This column is about Katy French, the young model who at the time of writing is in hospital, seriously ill. She celebrated her 24th birthday last week with a commercially sponsored party. In her short career to date, which seems to consist of promotional and advertising work as well as lingerie modelling, Katy French has sought and won a great deal of public attention, an extraordinary amount of it hostile, writes Ann Marie Hourihane
Pin-up girls used to be treated with a modicum of affection. Marilyn Monroe, Betty Grable, Diana Dors were all sex objects sold with a little smile. They didn't start out as screen goddesses - or, with the exception of Monroe - end up as screen goddesses either. Monroe became beautiful beneath our very eyes but Grable and Diana Dors were no more than averagely pretty girls distinguished only by a smashing pair of pins (Grable) or spectacularly large breasts (Dors), in the days before you could save up to buy some.
Of course we are remembering here the very pinnacle of the pin-up profession, and getting to the top of it was a harrowing journey, through beauty competitions, the chorus line and perhaps a little pornography. No one had any illusions about this.
But people liked the pin-up girls. Even as recently as 20 years ago, the British tabloid newspaper Page Three girl Samantha Fox, a topless model when she was a teenager and, rather disturbingly, managed by her father, was greeted in Ireland with instant recognition, great good humour and, if memory serves, riotous enthusiasm in Cootehill, Co Cavan.
But the world of the pin-up girl has grown dark. In Britain, Jordan, a young woman famous simply for having acquired breasts so large that they overwhelm her tiny frame, teeters on the edge of indecency, and frequently topples in. In America, Pamela Anderson has been diagnosed with hepatitis C. The pin-up girl now has to consort with celebrity. When a pornographic video of Paris Hilton, entitled One Night In Paris, became freely available on the web some years ago, it was obvious that the traditional figure of the pin-up girl had just become a lot more complicated.
In Ireland, of course, our attitude to pin-up girls was more complicated from the start. For a long time we didn't produce any of our own, and merely consumed other people's. The closest we got to homegrown pin-up girls were the Lovely Girls, as Father Ted so correctly identified them. The Rose of Tralee, our national and international beauty competition, is the Lovely Girl competition. It has always been run more for the proud parents of the competitors than for lustful males. Or perhaps Irish men find it easier to fancy a good-looking girl once they know that she is a nurse, a garda or indeed a New York attorney - in other words, an amateur pin-up.
The Irish pin-up girl is a new phenomenon and shares a difficulty with that other entertainment professional - the footballer. It is simply impossible for an Irish pin-up to earn a decent living in the domestic market. In Britain, Jordan, or Katie Price as she now prefers to be known, is a millionaire. Queues of women lined up to buy her two volumes of autobiography, which sold over a million copies after having been turned down by respectable publishers. Jordan is now designing bras (for the Panache company) as well as filling them.
In Ireland, the pin-up girl is left with promotional work and the odd pose in the newspapers. For a young woman this might be imagined to be enough, and Katy French has always been game. "I love my work," she told a journalist earlier this year. "I am fascinated by the media." Katy French inhabits a new female world which has not been properly observed or recorded by the broadsheet press. This new female world is not simply characterised by a year-round tan and a fondness for limousines. Armed only with the advice given by her mother - "just be honest" - Katy meets the media entirely undefended. As a toiler at the lower end of the public relations food chain, it never seems to have occurred to her why the executives at the top of the food chain might be paid vast salaries to handle the press.
Thus, on being asked which luxury she would bring to RTÉ's reality show Celebrities Go Wild, Katy joked that she might bring her vibrator. In the end - and this says a lot - she brought mascara instead. She was the first celebrity to be voted out of Celebrities Go Wild. She believed - probably rightly - that she was voted out because of her forcefully articulated views on abortion. Not every Irish girl of Katy French's age is a pin-up girl - although an awful lot of them dress that way. This is the pleasure generation, with Paris Hilton as its role model, a commercial company paying for the tequila at birthday parties and such a blind belief in fame that it does not yet have the cynicism to do what the grown-ups do, and lie. Katy French is a real person, beloved by her family for whom this latest drama is all too real. We hope that she makes a full recovery from her illness. She deserves better.