It’s always gratifying when an opinionated person admits they were wrong.
Jane Moore, The Sun’s longest-serving opinion columnist, used to
believe that the fashion industry was not to blame for the rise in eating
disorders. But she had a radical change of heart when the obsession with
size zero got too close to home.
Moore, 44, has a three-year-old daughter, Grace, and a stepdaughter, Lauren,
20. But it’s her 14-year-old, Ellie, who has made her think again. Moore
says: “I used to say that anorexia and bulimia had nothing to do with the
images girls see in magazines. I still think that eating disorders are
deeply rooted. But I’ve come to the conclusion that negative body image
among young girls, which is now at a record high, is the area where the
media has to take a level of responsibility. There’s a sort of vicious
circle: the designers blame the model-bookers, who blame magazines and
newspapers, who blame the designers. No one is saying OK, let’s all get
together and do something about this.”
Moore’s investigation Size Zero - Who’s to Blame? for
Channel 4 is a preemptive strike at London Fashion Week, which starts next
Sunday. She’s seething at the British Fashion Council’s refusal to ban
models with a body mass index below 18, despite backing for the idea from
the Culture Secretary, Tessa Jowell, after the death of two South American
models last year.
But, this being Jane Moore, who is paid to get people hot under the collar,
there’s a twist in the tail of her argument. “The biggest conclusion I’ve
come to is that we women are doing it to ourselves. And that, as mothers, if
we’re constantly on a diet and scrutinising ourselves, why are we surprised
when we pass on that neurosis to our daughters? We are the ones who buy
these magazines, we’re feeding the business. The pressure isn’t coming from
men.”
Parents of teenage girls will be all too familiar with the scenes in the Moore
household that originally made her worried: Ellie and her friends endlessly
poring over photos of Paris and Nicole and obsessing about their own
imagined imperfections; not just bosoms and tummies but foreheads and chins.
In a heartbreaking experiment filmed for her mother’s documentary, Ellie
estimated that her body was 18 per cent fatter than her actual size 8. By
the age of 12, Ellie had already been approached twice by model scouts when
she was with her mother in the Kings Road in London.
Moore herself has been painfully close to the suffering caused by eating
disorders. Recently she has been visiting a friend in her thirties who has
been battling the disease for years, and is having treatment in a hospital
where many of the girls are the same age as Ellie.
Yet Moore isn’t too worried about Ellie developing anorexia. She’s more
concerned that her daughter is among the horrifying number - 92 per cent,
according to a survey for Bliss magazine - of teenage girls who are
dissatisfied with the way they look in comparison with the air-brushed,
androgynous ideals they’re drip-fed all the time. She says: “I’m not saying
that negative body image leads to anorexia, although I don’t think it helps.
I don’t want my daughters growing up with that level of tyranny and worrying
about something so facile. I think it’s important to say to our daughters
that what you do and say is so much more important than how you look. When
Ellie says her tummy looks big, I say I’d love to look like you. I’m
constantly building up her self-esteem, although I don’t leave notes on the
mirror saying ‘Love yourself’ or anything like that! It just permeates
everyday life in some way.”
Moore herself has bucketloads of self-esteem. You’d need it to survive 20-plus
years as a tabloid journalist, a career she’d set her sights on by the age
of 11. She’s a tough cookie; she had to be when she became the only girl in
the royal rat pack at the age of 27. “It was sink or swim,” she recalls.
“Tabloid journalism was a very tough world and I had to develop quite a
thick skin. You have to be quick-witted and you’ve got to be able to take
criticism on the chin. When Kelvin Mackenzie was the editor of The Sun
he used to sack me two or three times a week. I had to have the
self-confidence to think he didn’t really mean it. But, bizarrely, because
people think tabloids must be really sexist, I have never experienced
sexism. You can either do the job or you can’t; gender doesn’t come into
it.”
Moore gets her enviable self-esteem from her mother, a strong working woman
who brought up Moore on her own. “I don’t remember her ever standing on a
soapbox. There was just this sense that you can do whatever you want in life
and it’s up to you to get off your butt and work hard to get it. She was
very supportive.”
Research that points to the influence of mothers on their daughters’ attitudes
to food add weight to Moore’s argument that women need to put their own
houses in order. It’s all right for her: she’s 5ft 10in (1.52m), claims
she’s a size 12, but looks thinner, never exercises and describes her idea
of heaven as a “great big steaming steak and chips with béarnaise sauce. I
eat enormous amounts and I certainly like a drink. But I don’t snack or eat
many sweets.”
She never dieted until after her second daughter, Grace, now 3, was born when
she was 41. When Grace was 18 months old, a woman on a beach looked at her
in her bikini and asked the question new mothers dread: “When’s it due?”
