Rosie Boycott wants to make the obesity crisis a feminist issue, but the problem’s much bigger than that
When I was a teenager, a strip by Claire Bretécher, the cartoonist Roland Barthes once described as France’s best sociologist, hung on our kitchen wall in a brown, plastic frame. The person responsible for this bit of interior decoration was – surprise, surprise – my mother, who had torn it from a Sunday colour supplement on the grounds that, some days, it pretty much summed up her life.
I can’t tell you, now, exactly how it went – Bretécher’s stock in trade is the liberal middle classes, whose power structures and myriad hypocrisies she loves to skewer – but I do remember the last scene. A woman, dark brown circles beneath her eyes, dangled her baby half-jokingly over a dustbin, the boastful single friend with whom she’d been talking having finally departed to do more exciting things. In essence, the cartoon was about the continuing drudgery of domestic life for the vast majority of women. It was the first thing my brother and I saw when we came in the room, truffling for biscuits, and it was the last, too, as we departed, bowls of cereal in hand.
June 04, 2017 at 05:24AM
from Rachel Cooke
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