It’s nice, isn’t it, when someone’s in the public eye for so long, and so variously, that you start to look upon them as a friend. I feel like that about Kate Moss — I know when she splits up with Babyshambles bad boy Pete Doherty and when she gets back together with him again; I know where she hides her cocaine when she goes abroad, which is a lot more than I know about my other friends, apart from the friend who invented a cunning secret compartment in his golf caddy.
Damn! Now I’ve blown it for anyone who ever takes holidays with their golf clubs and a load of drugs, though I wonder how large that crossover really is.
This week, she has been rumbled having a sleepover at Doherty’s place. Does this spell the end of her rehabilitation, and return to a world of drugs and sex and substandard rock’n’roll? Or was it just, as sources close to the pair maintain, a friendly pyjama party, in which both parties drank herbal tea?
I cannot tell you how sickened I am by the media treatment of Kate Moss, and this has been the case since long before the drug scandal, ever since she split up with Jefferson Hack and it couldn’t be proven — mainly because it wasn’t the case — that he’d run off with a newer model, and left her holding the baby.
She has long upset British tabloid sensibilities by not being enough of a victim. She doesn’t seem to have any problem getting laid (doh!), and not only is her calibre of chappie high, it also spans many genres (actors, toy boys, aristos) — suggestive of a woman with an independent and mature sexuality, rather than a moth-like flapping after meaningless validation (you can break as many rules as you like, in modern morality as in Dickensian, so long as you look really tragic while you do it).
Since the drugs, public derision has redoubled — I have gone on often enough about the nauseating sight of media cocaine-outrage, when the disappearance of just one British newspaper would probably be enough to halt the economy of a South American country.
Equally ghastly, though, is the spectacle of even highly respectable commentators pretending a disapproval of coke on the basis of the poor drug mules, when the truth is that they’ve never given a stuff in their lives about the exploitation of developing countries. All they really want to do is assert their own identities by spitting fury over someone else’s, which they’ve made only a minuscule effort to understand in the first place.
The joy whenever another milk-livered ad agency drops this woman; the inauthentic, Enid Blytonish congratulations when Moss seems to have seen the error of her ways; the delight when it turns out that she might not have done — these things unite all that is most disagreeable about us, as a nation and as an era.
It is true that there have been some cases in the United Kingdom in recent years of men who have lost their jobs after drug scandals but this has mostly been because they worked for a public-service broadcaster, and they haven’t been expected to proceed for the rest of their lives covered in shame.
They aren’t followed around, to check that they’re not taking up with their old friends, slipping back to their old ways. They simply aren’t subject to a disapproval so powerful it almost amounts to a fetish. Moss is the victim of manifest, embarrassingly bold misogyny, and the habitual defenders of women against sexism won’t touch her, because she’s only a model, and she has, after all, taken drugs, and besides, it’s all a bit trivial, isn’t it?
It isn’t trivial — women’s rights are like civil rights. If we don’t all have them, then none of us has them. And if most of us will be spared this malicious scrutiny by being insufficiently glamorous to warrant it, that doesn’t mean we can ignore it. — Â