the girly show

Lipstick, check. Chick flick, check. Chilled Chardonnay, check. We all love having girlfriends round for some female bonding but do we really live in a "Wella World" and is staying in the new going out?

HOW much of the blame can we pin on Bridget Jones for the prevalence of metropolitan thirtysomething singleton books too brightly coloured for their own good? For tarring an entire generation of women with the same brush? For making Chardonnay sound like it should be uttered with a braying laugh as you stagger in your stilettoes up the steps of the nearest wine bar?

Yes, we can happily blame Ms Jones for all these phenomena. But we can also blame her for Friends - not the TV series, that is, but friends with a capital F. If it wasn't for the hapless Bridget being so hopeless without a man, she wouldn't be single, and she wouldn't be as dependent on her cabal of friends as she is, bringing wine and sisterly solidarity to her door when evil men let her down.

For Friends in fiction are there whenever a crisis hits, regardless of what is happening in their own lives. They are the Super-Friends, in fact, the A-List, Top-Pedigree, Oscar-winning Friends, the Friends we expect to have in our real, grown-up womanly lives just as much as mortgages, jobs, spare tyres around our middle and - something else? Oh yes. Men. Almost forgot.

In spite of what many believe, Bridget Jones's Diary was never a hymn to romance, a longing for Mr Right. It was always about Friendship - with the hopeless mother she had, no siblings, and the dastardly Daniel making her life a misery, Bridget's nearest-and- dearest were Ace-Friends Shazzer, Jude and Tom, gay man and token girl. And thanks to Bridget's familial lack, hardly a "Chick-Lit" tale was spawned thereafter without a bunch of brazen broads at the door, ready to spend a night in, attending to another of their number, abandoned and broken by some vile chap. Jane Green, India Knight, Amy Jenkins, Marian Keyes, Jenny Colgan - where would your heroines be without their girlfriends? And the requisite gay male friend thrown in for good measure? Suddenly, after years of suspicious eyebrow-raising at women-only groups - those groups with the kind of women who wear dungarees, don't shave their body hair and talk about political agitation, of course - and male denigration of female friendship, it has become positively obligatory for women to have a back-room of bitches (in a girl power/reclaim-the-word sense, naturally).

The popularity of the women-only gathering, and its by-product, the women-only evening, have been seized on by the media and advertisers over the last two years with an enthusiasm matched only by Harry Potter mania. In 1999, Channel Four went women-only crazy, not only devoting a whole night of TV to Bridget Jones but also every Wednesday evening to "women's" programming. What did that involve, then? A documentary on the figure of the "ladette", an episode of Ally McBeal followed by Friends, sponsored by Wella Hair products.

Unsurprisingly, it prompted this blast of anti-girl ire from former editor of Red magazine, Kathryn Brown, "Wella World is a pretty, shaker-styled, cosy place, inhabited by graduates with clean hair who have regular Girls' Nights In. They wear cute vest and drawstring jim-jams, do face packs, drink wine from Habitat goblets and wait for boy-band pretty pizza boys to deliver junk food. They have no qualms about eating because in Wella World, diet is a four- letter word. Are these really our only options?"

Two years later and our "options" are pretty much the same. The BBC has just recently run a series of ads promoting Friday nights as "Girls' Night In", showing a sequence where glamorous women, apparently putting on make-up in the ladies room of a night-club, rush out to join their friend on the sofa for an episode of EastEnders. Blockbusters rented out their copies of Bridget Jones's Diary with reduced-price Diet Coke and Haagen-Dazs ice-cream (the idea presumably being that the calories you put on with the Haagen- Dazs will somehow be eliminated by the Diet Coke), accompanied by the strap-line "Staying In Is The New Going Out".

Quaker Foods joined the "Staying-In" fest with a huge promotional campaign for their new Snack-a-Jacks, a kind of reduced-fat crisp. Their ads, entitled Girls' Night In, proclaimed: "It's not often you have an evening in, just chilling out in front of the telly. And what could be better after a hard day's work than sending your man off with the lads, while you kick back and relax by getting your best friends round for several bottles of Chardonnay and a girly night in?" (Again, the fattening effect of huge quantities of wine will of course be counteracted by the "less-than-10 per cent-fat" crisps. Ha.) So what is going on? Chick-flicks, slumber parties, Sex And The City - popular culture has never been so women-only-friendly. And so domestically women-friendly too. Last year, the trade in US home- style queen Martha Stewart's books was met on this side of the Atlantic by Nigella Lawson's slightly more ironic How To Be A Domestic Goddess and - believe it or not - a reprint of Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management.

