On holiday the other week, I caught a glimpse of myself in the window of a shop. Hmm. Adidas originals trainers in brown. Baseball cap, also brown, with one of a slogan embroidered on the front, which just happened to be identical to the one my friend, walking alongside me, was also sporting.

I’m generally not afraid to copy what my pals are wearing - “would you be annoyed if I bought that necklace, too?” - after all, we absorb influences from those around us and even better if they have the energy and eye to spot lovely things. Sometimes, life is too busy to be individual.

But I am increasingly sick of ‘cool girl’ culture - the one that tells us we MUST look a certain way, own those EXACT things, have eaten in THAT restaurant and holiday on the BEST island in order to be accepted. And I say that as someone whose virtual shopping baskets are currently filled with Archies flip flops, Crocs and Cos barrel leg trousers. Who always stops scrolling to watch those ‘what the cool mums in New York are wearing’ reels.

What happened?

It used to be that there were a couple of genuinely cool girls - think Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy or Chloe Sevigny - everyone wanted to emulate. Genuinely stylish women whose outfits we’re still talking about years later. But they were inspiration rather than a blueprint - you did your best to unearth something similar in Topshop or Tammy, got the nod from your friends, and that was that. It was acceptance on a much smaller social scale - still tricky at times, but manageable for most of them.

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The algorithm has spoiled it all. We can find out exactly what a ‘cool girl’ is wearing on social media, how the sizing comes up and order it for ourselves - or join the waiting list, more likely. And we know, because we’re not stupid, that most are being paid by brands to influence us. Cool has been redefined as ‘cool enough to collaborate’ - which often means thin, rich, social media following. She air dries her hair, wears the perfect lip stain, owns endless just-right pairs of loafers (worn with socks, of course) and might be French. Gimme.

It’s a vicious circle of validation and we’re the losers.

Last time I checked, the major bonus of being grown-up was that we were no longer trapped in a playground environment where you felt forced to live by choices and judgements of the most popular people or be labelled irrelevant.

And here’s the real kicker.

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At last. After nine years, the ‘Putney Pusher’ has been arrested. Remember the case? If you’re anything like me (you know, a woman who regularly walks on pavements), it will have popped into your head now and again ever since May 2017 when it happened.

You probably recall the shocking footage: a man running along Putney Bridge in south London, suddenly s…

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David Harbour is ready to talk.

So says the cover of Variety magazine’s latest issue, in which the actor has ‘finally’ broken his silence on West End Girl, his ex-wife Lily Allen’s album about their marriage that may or may not be partly fiction.

I put ‘finally’ in quotation marks because who among us has not been waiting for the big mea culpa? The accoun…

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Well what a surprise. A new global survey has found that British women may well have the most rage in Europe. Apparently a quarter of us (only a quarter? Really?) reported feeling rageful compared to one in seven women on the Continent - up 47% on the previous year.

Hmm, why might so many British women be absolutely filled with rage on the daily? A clue …

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This morning, scrolling through my Substack feed, I noticed the same sort of message popping up again and again.

‘This is most wonderful piece I’ve read on such-and-such subject’

‘You won’t read anything more insightful than this!’

These sorts of reshares usually make me smile - they’re supportive, helpful signposts to really good essays and the sort of encouragement we’ve all come to expect here. It’s how I find excellent new writing and people I want to follow. Well done everyone.

But are we in danger of sucking up a little too much? Sorry if that’s a bit blunt, but I’ve seen enough of it over Instagram to last a lifetime - and done plenty of it myself, too. It’s become a praise pile-on, hasn’t it? One that obscures the genuinely interesting or heartwarming stuff. You know the drill: someone with a public profile or decent platform will post about their new book/podcast/article/whatever and there’s a rush to pat them on the back, even if you’ve never encountered said back in real life. I appreciate some of this might be my media-heavy algorithm, but I bet you’ve come across it at some point.

I used to join in all the time, with people I sort of ‘knew’. Professional acquaintances at best, sometimes fellow writers I’d absolutely hadn’t met but had a parasocial relationship with thanks to following them. It felt as though I was forever typing ‘massive congrats!’ and the fire, heart and clapping hands were my most used emojis. But why was I spending so much time sucking up to strangers? Strangers who, if they noticed me, might somehow shine some of their golden light in my direction? Was that my motivation?

