Corporal Katrina Hodge won’t be sent there to smile and wave, but to fight, which we all know is pure crazy-talk, as beautiful women can’t be good at anything but being pretty.
She’s not particularly excited about it, but she says she’s prepared to serve if called. Hodge has already served in Iraq.
“I’m not going to lie, it was hard to come back,” she said.
“It’s definitely a change of lifestyle from having your hair and make-up done every day to being in your combats and having your hair scraped back. I was thrown in at the deep end and realised that this was reality.
“I went on exercise and it was hard because I was living in woods, having spent the last year living in amazing hotels around the world. To go straight back to this, it was definitely a culture shock.”
There’s always a strange undercurrent of gleeful revelry when news like this is announced, that a woman who is held up as a paragon of glamor is going to be forced to work hard, to take the makeup off. There is an audience that loves to see “prissy” women get their comeuppance by having to roll up their sleeves and get dirty, that loves to hear every detail of the feminine trappings that are being abandoned and the pain that comes with separating from those things. I admit that I’m not immune to to it, which is why those outdoor challenges when all of the contestants on America’s Next Top Model start crying are such good television.