What a pathetic excuse for a female role model: Why Cheryl Cole represents the demise of true heroines

A couple of weeks ago I was on a bus just after the schools had finished for the day.

Behind me was an excitable bunch of schoolgirls, aged around 12, gushing about Cheryl Cole. One of them shouted out, ‘I love you Cheryl!’ and the rest crackled with noisy squeals.

I exchanged weary glances with the elderly man next to me. It would seem Cheryl Fever has swept the nation.

You cannot pick up a magazine without reading about her latest action – even if it’s just to wiggle a wedding ring-free hand at the camera, as she did last week with a grin on her face. (What fun to make sport of your husband’s infidelities!)

But more depressing is the fact that Cheryl was voted the Most Inspirational Woman Of The Decade – yes, you read it right, not even the year but of the entire decade.

Of the 1,178 women surveyed on the website Good Surgeon Guide, 78 per cent named Cheryl their inspiration and nearly a third said it was due to her ‘natural beauty’. What about her hair extensions, new teeth and fake tan?

Surely, we should be saluting a Nobel Prize winner, a great novelist or a courageous human rights activist? Instead, true female achievement is being ignored in favour of a pretty little sexpot who made her name on a reality TV show.

Sadly, Cheryl is not the only one to be awarded ridiculously hyperbolic accolades.

Recently, the Elle Woman Of The Year award was given to Kristen Stewart, the moody 19-year-old star of the Twilight teen films.

Each year, the clothing website La Redoute names a Celebrity Mum Of The Year. The last three have been Jordan, she of three children by two men, Emmerdale actress Suzanne Shaw, known for being dumped by love rat Darren Day just after giving birth, and Coronation Street star Kym Marsh, a single mum.

If you look further back, it’ll make you squirm even more. Kerry Katona, a walking car crash of a former pop star, won in 2002 and 2005, ‘four-by-four’ mother Ulrika Jonsson in 2004 and topless model Melinda Messenger in 2003.

Quite what they did to deserve this honour is unknown. (The irony isn’t constrained to females, by the way – love cheat John Terry won the title of Dad Of The Year in 2009.)

As far as I’m concerned, these results are symptomatic of a yawning void at the heart of our children’s education and upbringing, for which we adults are responsible.

The effect of celebrity culture has kicked in as we realise, too late, that we have raised a generation of children on pulp. No wonder today’s teenagers aspire to be no more than celebrities.

I remember my mother telling me how Nancy Astor became the first woman to become a Member of Parliament as proof that I could realise any dream I wanted.

At school we learned about the stateswomen Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir, and Emmeline Pankhurst – I can remember clearly the drawing in my textbook of her chained to the railings.

If we wanted to be anyone it was probably an intrepid traveller like Freya Stark who, in the 1920s, became one of the first western women to travel through the Arabian deserts. None of us even considered being on television.

So, what went wrong and when? It is now exactly a decade on from the first series of Channel Four’s Big Brother. While it would be facile to blame a single television series for demeaning society’s values, it is true that television and the media have replaced the people we used to look up to with those of meretricious and mediocre talent. Women have become famous for being famous.

It’s a trend that began with the It girls of the Nineties, like underwear model Caprice and socialites Tara Palmer-Tomkinson and Tamara Beckwith, and is carrying on today with Paris Hilton as its icon.

And it’s not just television that’s complicit in this trend. Laura Tenison, founder of children’s retailer JoJo Maman Bébé, won Businesswoman Of The Year last week, but received little coverage in the press.

Of course, blaming the media is one thing, but we need to question what role models our schools are presenting to girls.

Are they learning about our great queens Elizabeth I and Victoria? Are they told the inspiring stories of the great aviators Beryl Markham and Amelia Earhart? Do they even know that our Poet Laureate is a woman? I doubt it.

So what is it that makes Cheryl a poster girl for this age?