Perhaps, partly. I also felt as though congratulating or encouraging someone cost me nothing and was a kind, supportive thing to do. Besides, if I ever had something to boast about on social media, I’d hope that some of those people might do the same in return. That sort of validation is how the world goes round now and who am I to deny it?

Except, it also started to feel odd. It took me back to school, when I tried desperately to ingratiate myself with the popular girls, even though they hardly knew I existed. Offering to lend them my gel pens, or telling them how nice their pedal-pushers looked (it was the late 90s, ok?) in the vain hope of being noticed and included in their exclusive tribe.

As adults, we’re supposed to have moved on from that stuff - stopped making ourselves small and likeable in order to fit in with the ‘it’ crowd. Quit the people pleasing. And yet, here I was leaving confetti emojis for people I didn’t know, as though my symbol of support would make all the difference to them.

It might be what the social media set-up encourages us to do, but it’s also a teeny bit ridiculous, isn’t it? And it was actually starting to erode my self-esteem a tiny bit - making the constant sense of comparison feel even worse. Why, when I already felt in the shadow of this person, was I throwing praise their way (that they’d probably never see) given it only made me feel rubbish? How was that helping anyone? It all felt a bit performative and meaningless.

So I pretty much stopped, unless I know you or genuinely loved your work. And?

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Big news. Huge. Scientists in Amsterdam have created a detailed 3D map of all the nerves in the clitoris and - this is the really cockle-warming part - only THIRTY years after the penis got the same treatment. At last, some good news for women.

And it turns out some of what we thought we knew about the clitoris was wrong (all together now: nooo, really? …

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‘Missing mothers’ - I don’t mean women who have absconded from their families (although we’ve all had moments of feeling that way). I mean the 600,000 women that the Centre for Social Justice predicts may ‘miss out’ on motherhood.

It’s a strange phrase that one, loaded with finger-pointing. It’s rarely men missing out on fatherhood, is it? Where are those stats? Admittedly, it’s easier to measure who is actually giving birth, but the endless narrative that we women are the ones not having enough children to keep the population afloat is pretty wearing.

Anyway, the point the CSJ is trying to make is that - according to a 2023 poll - nine in 10 young British women hope to be mothers one day, wanting an average of 2.3 children. But the number of children actually being born is just 1.41 per woman of reproductive age. The report blames all sorts of things from not finding the right partner to career goals, housing, childcare costs, the environment and immature men becoming responsible and ‘marriageable’ far later in life and not in time for our childbearing years.

Sorry, what was that last one? I mean, yes, we’ve all come across a few man-children in our time, but is that really fair? Women also go to university and live at home for longer - this is a generational issue, with the financial uncertainty now facing young people pretty prohibitive when it comes to striking out on your own.

Then again, there was that study recently which found that a third of Gen Z men think a wife should always obey her husband and that a husband should have the final word on important decisions. Yes, faced with one of those enlightened chaps, I probably would deem them too immature to consider starting a family with. Or even a conversation with. But they can’t all be like this and it was a global study… I recall that British men came out better overall.

Have the CSJ researchers considered that women might change their minds? If you drill down into that 2023 poll, by Whitestone Insight, it was actually those aged 18-24 who largely said they wanted kids one day (66 per cent), with only half of women aged 25-35 feeling the same way.

It’s entirely possible that those young women decided that they didn’t fancy motherhood at all, given the economic burden, poor maternity care, impact on their jobs… or just having seen some of their friends have children and thinking “actually, that’s not for me.” Of course, there will also be those who discovered they sadly couldn’t conceive and isn’t it insensitive to write them off as ‘missing mothers’ - as though that was their only purpose?

I hate all that guff about women not meeting the 2.1 children ‘replacement rate’ needed to maintain the current population level. As though we’re letting the country down by not Shagging for Victory (now there’s a government campaign for you).

