Funny How That Happens
The Kathleen Turner and Kelly McGillis of newsletters is leaning into our inner newspaperwomen and considering the divorce memoir 2.0.
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Spreadstras,
Today we bring you exclusive footage of Best Actress nominee Demi Moore from Monday, March 3, the morning following this year’s Academy Awards:
At Spread HQ we are pouring one out for Moore1. (Purchase our vessel of choice here—it’s portable!) As other commenters have pointed out, there was something eerily Substance-y about watching the nubile young Mikey Madison (whose movie wasn’t not a celebration of youthful unblemished flesh) receive her statuette, with Demi forced to watch front and center. Here, in fact, was the best performance of La Moore’s storied career: the role of super-supportive elder stateswoman, one well aware that by 8 p.m. PST on Sunday, Mikey’s Vogue cover offer, Breitling watch deal, and SK-II contract were already whizzing across the internet (what, emails don’t travel like those magic pneumatic tubes at the bank drive-through?).
It’s not that we aren’t Madison fans—as a pair of Better Things foxes 😉, we are truly thrilled to watch her career unfold! It’s that for a moment, we’d contorted our brains into thinking that perhaps women with a few miles on the odometer were going to get their due. We say “contorted” because even if Moore had pulled it out, would that have actually said anything about, like, Hollywood or the world at large? We root for Moore as a human being—this woman has lived (do not sleep on her memoir!)—but the sum of her glossy Striptease mane, Mrs. Kutcher bod, and Blame It on Rio-era elevens hardly represents acceptance of aging. Here, we echo Rachel Tashjian’s Washington Post analysis of the increasingly high goal posts of Hollywood’s aesthetic perfectionism, and a screed by the Telegraph’s Lisa Armstrong (Maggie’s first boss!) whose headline says it all: “The only reason Hollywood tolerates over-50s is because they look under 40.” So obvious, so piercing.
Pass the clippers,
Rachel & Maggie
PS: If you’ve not yet taken the plunge on a paid subscription—we know, we know, you’ve been meaning to—the time is now: Our major Galentine’s Day offer—a whopping 30 percent off—expires this Friday!
Meet the New Menopause, Same as the Old Menopause
At first glance, the headline of Rebecca Mead’s new New Yorker story seemed head-smackingly obvious. Then we realized that was the point. In “Menopause is Having a Moment,” she reminds us that this is far from the first “moment” that everybody’s favorite life change has enjoyed. Readers, this is a story your Spreaditors have been waiting for! In case you missed it, there are three more new meno books out; this time by Naomi Watts, newslady Tamsen Fadal, and British broadcaster Mariella Frostrup. Each “vies to be the must-have companion for women of a certain age, a thumbed copy on the nightstand of a sweat-drenched bed—a kind of ‘What to Expect When You’re Exploding.’” And each positions itself as the first to talk openly about “the life stage that dare not speak its name.” But in truth, the subject has been aggressively explored by each successive microgeneration for sixty-odd years. The early ’90s alone saw the publication of more than 100 books on it. Which doesn’t mean there’s not plenty to surprise left in the subject matter: For starters, while fully 79 percent of women’s media over the past five years has centered on the subject of “the change” (that’s according to the Spread’s head data cruncher), Mead reports that less than four percent of American women in their fifties have actually been prescribed hormone therapy. Wait, what?!
Read it here.
What do Emilia Pérez critics and Honey Boo Boo hate-watchers have in common?
“Anti-fans, as pop-culture scholars have termed them, are similar to hate-watchers: consumers who become fixated on what frustrates them. Both groups tend to target something in the zeitgeist, but unlike hate-watchers, anti-fans tend to construct something new out of their annoyance or contempt. ‘Anti-fans are folks who dig into something they dislike because there’s something about it that really irks them.’”—from “The Rise of the Anti-Fan”, the Atlantic
Special Kay
On the Venn diagram of Spreadheads and Grahama’ams (Katharine Graham stans, obviously) there’s a lot of overlap. (Honestly, who among us has not referenced “Kay” as if you roomed together at Vassar?) But whether or not you’re able to quote extemporaneously from her 1997 blockbuster memoir A Personal History, Amazon’s new bio-doc on the trailblazing Washington Post publisher is worth your 90 minutes. Like Graham herself, Becoming Katharine Graham is not flashy or formally daring, but her story is as inspiring as billed. The doc does a bang-up job of parsing aspects of her life that need more context than one can lend when writing about oneself. Thanks to participation from Graham’s buddy Gloria Steinem and other pathbreaking female journalists of the sixties and seventies, we are treated to a fuller understanding of Graham’s place within the women’s rights movement (though she did not consider herself a "feminist,” the proof is in the pudding). There’s also some good stuff from Kay’s self-described best friend Warren Buffett, whom she credits with teaching her how business worked. What’s perhaps most extraordinary about the film, however, may be its parallels to present day: As Graham fights Nixon’s White House tooth and nail on behalf of the press, we hear audio tape of Nixon and his lackeys shit-talking Graham’s looks and calling her a bitch. As jaw-dropping as it is familiar.
Watch it here, and read about it in the Washington Post opinion section (meta) here.
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