Tina Fey

| The Guardian

Ah, Tina Fey. It was fun while it lasted, what with the multiple Golden Globe awards, the knockabout fun of your film Mean Girls and that rock-solid Sarah Palin impression. (You really do give great Alaskan.) But the honeymoon had to end, and last week it did. Backlash was in the air, and it didn't come from the obvious source – moose-decimating Palin fans. No, after an appearance on the US sketch show Saturday Night Live, in which Fey portrayed both a lonely teacher lusting after a teenage student (as creepy as it sounds) and a single woman in an ad for a chocolate brownie husband ("the perfect blend of rich fudge and emotional intimacy"), the knives came out online. Feminist writers were pissed off about various issues, but the main one was this: what does Fey have against single women?

Fey does, after all, have form. Her most famous creation, Liz Lemon, who she plays on 30 Rock – the sitcom she also writes – is probably the most prominent current depiction of a single woman, and, in many ways, it ain't pretty. Lemon is a neurotic, food-stained, baby-stealing type who isn't above trying to give her ex-boyfriend food poisoning when he's on the brink of marriage to another woman. Then there's Kate Holbrook, the executive Fey played in the 2008 film Baby Mama, who could also potentially be perceived as the walking, talking embodiment of a nasty Daily Mail editorial. Holbrook is the too-ambitious-for-her-own-good career woman who wakes up in her late 30s, realises she can't have children, and has to hire an unreliable woman as a surrogate. Sound familiar?

The anger being expressed towards Fey reflects the mood of the late-90s, when feminists of all stripes were spitting about Bridget Jones – another stop in the less-than-illustrious history of the single woman as saddo. And the backlash against this feels particularly welcome now, when we are being spoonfed the notion that a woman without a man is like a fish without a pond.

Everywhere you look, there is a celebration of wives and girlfriends (whether they're married to footballers or politicians) and a suggestion that a marriage or relationship split is the most destructive thing that can happen to a woman. We've seen how this has played out for Jennifer Aniston, patron saint of this tribe for the media. However many desirable men Aniston dates, however many millions of pounds she makes, however luminously she smiles at premieres and parties, we're still sold the story that she's sobbing inside.

Both Kate Winslet and Sandra Bullock are currently being Anistoned by the press – I can only imagine the number of paparazzi clamouring for a snap of Winslet in tears, treatment I doubt is being meted out to her ex, Sam Mendes. And while the coverage of Bullock's marital problems has been lurid in the extreme, I was struck by one almost throwaway line in a gossip magazine. Bullock, the piece opined, had married in her early 40s after "a string of unsuccessful relationships", a phrase that deftly paints her as innately unlucky in love, a serial loser.

Of course, some people do experience loneliness when they're single, and sadness when they're splitting up, but as anyone with male and female friends – ie, everyone – will have noticed, those emotions aren't remotely gender specific. A man is just as likely to be heartbroken by a divorce as a woman, and is just as likely to feel some sense of yearning when they're single.

So the pop-culture obsession with single ladies as tragic losers is about something else: specifically, putting women in our place. And it's right to be angry about this, because these stereotypes have implications both publicly and privately. Extreme pity is often a close relation of hatred, and single women of all kinds – including mothers, divorcees and widows – have been vilified throughout history, seen as predatory, unnatural, dangerous, irresponsible. As JK Rowling pointed out in an elegant column in the Times last week, these attitudes have often found their way into the political arena, notably during the last Tory government, when, for instance, John Redwood described single-parent families in one area of Cardiff as "one of the biggest social problems of our day". Rowling was a single mother at the time, and to be told repeatedly, she wrote, "that I was feckless, lazy – even immoral – did not help".

David Cameron apparently intends to encourage marriage with a £150-a-year tax break for lower-income married couples, and while this amount isn't likely to sway anyone either to get hitched, or to stay in an unhappy relationship, it's made it patently clear where his sympathies lie – something that should strike fear into the heart of anyone who, like me, grew up the child of a single mother during the last Tory administration. What probably does both propel many women into destructive relationships, and keep them there, is the constant drip, drip of stories that suggest that they will be permanently lonely, damaged and depressed if they leave. When it comes to Fey's work, I actually think 30 Rock is a skewering of these stereotypes rather than an endorsement, but I'd agree that her latest work is below par, and I'm glad that people are deconstructing it and getting angry. Because suggesting our lives are worthless without a bloke is bad for every woman.