Lizzo and Amanda Abbington are victims of toxic lefty ‘groupthink’ – and you and I should be worried, too
“IT’S bad bitch o’clock, yeah, it’s thick-thirty,” Lizzo warbles in her song About Damn Time.
“I be dripping so much sauce/Gotta been looking like ragu (ooh, baby)/It ain’t my fault that I’m out here getting loose/ Gotta blame it on the Goose,” she sings, Keatsian, in Juice.
I Love You Bitch, another hit, inspired possibly by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, waxes lyrical about sexting.
Lizzo, a leotard-wearing sex and body-positivity rapper, is no Vera Lynn.
So quite what did her backing dancers — all big girls given, well, their big break by the American rapper — expect when they signed up on her tour?
More tea, vicar?
Three disgruntled former dancers are seeking damages — financial of course — alleging the Grammy winner took her crew to Amsterdam’s red-light district and pressured them to touch sex performers and, erm, “take turns eating bananas protruding from their vaginas”.
Apologies to anyone reading this over their morning coffee, and a banana.
The dancers, somewhat inconceivably, have also accused the 21st star of “fat-shaming” them.
Lizzo has furiously denied the “sensationalised” accusations.
None of us, yet, knows the truth. Hopefully she’s a taskmaster, not monster.
What she most definitely is, however, is a plus-size feminist icon for millions.
She’s done good things — given to charity, including a million dollars to a family-planning one in the wake of Roe v Wade, and performed for free.
She’s also done not-so-good things — used the word “spaz” in a song, sworn live during the Grammys and maybe done weird things with bananas.
Lizzo is, after all, human.
And above all, the singer, real name Melissa Jefferson, has inspired a generation of young girls who don’t all look like Taylor Swift and reassured them it’s OK not to look like Taylor Swift.
If it transpires she is some kind of sexual predator and a bully, then she should be rightly called out. And action ought to be taken.
But until the facts are established it’s beyond depressing to see the uninformed masses rushing to cancel her.
Her Instagram following is plummeting by the hour.
Beyonce is no longer giving her one-time mate shout-outs on stage, while the silence from British celeb pals Adele and Harry Styles is deafening.
But hey, that’s showbiz.
Closer to home, our very own Amanda Abbington is feeling the sting.
Viewers are threatening to boycott Strictly Come Dancing after the Sherlock star was announced as a contestant.
Which all seems VERY dramatic for a series essentially showcasing 12 celebs of varying celelbbyness tangoing around a dance floor in fake tan and snazzy sequins.
Amanda’s crime? Getting on the wrong side of the sex/gender debate.
She once criticised a “sexualised” drag show for babies. Yes, babies.
And in another tweet, she suggested: “If you don’t actually have proper, real breast milk in your breasts, just don’t try and breastfeed your baby.”
I’m no biologist, but this sort of sounds not unreasonable.
Yet no. In a case of the left eating the left, Amanda has been forced to delete her Twitter account after being branded a Terf.
Yesterday she felt compelled to issue a grovelling video, backing the LGBTQ community and calling herself an “ally”.
She even felt obliged to reveal her own teenage son had had a part in cult show Everyone’s Talking About Jamie — she added, surely utterly unnecessarily, that he was “a wonderful drag queen”.
That she felt the need to defend herself so personally and vociferously, and bring in her family, tells us all we need to know about our current, toxic groupthink situation.
Like lemmings on speed, we jump on a single fact and distort it beyond all recognition.
Judge, condemn and write off with only half the story.
Weaponising culture wars only creates more tension, more division and more toxicity.
Soon we will all be too scared to think a thought, let alone air it.
For a Western world which prides itself on tolerance, increasingly we anything but.
SUCH A COCKY UP MEG
FOOTBALL’S second most cocky superstar*, Megan Rapinoe, missed a penalty in the USA’s defeat to Sweden, sending them crashing out of the World Cup.
It was a sad end to an incredible international career.
Still, the positives.
Presumably a Pizza Hut ad, a la Gareth Southgate, will now follow, and a sterling career in management (womangement?) beckons.
Meanwhile, heartfelt apologies to England’s Lauren James, to whom I gave the kiss of death last week.
Over the course of 1,500 gushing words, in an ode to Lauren, I compared her to Pele and waxed lyrical about her “technical nous, brains and feel for the game”.
Sweetly, I ended the piece: “Now is Lauren’s time to roar.”
Cue her stomping on a Nigerian player and promptly getting sent off.
A slightly more ferocious roar than I’d imagined.
*Nod to Ronaldo, in first place.
LAST week I saw Barbie.
Yes, yes, all very meta-feminist and knowingly ironic.
And bringing in millions for the line-stealing co-lead, Ryan Gosling, male co-writer, Noah Baumbach, Warner Bros CEO David Zaslav and, yep, all-male Mattel boss Ynon Kreiz. Sigh.
PS: Thanks to the app Bairbe.me for this understated, very natural little makeover.
Absolutely unfeminist, but I wish.
HUE ’N’ CRY IS CRAZY
AN Edinburgh woman has won a lengthy battle with city planners over the colour of her front door.
Miranda Dickson was ordered to change it from a bright pink, and after repainting it green faced more complaints and was made to change it to an “off-white” shade of pink.
This, too, received a complaint from some Scrooge-like neighbour.
But, finally, common sense has prevailed and the baby pink is now there to stay.
As someone who fairly recently repainted – by this I mean paid a nice man to repaint – her front door a vivid pink (Little Green’s Bertie’s Best for those with an interest in these things) I can heavily relate.
But my neighbour then painted her door “terracotta pink” and, suitably inspired, next door are now going for a muted shade of Barbie.
Edinburgh residents are killjoys.
STUDENTS who store their phones in another room do far better in cognitive tests than those who keep theirs nearby and face up, a study by the University of Texas has revealed.
As someone who sleeps with her phone in another room – partly a weird panic over, ya know, brain tumours and airwaves and Bluetooth, and partly because I don’t want anyone to contact me, ever – I concur.
During the day, my screen time is abhorrent.
We all need a break from tech.
PIERS ON THE MONEY
PIERS CORBYN isn’t all bad.
The climate change denier was spotted in Aldi getting into an altercation with staff after they refused to let him pay with change in one of their cashless stores.
“I’m offering exactly the right amount of money here,” he announced, before forcing his way through the exit gates.
“I’ve paid my legal tender.”
He’s right. The invidious creep to a cashless society damages only one sector, the elderly.
More needs to be done to stop alienating those without the means or inclination to go fully digital.
DEER-Y ME, JOE
SOME stories write themselves.
And this one is a case in point.
“Joe Pasquale impaled in freak moose accident in Skegness”, read headlines over the weekend.
Turns out the former I’m A Celeb comic was rushed to hospital and required stitches after stabbing himself in the leg with some stage prop antlers.
What a way to go that would have been.