And the narrative - not pushed by the CSJ, I should say - that men aren’t getting married because they know their wives will divorce them and take them to the cleaners, as so many commenters below articles on this seem to think. Because we’re walking wombs and gold diggers, naturally…

Anyone paying attention knows that the reason more couples aren’t having children, or more children, is because it’s pretty impossible.

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First, sorry for not having written recently - I was ill, then the baby was ill, then my husband was ill, then the baby… you get the picture. Thank you for sticking with me.

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I wasn’t going to write about this. I’ve been struck down by yet another illness from my nursery plague vector of a baby and wanted to jolly myself up by wittering on about something hilarious, you know, like perimenopause.

Then the Epstein files dropped - well the other half of them we’ve so far been allowed to see - and the reaction to…

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Well, whaddya know? No sooner had I written about the misogynistic overtones of Nicola Peltz being blamed for the animosity between her husband, Brooklyn Beckham, and his parents - guess what? Another woman is being blamed, too.

Poor Brooklyn is so fed up with his wife being accused of tanking his family by refusing to wear a wedding dress designed by hi…

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Undressing women and putting them in bikinis. Making women’s genitals visible. Adding bruises, blood and semen stains to their bodies. Making women appear as though they have baby oil on their limbs, cigarette burns, ball gags in their mouths, bigger breasts, perfect teeth, are pregnant, blonde hair, whiter skin. Shall I go on?

All these things have been requested by men on Elon Musk’s AI tool Grok. And while I say ‘women’, some have been done to images of teenage girls and children, too.

You might have read about all this by now - those who have discovered images of themselves, digitally altered on Musk’s social media platform X, and been left humiliated and traumatised. You may have seen headlines reporting that ‘Grok undresses women’ - absolving those who are actually doing this and not forcing them to take responsibility for their actions. Grok isn’t doing this. Grok is only doing what it’s being asked to do. By men. ‘Men are undressing women on Grok.’ There, that’s better.

And you might have heard that it’s called ‘Spicy Mode’ on the app - not, oh I don’t know, non-consensual mode, degrading mode or illegal mode. Just a few suggestions.

From ‘put her in a bikini’ to everything else being done to our photographs, one thing is clear: men are using it to control us. They are able to put women in their place at the click of a button and more easily than ever before. We can be made to look how they want, perform how they want, be subdued, silenced, sexualised, degraded. It puts me in mind of Marina Ambramović’s 1974 performance art piece ‘Rhythm 0’ in which she stood motionless for six hours, while members of the public were able to use one of 72 objects to cause her pleasure or pain. People - mainly men - stripped naked, cut her skin, put knives between her legs, touched and ogled her body, as she wept. It was a masterclass in misogyny. In what men might do to women, given the opportunity.

Musk has apparently intervened and moved Grok, on the X platform, behind a paywall - available to subscribers only (though it’s seemingly still free on the actual Grok app). Ohh, silly me, digitally undressing women without consent - theirs, not Musk’s - is OK as long as you pay to do it. And Musk posting a photo of himself manipulated so he’s wearing a bikini means it’s fine because, hey, this could happen to anyone. Silly me! That fixes it, ladies!

Right?

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Hello and happy new year all. Hope we all had a good festive pause - I’m not keen on the word break as that assumes actual relaxation and we all know it isn’t entirely that.

Anyway, this weekend was my birthday and I turned 42, if you must know. It felt like crossing the rubicon in a wa…

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Naturally I was going to do a last minute gift guide, but instead I thought I might issue a plea. Please, please, can we all stop blaming women for the way their husbands decide to treat their own family? Thank you.

I expect there will be quite a lot of this over the coming festive days - relatives up and down the land casting side-eye across the lunch table at a woman who’s married into their clan and who they blame for darling Max never picking up the phone to his mum, neglecting to send birthday cards or any number of offences. If only he hadn’t married that woman. She’s out to ruin the family. She’s brainwashed him.

Urrgh. It’s all so reductive and predictable, isn’t it? The narrative of the toxic wife. The manipulative, selfish woman who is determined to cut her defenceless husband off from his relatives and he is too in awe to stop her.

Please.

