Imagine you didn’t shave for a fortnight, took a pic, and then millions of “followers” would tell you how amazing you are, how much good you are doing for the world. Oh, for the life of the woke celebrity.
This act of stunning hirsutal derring-do is one the model and actress Emily Ratajkowski performed during a recent shoot for Harper’s Bazaar.
In the pic: the usual bra-only top, hands on head to push the breasts out, and in the armpit a small nest of tangled black hair. Caption: Inamorata bralette; Chanel pants; Chanel Fine Jewelry earrings.
Upload said photo to Instagram. Write a short message (“Do your thing ladies, whatever it might be.”) Post link to essay in the magazine hat 99 percent probably won’t click on (“I’m a cis white woman. I’m well aware of the privilege I receive as someone who is heteronormative.”)
Get 1,900,000 likes. So many heart emojis, thousands of comments.
“You are doing a huge thing: using your privilege to fight for individual freedom.”
“That’s powerful.”
“LEGEND.”
Like Hercules? Like Emmeline Pankhurst? Who wouldn’t like that.
You don’t have to even keep the hair patch. Ratajkowski is perfectly smoothly shaved in every other photo on her feed.
Perhaps you don’t even have to grow it at all. Some say it was an armpit wig, though I will not cast aspersions on Ratajkowski’s body hair integrity.
There is no downside at all.
Pity then poor Taylor Swift.
“Rights are being stripped from basically everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender male,” she’s told Vogue.
So, she knows her cisgender from her non-binary. She is woke TOO. Did you see all those gay icons in her last video (song was OK too)?
But it’s “kind of devastating” that Swift’s only now started to advocate for LGBT. But trust her, she wanted to all along. She just didn’t know how.
I’d probably be devastated too if I was missing out on all the free love tokens.
It is, however, very important that at a testing time like this all of our celebrities agree with each other. That’s what makes them so brave.
Room for one more on the bandwagon?
By Igor Ogorodnev
Igor Ogorodnev is a Russian-British journalist, who has worked at RT since 2007 as a correspondent, editor and writer.