I mean, I guess it was probably a man, and I guess it was quite a long time ago. You know, when women didn’t have jobs, and it wasn’t even necessary to kid themselves into thinking, “Well, if both parents are relatively useful, it just about stacks up.”

Nowadays, even if both parents are useful and don’t mind never seeing each other, the math ain’t mathing.

I’m not even going to bother with a breakdown of a 9-5 vs the school day, but I will just pause to reflect that, in a normal state school, before taking inset days into account, kids get 13 weeks of holiday a year. Their (non-teacher) parents get… what, five if they’re lucky.

How do we fix it? Make them go to school more? Pay people better so they can afford childcare? Force employers to be more flexible? Frankly, it’s above my pay grade. But maybe I’d be better equipped to think about that question if my small person wasn’t whining “Mummmmmmmmyyyyyyy” up the stairs at me for the 12^th time today, telling me she’s bored.

I’m a single parent, so I’m lucky that for a couple of weeks this is someone else’s problem – I get to wipe my hands of it and reach for another glass of Savvy B2. I’m also lucky I’m able to spend a bit of time at my mum’s house during the holidays3. The pressure to actually show her a good time over the summer remains, nonetheless, intense.

We’ve done some cool things, like the Aardman exhibition at the Young V&A, and the Tom Gates adventure at Kew Gardens. These are expensive but a lot of places – in London at least – offer concessionary prices, so it’s always worth checking. Even so, you can’t do these things every day.

I tell my six-year-old daughter constantly that life just is boring sometimes, so it’s a good idea if she can manage to tolerate it for at least five minutes. In fact, my friend Nancy often tells me about how her mum deliberately took her and her sister to do boring things like queueing at the Post Office in order to sort of train them to tolerate boredom. Big up Val, apparently a woman after my own heart.

It’s reassuring, therefore, to discover quite a lot of people agree with me. In my extremely scientifically robust survey of my own Instagram followers, the vast majority (73%) said they felt kids should be able to be bored. Keeping busy everyday is not realistic. After all, 94% of those who responded said that they remembered they themselves were bored during the summer holidays back in the day. One even said her parents had to set her extra maths and physics homework by day three.

It’s hard though, because back in the day, Dogtanian and Dungeons and Dragons were doing a lot of the heavy lifting for my parents, whereas now we’re told not to sit our kids in front of a screen for hours on end. I mean, is this part of the reason they’re bored in the first place? Are they so perpetually distracted and over-stimulated, there’s no space for creativity?

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Because that’s what we used to do when we were bored, isn’t it? Play with our toys and make up bad shows for long-suffering uncles to endure4?

Boredom is the place where creativity can thrive, and I don’t think it’s any bad thing if kids have to put up with it from time to time. But if you do need any tips on how to get through the last couple of weeks, I took Lyra to the library THREE TIMES in eight days. Could she adequately explain the plots in any of the six books she read as part of the summer reading challenge? Could she fuck, but she was pleased to receive a medal at the end.

Meanwhile, you could take a leaf out of (another) Jen’s book: “Usually when they say ‘I’m bored’, I react with ‘ok’. Because it’s ok to be bored and it’s not really a problem to solve.”

Or Harriet, who says: “Every time my son says he is bored, I give him a chore.”

Does it stop him being bored, or stop him complaining about being bored?

“The second one,” she says.

Win-win.

It’s easy to pour scorn, and often rightly so, because daytime TV is a bit like being in a foreign supermarket. Sure, you know what it is and what it’s trying to do, but quite why it’s structured like that is a mystery you’re unlikely to ever solve. Just accept it wasn’t made with you in mind and move on.

In a way, I’m kinda in awe of daytime telly. Great swathes of time between the morning news programmes and the evening news programmes needs to be filled with something, god dammit, and preferably something that can be funded from petty cash.

The audience they want to reach is wildly disparate. I mean yes, evening telly has to please everyone but that somehow seems an easier job than finding something that will appeal to pensioners, shift workers, a vanishing number of students, mums who haven’t slept for days, poorly people, anyone waiting for their car to be serviced, dogs with separation anxiety and the sort of people who like to think they’ll ever get round to fixing all their broken shit, but want to avoid it for a bit longer by watching other people fix stuff.