I’ve heard it one too many times from people in my own life: the woeful tale of evil wives preventing their in-laws from spending time with the grandchildren or putting the kibosh on regular Sunday lunches. As if these helpless grown-up adult men have no influence whatsoever over what they do with their own family and when.

And this stuff is ingrained into us - women, too. Even now, after being with my husband for 15 years, I get paranoid about it.

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Years ago, I was late for a coffee with an important editor. I mean, really late - like 45 minutes into an hour-long meeting, which I’d been lucky to snag in the first place. I arrived sweating and distraught.

I can’t actually remember what excuse I had given her - probably train cancellations. I lied because I felt as though the truth was too embarrass…

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If you missed the latest headlines about the appalling state of maternity care in Britain over the weekend, let me - as a ‘geriatric mother’ - bring you up to speed. You probably already know about many of the failings: the women being left with birth trauma, the babies who have died. The care watchdog has told us…

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Ruminating, ruminating, ruminating. That’s what I’ve been doing all week since reading a review of Lily Allen’s new album West End Girl that picked at her for using autotune (male critic, obv). Talk about …

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I know, I know. Probably I should be thrilled that a nine-months pregnant woman opened the catwalk show for Victoria’s Secret. Finally, visibility for bodies we’re usually encouraged to cover up in sack dresses, eradicating any lingering sense that we might be sexual beings (ir…

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I have, on occasion over the years, been called ‘aloof’. I’ve always taken this to mean that I appear unapproachable somehow, a person forged in the “cheer up luv!” camp. Rarely have I been so shocked as when a nice woman on a National Trust desk told me that I had an “open, honest face” when I”d forgotten my card and promised her I was a member.

I’ve been thinking about this in recent days thanks to Nicole Kidman and all the finger-pointing that’s been going on about her impending divorce from Keith Urban. Their split has been blamed on her midlife makeover/work schedule/racy roles - because, of course, it’s always a woman’s fault that she wasn’t able to make her marriage work and couldn’t ‘keep her man’ (nevermind the rumours that he has a new lover).

It made me wonder why Kidman isn’t held in the same warm embrace as other actresses - Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon? The sad loss of Diane Keaton over the weekend re-highlighted her lifelong friendship with the dubious Woody Allen and yet we still worshipped her. But weirdly Kidman can’t seem to get a break.

“She looks brittle and unapproachable… just snooty somehow?” messaged a friend. “She’s aloof, but less cool than Tilda Swinton who gets away with it. And Katie Holmes just has a much more approachable face, sadly.”

Oof. The woman basically escaped a cult, adopted two children, advocates for women’s rights, makes a point of doing projects with a female director every 18 months (and has exceeded that by working with more than 20 in recent years). She’s pushed boundaries when it comes to what’s expected of an older actress in Hollywood - Babygirl, anyone? - and yet she’s still deemed too ‘aloof’.

Over the years, headlines have called her cold, brittle, icy, steely. And while we’ve had a rethink about the narratives forced on other famous women - think Aniston’s ‘Poor Jen’ - Kidman, who really should be hailed as a feminist hero, isn’t one of them.

As an aloof woman, here’s what I think….

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No, not the title of my memoir, but the first sentence that Victoria Beckham utters in the Netflix trailer for her forthcoming documentary series, while wearing a t-shirt from her own brand that says ‘Fashion Stole My Smile’.

Yes, that’s apparently the most interesting thing about her, so shocking it has to be addressed before anything else. Forget her upbringing in Hertfordshire (“very working class” despite being driven to school in a Rolls Royce, of course), her global fame as a Spice Girl, marrying the world’s best known footballer in those purple outfits, pushing against snobbery to break into the world of high fashion, apparently being estranged from her eldest son, Brooklyn.

Nope, ‘woman doesn’t smile enough’ is the biggest deal of all. A survey in 2019 found that 98% of us have been told to smile more, mostly by men. We’re also judged more harshly for not smiling. As someone who has frequently been on the receiving end of ‘cheer up luv!’ comments - can I just say, on behalf of us all, oh do piss off?

I remember the first time it happened, when I was on the train as a teenager - I can’t have been more than 14 or 15 at the time.

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