LIZ JONES: Molly-Mae Hague 'made it' by donning a cheese-wire thong on national TV. Now fans are recoiling at the woman she has become - suong
Compare and contrast the following quotes, both uttered by young women in the public eye in the past 24 hours.
Exhibit A: ‘I played the whole tournament with a fractured tibia, but no one knew.’
Exhibit B: ‘I’m trying so, so hard to stay positive but, I feel like I need to keep my camera running all day so you can see like every single thing... at the minute, it’s just a lot.’
The first quote was uttered without self-pity or histrionics by Lucy Bronze, 33, the tenacious member of the Lionesses who were, of course, crowned European champions of women’s football last night.
The second was uttered through barely held sobs by Molly-Mae Hague, the 26-year-old reality TV ‘star’, in a YouTube video so devoid of self-awareness it was laughable.
To call this a ‘selfie’ is surely a misnomer. Molly-Mae seems to have invented the ‘poor-mie’.
Her tearful statement came less than a month after her influencer sister Zoe Rae was derided for leaving the island paradise of Bali after 48 hours because it didn’t live up to depictions on social media.
But Molly-Mae’s emotion was in response to another video – one she herself had posted last week in which she complained she’d ‘not done one fun thing all summer’ despite trips to Dubai, St Tropez, Disneyland Paris, Wimbledon and the Isle of Man in an £86,000 motorhome... to name but a few.
Other posts from her summer of ‘no fun’ show her in head-to-toe Dior after a shopping spree, carrying a £4,200 bag that looks as small as her brain and racing around in her new £259,500 Bentley.
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Molly-Mae Hague's lack of self-awareness in that video is mind-boggling and deeply alienating for her young female fans who doubtless do work for minimum wage, writes Liz Jones
Unsurprisingly, her complaints didn’t go down well with fans who said she was ‘entitled’, ‘spoilt’ and ‘always moaning’ – hence her tearful defence of her hard work last night: ‘I don’t care who tells me I am out of touch with reality... or all this stuff that’s going on on TikTok at the minute. I don’t care, I’m not going to not talk about it.’
Hard work? Perhaps Molly-Mae needs to take inspiration from her contemporary Lucy Bronze who has spent up to six hours a day playing football since she was a toddler, toiling in a Domino’s pizza joint as she tried to make it as a professional sportswoman. Or her teammate and goalie Hannah Hampton who was told as a child that her serious eye condition, strabismus, would mean she should never play football. Both women defied the odds and went on to become heroines of the hour.
Molly-Mae? She donned a cheese-wire thong on ITV dating show Love Island and snared boxer Tommy Fury to come second place on the 2019 series. The social media buzz allowed her to amass a net worth of £6million via her role as creative director for fast fashion brand Pretty Little Thing and various sponsorship deals to flog to her 8.5million followers on Instagram.
This year she has celebrated the launch of her fly-on-the-wall documentary Molly-Mae: Behind It All on Amazon Prime, in which we learned that she likes pyjamas and Big Macs, and that her partner Tommy (with whom she has a two-year-old daughter Bambi) struggles with alcohol.
She’s also launched her own fashion brand Maebe which, given she doesn’t have a fashion degree from St Martin’s or even done a spell on the Zara till, has sparked less-than-rave reviews from shoppers who’ve posted scathing reviews of her expensive jackets fraying. It’s a shame that her retired police officer parents weren’t in the fashion police.
I must admit, I have some sympathy for the Molly-Maes of this world. Anyone who appears on national TV in a bikini to be eviscerated online and cruelly rejected by boys is brave.
At least young women like her are trying to make the most of what they’ve got, rather than staying in bed claiming benefits.
Molly-Mae doubtless took the opportunity to flaunt her toned body not out of vanity, but because it was a quick route to stardom. Before entering Love Island, she no doubt had scrolled through endless photos of seemingly perfect, effortless, polished lives and wanted that, too.
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Molly-Mae doubtless took the opportunity to flaunt her toned body not out of vanity, but because it was a quick route to stardom
So when she did finally become a star on the show, Molly believed she would segue into a world where likes and limos rather than hard graft are all that matters.
The trouble is that nothing and no one on social media bears any resemblance to the real world – even though her latest vlog entitled ‘A few realistic days with me’ would have us believe otherwise.
The rest of us know that life isn’t just Photoshopped, Facetuned loveliness. Life with a toddler is not about posing on a private jet with a giant cake – it’s about wrestling with something that is screaming and writhing and never lets you put yourself first. Life with a man who drinks can be challenging or even frightening – as can launching your own business venture when things don’t go according to plan.
It’s very easy for the world of fashion and reality TV to turn your head: the bowing and scraping she will have experienced in the designer boutiques, the feeling of invincibility knowing there is money in the bank.
When that life of privilege butts up against, say, a delayed ferry to the Isle of Man, there is no perspective. The get-rich-quick ambition of the influencer generation, who have never endured the bruises of working their way up the ladder and instead believe that posing is an achievement, means they have no coping mechanism when things inevitably go wrong.
Molly-Mae is, to her credit, having therapy. But the lack of self-awareness in that video is mind-boggling and deeply alienating for her young female fans who doubtless do work for minimum wage, who do struggle, who really don’t have a fun social life or much of a future.
When your career is built on a house of virtual cards, there is always someone dimmer and slimmer who will come along and blow it down.
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