The solution broadcasters seem to have hit upon is programmes where people buy something (it scarcely matters what) and sell it shortly after for more money. Or less money. Or exactly the same amount of money. Or shows where people move somewhere. Or have people round to their house with the express intention of not getting on with them. And if you like Numberwang-style quiz shows, let me tell you you’re going to love being in a nursing home.

And all of this goes on, day after day, with most of us taking not the slightest bit of notice. (Note to self: find out if women run daytime telly.) Unless there’s a scandal or Sarah Dempster writes an exquisite review of it.

Daytime drama is almost impossible to describe if you’ve not watched any. Although thanks to the iPlayer, working in the day is no bar to finding out for yourself. But the fact we’re not all doing that tells you everything you need to know about daytime drama. It’s designed to be watched when you have no other alternative. Watching it in the evening seems, and I know this sounds melodramatic, fundamentally against the laws of nature.

Dominated for so long by Doctors, which came to an end in 2024, daytime drama is an odd mix of stuff that will appeal to older viewers and topics the young writers cutting their teeth there want to cover. Hence daytime almost certainly has the highest percentage of plots including pensioners who are drag queens.

The BBC’s latest daytime drama, The Hairdresser Mysteries, is a cosy crime. Because of course it is. But really, when did we decide that 75% of all British books and TV series now have to feature crimes being solved by people who aren’t policemen? Was it part of the Brexit agreement?

Cosy crime solvers are often not even detectives. And if they are, it’s because they’ve met someone whose name matches theirs in some way and they couldn’t possibly not go into business together. (“No, I’m afraid Mr Bunkham’s not in the office today. I’m his partner, Jim Crack.”)

Vicars solve crimes, nuns solve crimes, whole seaside towns gang up together to solve crimes. Quite a lot of this happens in fancy dress, given there’s nothing like the 34th Annual Something Our Town Does Festival to kickstart a murder spree in the countryside. Back stories only include secret love children or a stint in the slammer when they were a youth. Which is probably why most characters don’t have one. Jean runs the Post Office. There’s nothing else to see here.

And, of course, I know this all goes on in evening telly too, more’s the pity, but their extras do at least look like they realise they’re in shot.

As the title suggests, the Beeb’s latest crimefighter, Lily Petal (why not!), is a hairdresser, which means she talks to people when she cuts their hair. Which is basically the same thing as being a police officer. But cutting hair isn’t her USP. Being played by Sally Phillips, someone from actual night-time telly, isn’t even her USP. It’s the fact she dances. Around 25% of the time. Because she loves the 1970s and dancing to its music and the fact that she’s taken it upon herself to investigate a body in the belfry is not going to get in the way of that.

It’s almost as if the creators found an old Top Of The Pops album, thought “wouldn’t it be great if we had a detective who was permanently grooving to Donna Summer” and worked back from there.

None of this is a bad thing. None of it is a good thing either, but it’s insanely enjoyable to watch. I don’t know why. All I can say is that if you want to feel like you’ve been drinking at 2pm, without actually drinking at 2pm, this is the show for you.

More of this insanity please, in particular and in general.

• Standard Issue reviews evening telly on the third Friday of the month

• The Hairdresser Mysteries ends its first season next week

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The purists didn’t like it, but it was possible to argue the toss about each mucky little step. The expanded format, for example. Sure, it would make governing body FIFA a lot of money, and maybe an extra round was too much for players, who were already dealing with a late end to the season and the fixture congestion that is part and parcel of the modern game. But can you really argue against giving underdogs a chance to shine on the world stage? And would we have been without the plot twists provided by Cape Verde this summer? Maybe this is just democratisation of the game and we should support it.

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The hydration – or perhaps more accurately described “advertising” – breaks, which were said to “ruin the flow” of the game. But I actually read quite a compelling piece on the normal ebb and flow of a game of football, and how in reality the break made little difference. I was definitely against the half-time show, but I’m certainly not against Shakira.