She is an exceptionally pretty girl with a sweet manner. But her achievements amount to winning some competitions and performing some catchy pop songs. Yet it’s her dual public role as Simon Cowell’s sidekick and anguished wife of a love rat that has catapulted her into the celebrity stratosphere.

The first role demanded she display a sympathetic and supportive nature, while looking gorgeous in a series of fashion experiments. She did both. The second involved simply being the injured wife who came to a painful decision.

Neither role needed talent, brains or particular courage. Yet in an interview with Hello!, she is described as a true heroine, ‘resilient’ and ‘strong-willed’.

Poor little Cheryl leaves her multi-million-pound mansion after licking her wounds for a few days and is described in terms more fitting for Joan of Arc at the stake. If we depict our celebrity starlets with such hyperbole, is it any wonder they are hero-worshipped by millions of young women?

When I was at school, we were shown the 1958 film Carve Her Name With Pride, in which Virginia McKenna played Violette Szabo, the British spy.

Szabo, a young mother and widow, volunteered for service in occupied France and was eventually murdered by the Gestapo. She was awarded the George Cross for her courage posthumously. The image of Virginia McKenna facing torture stayed with me for years.

Szabo was someone I would use the adjective ‘resilient’ about. The point is that, as a 13-year-old, I was offered a vision of conviction and courage that I don’t see on offer today.

Where are the female entrepreneurs, writers, painters, soldiers, doctors and scientists? There are plenty of them, but I doubt there’s even a tiny handful of 15-year-olds who have heard of them.

Increasingly, everyone, from regional theatres to publishers, are sticking to tried and tested models, designed to please the lowest but biggest common denominator.

So, we end up with Cheryl Cole – a pretty amalgam of the more high-profile women of the past two decades, spanning Liz Hurley and Jordan – proving that if you’re slim, pretty and have a bit of pluck, you too can make it big.

There have always been starlets – Joan Collins, now a national treasure, was the ultimate example in her heyday. But back then being a starlet at least involved some acting. It was perhaps Liz Hurley who changed fame, proving that all you had to do to achieve it was wear an outrageous dress.

Fame is now disassociated with achievement and allied instead to chat show appearances. It is, of course, an irony that a website dedicated to identifying the best cosmetic surgeons conducted the poll that named Cheryl the inspiration of the decade. If thegoodbookguide.com or Science Today were to conduct this survey, the results might be different.

Sadly, their websites probably don’t attract nearly as many girls as Good Surgeon Guide. Nevertheless, it’s time that parents, teachers and the media began to question celebrity rather than pander to it.

About a decade ago, I made a film in Zimbabwe about how difficult it was for girls to go to school.

One of the girls in my film was 12-year-old Lucia, who walked miles to school each day, then came home in the evenings and tended her younger siblings.

She didn’t mind. She was prepared to do anything to go to school. ‘You see, I want to be a pilot,’ she said, grinning broadly.

Without any media at all, Lucia had the kind of aspiration and ambition that our own children totally lack.

I thought of her early this week when I was asking an 11-year-old girl what she would most like to be. The girl immediately said: ‘A singer! A singer like Cheryl Cole!’

We cannot frown at young girls’ ambitions when we have such a limited selection of women in the headlines.

I’ve nothing against Cheryl Cole, but if she is the best role model we can deliver as a society, we deserve everything our teenagers will undoubtedly throw at us.

Tags: Charlotte Metcalf, Cheryl Cole, Jordan, Katie Price, Kerry Katona, Kristen Stewart, Kym Marsh, Suzanne Shaw, Ulrika Jonsson, Women in Media, X Factor

Posted by Charlotte Metcalf on Wednesday, April 7th, 2010 at 6:23 pm.

Filed under Lifestyle, News, Parenting, Tagged as: , Charlotte Metcalf, Cheryl Cole, Jordan, Katie Price, Kerry Katona, Kristen Stewart, Kym Marsh, Suzanne Shaw, Ulrika Jonsson, Women in Media, X Factor.