“I started to worry about the size of my tummy in a way I never have before,
and I started dieting. Basically, I just stopped eating bread and the weight
fell off and then of course everybody started saying I looked amazing so I
had to maintain it, although being older my face didn’t look great when I
lost weight. Then last Christmas I told myself to get a life. So now I’ve
gone back to how I was and I’ve got a nice big tummy again. I dress
strategically.”
Moore gets away with criticising women because she counts herself in. She’s
accepting about the way women constantly weigh each other up, and puts her
hand up to sitting in cafés saying, “Look at the state of that!” with her
own friends. “It’s how women operate when they’re together. They’re very
critical of how other people look. But it’s got to ridiculous levels and I
believe that arises out of the culture of magazines that feed off gossip and
celebrity.” So what about her own newspaper, The Sun, with its
celebrity diet and fascination with beautiful bosoms and Victoria Beckham?
“That puts it in the same category as everyone else. The Sun is
running a big anti-size-zero campaign but that’s not enough. Everyone in the
media has to look at the insidious side of what happens when we print
captions saying doesn’t she look gorgeous, she’s lost 3st.”
In her columns, and in conversation, Moore often makes the kind of remarks
that make you want to cheer at first, then think twice. She once called for The
Sun’s Page Three to be scrapped (hurrah!) but only because FHM
and Loaded were doing a better job (boo!).
She’s disarmingly regretful about a caption she once wrote: “Charlotte Church
said she’s going to lose weight. In the meantime, she’s found the best diet
of all - hanging out with a fat friend.” Then she explains: “It was not so
much that I said she was fat, because I don’t ever shy away from the word
fat, and there is a massive obesity problem in this country. But I did feel
a bit mean that I’d brought her to the attention of the public when she
wasn’t a celebrity, and that broke my rule about not making comments about
people unless they’ve invited media attention. But, other than that, I’m
very careful about what I write. As I’ve got older - and certainly after
having children - I have been more responsible about what I say.”
Moore wants women to take matters into their own hands: to stop buying
magazines that feed body fascism and step off the dieting treadmill. It’s a
tall order. What’s less clear is how she expects women to stop sizing
each other up and being so self-critical. When I suggest good old feminist
sisterliness might help, she’s doesn’t sound convinced. She thinks mothers
should just get over themselves, stop whingeing that it’s someone else’s
problem and get on with being better role models because we’re old enough to
accept what we can and can’t change.
But what about the whole new pressure that comes into play with age and the
prevalence of plastic surgery? She admits she feels it herself, and that
lately she has been thinking a lot about a lower face lift, to sort out the
sagginess around her chin and jowls, although whether she’ll actually take
the plunge is a different matter. She is also planning to take up yoga
because she’s beginning to feel very stiff and creaky in the morning.
Otherwise, she’s too busy to exercise and, so far, running around after a
three-year-old does the business. She’s also one of those people who can’t
sit still: “If I watch a film on television I feel guilty. I always think I
could be doing something else at the same time, like paying a few bills.
I’ve always got an in-tray piling up upstairs, and there’s always an article
to finish or research to do.” She’s clearly mad for work: as well as her
weekly column she makes documentaries, is a team captain on Rob Brydon’s TV
comedy show Annually Retentive, writes novels featuring heroines who
“sashay” into rooms, and has just finished a TV drama script.
“Quite why I’m doing all this, I don’t know,” she says. “My greatest failing
is that I can’t say no. I’m also really rubbish at taking time out to relax
and, at the moment, I feel pretty exhausted. But I’ve always been very good
at handling stressful situations. I only feel stressed occasionally — it
manifests itself at 3am when something wakes me up and I can’t drift back to
sleep like I used to. The floodgates open and all the things that I’ve got
to do filter into my brain. Having a three-year-old who doesn’t sleep
doesn’t help.”
But she’s loving motherhood even more the third time round. She married Gary
Farrow, who runs his own PR company, five years ago; Elton John was best
man. Lauren and Ellie are daughters from her respective previous
relationships.
“Obviously, in my forties I don’t have as much energy as I did. But, in a way,
I enjoy motherhood more because I appreciate it more. My career is now in a
place where I don’t have to prove anything to anybody, so I’m not constantly
rushing around; when Ellie was young I was working 12-hour days as a
newspaper executive and spent my life in traffic jams saying: ‘Keep her up!
I’m nearly home!’ Now I work from home I don’t have any of that and I’m far
more in control of everything.”
Size Zero - Who’s to Blame?, part of the Insider series, will be
broadcast on Channel 4 on February 9 at 7.30pm