Nonetheless, it was hard not to see the summer’s event as a bastion of late-stage capitalism, and the message seemed pretty clear: something is coming, and you’re going to hate it waaaaaaay more than VAR.^[i]

Football is a grubby game. Look at the previous edition of the tournament, hosted in Qatar, a location selection which has faced numerous allegations of corruption and bribery. The building of the stadia was done so on the backs of men said to be working in conditions tantamount to modern slavery, and of whom the International Labour Organisation said 50 had died. A further 500 were seriously injured, while 37,600 suffered “mild to moderate” injuries. Look at this tournament and the number of alleged rapists participating in it (not least the big guy at the top, current President of the United States of America, Donald Trump).

We know all of this, but we still support the clubs, buy the shirts, and shell out for the tickets and TV subscriptions. In a way, it seems weird to me, that the hill we want to die on is FIFA wanting to make more money – because bears are well known to shit in woods.

It was announced this week that FIFA, headed by Gianni Infantino, a man so morally absent that even Sepp Blatter thinks he’s gone a bit too far in his money-making schemes of late, plans to create a commercial subsidiary to run its main events, such as the World Cup, and that external investors will be able to buy stakes in it.

If we’re talking about selling stakes, maybe we should talk about sponsorship. Maybe we should talk about a tournament that celebrates sport, health, competition and fairness backed by Coca Cola, McDonalds, Airbnb and Visa, and whether or not the never-ending rogues’ gallery of backers felt they already had a stake in FIFA’s major tournaments.

To make it all the grubbier, FIFA has offered governing bodies $40million a pop if they sign up to the proposals – an initial $20m if they do so before September 19.

I’m not a business head, and I can’t pretend to fully understand the implications of the announced proposals. Obviously, it’s being sold as a mechanism through which to raise money to help “grow the global game”, and the press release is peppered with links to stories about Cape Verde and Curaçao’s inclusion in the 2026 World Cup.

I can’t help but wonder if the global game is already fairly well grown, but also that if further growth is needed, how they’re not in a position to fund it after the reported $9billion generated by this year’s World Cup. Oh wait, could this possibly be related to those aforementioned little windfalls and the governing body’s not-for-profit status?

Of course, the proposals have been met with widespread condemnation, and a slew of platitudes along the lines of “fans own football”. It’s an assertion that seems insane to me, because if fans really owned football, we’d hardly charge ourselves in excess of £60 for a match ticket, and another £50 for our shirt.

Make no mistake, FIFA owns the World Cup, but they don’t own football, and they certainly don’t own us. If we want to see a better type of game, and a better moral code running through it, it’s time to put our money where our mouths are – back in our pockets.

^[i] I actually like VAR when it’s used equally against all participants. I’m not going to mention conspiracies about Argentina at this stage…

Not after the Hillsborough Disaster.

On April 15, 1989, we watched the news in horror and disbelief, as the BBC rolled footage of a lethal crowd crush at the FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. Negligence by the South Yorkshire Police had led to the deadliest disaster in British sporting history; one which claimed 97 lives1 and changed football forever. I remember my granddad, a lifelong Liverpool fan, heave-sobbing, which scared the shit out of us kids, because he was not what you’d call an emotional man.

Anger was the next emotion, as four days later the lies began. “THE TRUTH” hollered the front page of The Sun, splashing an article that was anything but, in which it falsely alleged Liverpool fans pickpocketed the dying, urinated on police and attacked emergency responders. The boycott of The Sun was immediate, with sales figures in Merseyside plummeting 40 per cent overnight. Given it continues today2, that boycott is quite possibly eternal. Good.

But The Sun wasn’t coming up with these lies all on its own, it had sources; South Yorkshire Police presented a series of false narratives that blamed Liverpool supporters for the disaster, rather than take responsibility for their own catastrophic mismanagement. Hillsborough was a policing disaster followed by terrible falsehood, which in turn exposed a state machinery that ignored a city for two decades – and then some.

In fact, it wasn’t until 2016 that the conclusions of a second inquest into the Hillsborough deaths at last fully vindicated the families. A jury found that those who died were unlawfully killed due to gross negligence manslaughter by match commander chief superintendent David Duckenfield and that no behaviour by Liverpool supporters contributed to the disaster.

