Shaming Sam Smith
Good evening, mes chers. Another of my Narcississy Spacek posts tonight! I had written Misogyny and Madonna down as the title of this week’s composition, but the to-do around Sam Smith caught my eye and it rather ran away with me…
I don’t follow music! The only time Sam Smith has been in my purview was at the 2016 Academy Awards. “I read an article by Sir Ian McKellen,” they chirped “that no openly gay man had ever won an Oscar”.
As you can imagine, the Twitterati had their guts for garters! Mind you, they were still a ‘he’ then and proudly accepted Diane Warren and Lady Gaga’s award as “the first gay man” to do so. Elton John and Lance Black grimaced! Of course, Serena McKellen meant the Best Actor Oscar, but that’s neither here nor there.
This week, Smith commandeered my feed again. Rather like the occasions when their pronouns (I combed over this article to make sure a stray ‘him’ hadn’t slipped in somewhere) generate media frenzy. It’s to do with their appearance. And their new song, I’m Not Here to Make Friends. The comments across social media are overwhelmingly negative: bemoaning everything from Smith’s Yentl health to the end of Western civilisation – as this thirty-year-old shilly-shallies along in outfits much too thin (and much too young) for them.
I look at Smith and see a figure not dissimilar to mine. Hirsute and fleshy, squashed into corsets, nipple-tassels and boas. Do I feel some sort of kinship that my type of body is being represented? Certainly not! It fills me with deep embarrassment; as though at any moment, I shall appear in such a rig-out and have to perform before the Father and the boys who bullied me at school! (No.) But why do I cringe at their countenance – in a way I’d never do if it was your Mr. Styles? It’s what the Germans called fremdschämen, second-hand shame, the opposite of schadenfreude.
This time two years ago, I was a lean 140 lbs (that’s American for ten stone) after an illness. Although it rather unnerved me that people assumed I’d tapped into some hidden reserve of willpower. “Oh, but your attitude is so much better, Mark!” they would say. Even now, I’ll try any hairshirt method to get back to that size. Consuming only Diet Coke and Metamucil for a week and then relapsing into a packet of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups!
That’s what annoys us about Smith. They want the laurels without doing any of the work. “They ought to have a whit of discipline!” we say, when what we really cannot cope with is someone embracing their authentic self. (And, look, I get that that’s polite jargon. When Sam Smith closes their door at night, they could be as miserable as the rest of us.) Like the first iteration of Adele, we are perfectly content to see larger artists if they’re singing doleful ballads. The second there’s a trace of positivity? Open season.
I’ve been Googling ‘Andrea Riseborough’ so much that the algorithm assumes I mean ‘Andrew Tate’ and my For You Page has become a bastion of toxic masculinity. As one commentator had it: “hard work and fitness” as opposed to Smith’s “degeneracy”.
And we gay men prove quite the merry band of quislings. “How can someone have access to the best trainers and nutritionists in the world, and still be that size? So lazy!” or “I have sexual fantasies, too. I don’t want other people, especially children, to be privy to them”. They invoke the legacies of Divine or Boy George, who didn’t resort to Smith’s brand of baloney, and carried their girth off with chutzpah. “Boy George would never have expected an awards show to cater to his narcissism by erasing female performers!” (The BRIT Awards recently went gender-neutral and nominated zero women for “Best Artist”.)
It’s becoming a recurring theme with most of the individuals my blog covers, but perhaps it’s the toll of living in 2023. That we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. It occurs to me that a straight person questioning this story is instantly labelled homo or transphobic, while a gay person must hate fat people. But we’ve both been had! Sucked into a cynical marketing gimmick.
It’s tempting to say that with Smith, it’s all a contrivance – yet I think it goes deeper. We dislike them because we imagine they have a sign above their head, saying “Look at me! Look at me!”. What we were all accused of from an early age. For the crime of existing! Sam Smith embodies our deepest fears. And that’s why we must drag them down.