency! Hope that’s not threatening; at least she’s still hot, eh?
None of this is Horgan’s fault, of course – on the contrary, acting since the early 2000s, she will have felt the sharp end of our culture’s beauty standards for decades. In fact, in a recent interview, she laid out her worries about her daughters being exposed to today’s super-thin celebrities – what’s more, she seems totally aware of the problem at hand: “I didn’t have any decent products until I hit 50,” Horgan explained. “Now I’ll go in and have as many treatments as I need to make myself look like a human woman on TV.” It’s far from fair that looking like “a human woman on TV” necessitates treatments at all – but that’s precisely why we have to interrupt the standard’s vicious circle.
After all, despite some progress, the gulf between the way that men are allowed to look on television compared with women remains staggering; the kind of thing you can’t stop seeing once you’ve noticed it. From standup comedy to newsreaders, TV to film, women in the public eye are almost universally beautiful; men, meanwhile, are much more varied, running the gamut from Brad Pitt to Ricky Gervais with no one batting an eyelid (that is, at Gervais’s appearance – his increasingly tiresome jokes are rightly up for mockery).
At its core, that double standard reflects the fact that our patriarchal society thinks of men as people, permitting them physical as well as emotional fallibility. And while the recent rush of stories about complex women, from to and now , has opened up the latter to the other half of the population, women’s beauty standards remain ironclad. In fact, they’re only getting tighter – the uptick in the amount of tweakments seen as , plus the return of staggering thinness to red carpets, is no coincidence; as we expand women’s emotional parameters, we curtail their physical ones. Next on the docket for my personal revolution, then, is the right to look old, fat, greasy, rather than gorgeous, lithe, coiffed – of course, that would cause an apocalypse, so we’ll start slow: unbotoxed; size 12; dry shampoo.
While there seems to be some tacit understanding that audiences would revolt if they saw a less-than-stunning woman starring in a show, that’s the patriarchy talking; the women I know would eat up a series about an average-looking woman, especially one where her normal looks weren’t wielded as a tragic plot point. With , Horgan has proven yet again that she’s uniquely placed to write such roles – that she sometimes ought to pass up playing them is a compliment, rather than criticism.
‘Youth’ is streaming on HBO Max and NOW