Licentiate Column 05/09/13: Stylefile or ‘Look at me Ma, I’m Famous!’

It’s one thing to write for a local paper – it’s quite another to be featured in one as its subject. Having my photo taken makes me uneasy. I have no control over my image bar whatever slightly awkward pose I assume and there’s no way, if there’s talking involved, to stop myself from sounding like, well, a bit of a moron.

Last week I was papped for the Stylefile in my hometown paper (not The Cork Independent – so don’t look for it, I beg you). Many papers carry a similar feature; choose a girl on a night out, take a photo, ask her questions about her shopping habits. Paper is published, girls endures a week of mortification and self-immolation (not literally) until the next week’s edition pops out and the cycle starts again with fresh homegrown blood.

OK, I may or may not have been a bit worse for wear when I was caught for the Stylefile. My cheeks may have been a bit red, my smile a bit lopsided. I almost definitely listed ‘twerking’ as one of my hobbies and was devastated when it was excised from the interview, leaving only ‘reading and talking’ as the things I like to do most in the world. I am such a boring Sarah.

This kind of Hometown Girl feature is inherently nosy – we want to know who you are, what you spend and what you can’t live without. The answers are invariably the same; the ladies all love their hair straighteners, they all spend at least €400 a month on clothes, they all love the same pubs and restaurants. However, just as my love of dancing around like Miley Cyrus was deleted from the records, maybe the weirder aspects of these women’s style lives are also wiped away.

It’s a pity, really. It only shows one side of the coin – the side that likes drinking and dancing and bodycon and never the side that has an obsession with rockabilly hairstyles or a particular shade of blue. The idiosyncrasies are wiped away and instead we’re left with pictures of smiling girls who all think that Penney’s has the best bargains in town – when really we know that they have much more interesting things to say about themselves.

It promotes a proscribed version of beauty, which is very unhealthy. I’m firmly convinced that the journalist involved asked me to pose because a) I looked like I had something to talk about (my friend’s shop, which I plugged about three times) and b) everyone else had already said no. I don’t fit the profile. For one, I was wearing trousers.

On a personal level though, I hate the picture. I look like a potato – albeit a potato with some nice lipstick on. And, at the very least, I know that deep inside I am a potato who loves to twerk – even if no-one else does.