Bridget Jones will write a third diary for a movie. This diary will start 13 years after Bridget Jones, The Edge of Reason. The Telegraph speculates about what this fortysomething diary might involve:
In the first diary, Bridget was in her thirties, so the new material should make her in at least her late forties. We can only speculate then how Bridget’s new diary – or more likely blog – would start: Inappropriate tweets 10, followers 95 (down five following yesterday’s said inappropriateness), hours wasted on match.com 7. 2012’s Bridget would surely be an avid Internet dater, going after the younger men. She’d be sniping about ex-boyfriends – perhaps ex-husbands – not over cocktails, but on Facebook, and debating the trials of parenthood on a Mumsnet forum. Yep, Fielding can have a lot of fun with 4G-enabled Bridget, but you can bet the bits that will stay the same.
Sally Newell has good instincts. While the naive antics and mishaps of this ditzy single woman in her thirties entertained in part because she was only a little bit pathetic, if fortysomething Bridget still hasn’t gotten her act together, then there will be no entertainment, just pity. But Newell’s conclusion caught my eye. Bridget Jones first appeared in a running column in The Independent in 1995. From one of those first columns:
Bridget’s friend Jude said: “We women are only vulnerable because we are a pioneer generation. In 20 years’ time, men won’t even dare start with F***wittage because we will just laugh in their faces.”
Well, here we are, almost 20 years on, and according to the dispatches from the hook up culture, men regularly dare to start not with just sex wittage but straight up propositions. Women don’t laugh at them but sleep with them. Women are still vulnerable, but you are a patronizing jerk if you say so. And according to the feminist orthodoxy, this is progress.
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