The exhortation to "Stay In" has a background then in a market which depends on women spending some time at home. It cannot simply be put down to either the onset of winter, or the effect of the World Trade Centre attacks on September 11, which have apparently caused a huge rise in pizza deliveries as frightened city-centre workers choose to stay indoors in the safety of their own homes, appealing as those more straightforward explanations are.

That women prefer to gather in large numbers in their own homes is maybe only part of a larger phenomenon of women-only lifestyles altogether. Women-only websites, sports stores (Nike recently launched theirs in LA), financial consultants, health clubs, university colleges, holiday companies, all exist and compete for our attention, and our cash. Why then not women-only nights in? What is it that women get from them that they feel they are not getting otherwise?

According to Dr Terri Apter, a social psychologist at Cambridge University, women get a great deal from women-only evenings together. "There are many benefits," she says. "The style of conversation, the subject matter is different in all-women groups. In mixed groups, women sometimes feel the style of conversation is dominated by a masculine style - it can be a relief to get away from it. Also, there is a communality among women. Sensitive issues about work and family tensions can be aired. Women tend to be more aware of how other people stereotype women too, and it can be a relief to talk about that."

Apter's assessment recalls the support-type groups of the Seventies, when feminist consciousness-raising saw women banding together to discuss personal relationships and their interaction with their families, for the purpose of changing their lives. In spite of the Wella sponsored girly nights in, it is possible for the slumber parties of the millennium to still have some political edge, Apter argues. "We live in a world which is informed by a masculine culture, she says. "It informs our sense of what being a professional is, for instance. A lot of the group who often feel outsiders in their professional lives are offered a sense of being insiders for a change. They can be outrageous without being called to account for it, for instance, or share problems without feeling that they might appear weak or vulnerable."

And yet this new-found "women-onlyness" has not found approval everywhere. For those who work in female-dominated professions, the appeal of an all-girls-together is somewhat limited.

Some of the harshest critics of the women-only set-up are, surprisingly, women themselves. When Rebecca Wells's book The Divine Secrets Of The Ya-Ya Sisterhood was nominated for the women-only Orange Prize last year, there was uproar, much of it among women critics.

Wells's tale of a group of women growing up together in New Orleans was not considered "literary" enough and the fact that her book had spawned a network of "Ya-Ya Sisterhood" groups across the States where women gathered to talk about their lives in the same way as the characters in the book didn't help (although nobody doubts the merit of Lord Of The Rings despite nerdy boys growing up using its special lingo). Ya-Yas held special slumber parties for group members and referred to each other as Dahlias, in reference to the book's gossipy Southern belles. When actress Leslie Ash launched Chicks for Charity two years ago, a women-only soiree at Teatro, her Soho-based restaurant, she was castigated - by other women.

"There will be a smattering of requisite chick chat - this is, after all, a "girls' night", complete with all the contrived confidence in the powder room that implies - and some token rowdy faux-hen night antics," wrote Polly Vernon in one newspaper.

That an all-female gathering should smack of either victimhood (support for those who feel intimidated in their work lives, abandoned by a man) or forced friendship (nothing but "contrived confidences" on a "faux-hen night") to some women, is a pity.

Several years ago, on my first trip abroad to a small academic conference, I found myself stuck in a room with 20 male academics for company. After ten hours of incessant one-upmanship, point-scoring and mild bullying of younger scholars by older ones, I fled to the empty apartment where I was being put up. Searching through my host's CD collection, to my joy I came across a Nina Simone album. I played it straightaway - I just wanted to hear a woman's voice.

Those working in female-dominated professions maybe don't miss the sound of women's voices. But for the increasing numbers of women making lonely headway in a male dominated workplace, the slumber party, the Sex And The City marathon-viewing session, the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and the "Girls' Night In" are all positive reminders that they're not alone after allu

Copyright 2001
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