Ground Floor: My favourite song of the year so far is Pink's "Stupid Girls". It's a polemic against the culture of celebrity women whose main concerns - as they travel in packs and accessorise by carrying small dogs wherever they go - are whether or not their hair looks okay and whether they've consumed too many calories. Pink laments the disappearance of girls with ambition, girls who, for example, want to be president.
I have to side with Pink on all of this. Yes, there's something amusing about seeing glossy photos of ever-skinnier model-girlfriend-whatevers with their blonde highlights, designer shades and ubiquitous doggies, but it's hard to accept that being famous for being famous is actually a career choice now. Yet it is. According to the US magazine, Girls' Life, the main ambition of 35 per cent of teen and pre-teen girls is to be "famous". The US Roper Youth Report published back in 2000 found that 56 per of children dreamt of being rich while one of the other top ambitions was to be "beautiful".
Are these valid ambitions? If you can amass a small fortune simply by wearing the right dress to a movie premiere, or by getting curlier hair extensions or by succumbing to the humiliation of being on some kind of reality TV show, then why the hell should you bother with the studying and the hard work to be a success any other way? If a girl's idea of an intellectual conversation is "yeah, well, happy days, whatever" and her yardstick of making it good is being photographed frolicking with her latest boyfriend and designer dog in Barbados, then why not?
Besides, after listening to the pretty incoherent "Yo Blair" conversation between George Bush and Tony Blair at the G8 summit, it's clear that being a president or prime minister doesn't require a font of articulate debate. And what with the business world's never-ending stream of news stories about company mismanagement, creative accounting and plain old fraud, being at the forefront of commerce doesn't seem to be any less squalid than being paid for the novel that you didn't actually write or the perfume that you don't actually wear!
Colleen and Jordan and Paris and Victoria can all claim that they are global brands and that they are, after all, incredibly successful at being famous and equally successful at looking good. They are all wealthy. They are all ambitious - at least in their pursuit of column inches - so, in the way that we seem to value ourselves most, they've made it.
And yet . . . I do so wish it was different. Not because I think that anyone who does well at the way they want to earn a living shouldn't be rewarded, but because women have struggled so long and so hard to be taken seriously that every time these girls appear in another micro-mini, hugging a dog and a Burberry bag, they are saying that looking good is all you really need.
And of course this particular image is moulded and enhanced by the celebrity magazines which cosset them and recount their shopping trips and then breathlessly tell us that it's okay because they are worth millions. It's saying to women that the time you put in at school or college is somehow less important than always looking great and (potentially) marrying a footballer. It's tightening a cord around real ambition and telling you that your looks will always be your fortune.
Celebrity magazines focus on a particular type of woman and a particular type of ambition. And their message is relentless. The problem is that it's difficult to find a message celebrating ambition in other areas of life, in defining success for women as anything other than perfect hair and perfect nails.
Nevertheless sometimes you read something which you know would please Pink. Last weekend's Sunday Times carried a story about Anousheh Ansari, an Iranian woman who will become the first female space tourist at a cost of approximately €15 million. Anousheh can afford the fee. She's worth a few hundred million herself.
Having come to the US as a teenager she harboured dreams of becoming an astronaut but felt that her background of being both a woman and an Iranian would work against her. So instead she got her masters in electrical engineering, as well as a degree in computer science, and in 1993 she and her husband set up a telecommunications business. It grew rapidly. By 1999 it was ranked third in revenue growth for Texas-based technology companies and had already notched up some industry awards.
The same year, Anousheh was chosen as Entrepreneur of the Year in Ernst & Young's technology and communications awards and a year later she won Working Woman magazine's entrepreneurial excellence award.
Having sold the company, she contributed to a prize fund (now named the Ansari X) which was aimed at promoting space tourism and which was won by SpaceShipOne in 2004. Richard Branson then announced that he wanted to license the SpaceShipOne technology so that he could start offering commercial flights on Virgin Galactic.
There are no pictures of Anousheh Ansari in OK or Closer or whatever the latest fashion-obsessed celebrity gossip magazine might be. She's famous, but within a relatively small circle. She is unlikely to be part of a story about turning up at a music awards ceremony wearing a dress which is mysteriously missing most of its front or its back or is held together artfully by safety pins.
But she is a woman with ambition. This ambition led to the formation of a company that was valued at over €500 million. Her donation to the Ansari X award furthered technological advancement.
When she does finally blast off into space this self-confessed Star Trek fan will realise yet another one of her ambitions. She will be a star among the stars and I will be cheering her on. I bet Pink will too!
www.sheilaoflanagan.net
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/VR3765MFOBH2NMV2QNICYDF67M.png)