“Immediately after, the families adopted the Hillsborough law as their positive legacy from the ordeal they had suffered,” says Guardian journalist David Conn, who has reported on Hillsborough for 30 years. “They wanted a duty of candour for public officials and authorities to be introduced, and equality of funding for legal representation for people fighting for justice like them.”3

That law – initially proposed as a private member’s bill by Andy Burnham4 in 2017 – has been languishing in Parliament for the past decade. But I think my granddad would be sobbing again, as the Hillsborough Law, officially called the Public Office (Accountability) Bill, has finally passed through Parliament.

Now, the Hillsborough Law is complicated and full of legalese as laws are wont to be, and there’s still the Lords and lingering concerns around national security to navigate, but its premise is simple: never again should a grieving family have to fight the state to discover the truth. This is a law wrought by the people. People who have tirelessly campaigned for decades, tirelessly fought the institutions that should have stood beside them, tirelessly refused to accept compromise over justice.

As Ian Byrne, MP for Liverpool West Derby, said in his incredible moving speech in the Commons on Tuesday 14 July: “The supporters were innocent. The lies were exposed. The cover-up was exposed. The culture of unaccountable power was exposed… When power is unaccountable, truth becomes negotiable, justice becomes optional, ordinary people are sacrificed… Never again.”

I urge you to watch his speech in full.

The Hillsborough Law is a proud legacy for the 97, for their families, for every campaigner who never gave up. And it speaks to many more: Grenfell; the Infected Blood Campaign; the Post Office Horizon families; Primodos; Truth About Zane; the Nuclear Test Veterans; the Chinook Families, the Manchester Arena families.

One of my best pals is a Forest supporter, something he inherited from his mum and dad, who were at the game on April 15, 1989. He’s also a football writer, so it seemed fitting to ask him for the Forest perspective. Here’s The Athletic’s Nick Miller:

“My parents were at Hillsborough, at the other end of the ground to the Leppings Lane end. I was five, and at home with my Nan, and didn’t really understand what was going on. Neither did Nan, but for different reasons: I didn’t realise that something awful had happened, but she did, and had no idea if mum and dad had been involved. This being the days before mobiles, it took them a few hours to find a payphone to let us know they were OK. They listened to the radio in the car home and heard the death toll gradually going up and up.

“They also didn’t know the gravity of it all, initially. Regrettably, when fans started spilling onto the pitch they assumed, because of the era, that there was fighting of some nature in the Liverpool end. The game was stopped, and for a while still nobody knew what was happening. Then they saw someone using an advertising board as a stretcher, someone’s limp arm flopping over the side of it, and they realised.

“You’re always careful as a Forest fan not to insert yourself into the Hillsborough story too much, because we were very much bystanders. But there are people who were there who have suffered trauma, PTSD, even survivor’s guilt. There’s also a sense of guilt that Brian Clough, Forest’s manager, blamed drunk Liverpool fans for the disaster: he eventually apologised, but it’s still a stain.”

I’ll leave you with this from the aforementioned Guardian writer David Conn, whose reporting on the subject has been as tireless as the efforts as everyone else involved in seeking justice for the 97.

“These families have always been underestimated. If you think about where they were after 1989: they suffered not just losing their loved ones in the most terrible circumstances but this disgraceful, toxic narrative from South Yorkshire police and a judicial system that failed to establish the truth for decades. And now they have succeeded so completely as to make it illegal for public officials to ever be less than candid about how a disaster occurred.”

Because that lack of forced socialising is a big reason it’s trickier to make pals as we get older. And, y’know, I already have friends. Really good friends. I’m not a big pack of ride-or-dies kind of person, but I consider myself proper lucky with my heart pals. With those in place, it can feel easy to think of that bucket as full, so there’s no need to bother with new people.

For most of us, those big bucks friendships and our family provide the bulk of the emotional support; they’re the ones we’ll turn to in a crisis and drop everything for in return. Yet that’s exactly why those relationships demand so much time and energy. When it comes to our emotional health and stability, they’re very much an input – and very much an output.

And as so many of us discovered during Covid and its numerous lockdowns, humans actually need, and indeed thrive on, the small connections – also known as “weak ties”3 (although that name feels too diminishing to me, given the comfort they bring). These can be anything from a natter with your postie, a chat with someone in the supermarket, a chance meeting in a pub – or joining a netball team.

Which is why, back in January, I went to a taster session for a local netball league. Yes, it was pretty daunting trotting along on my tod to a roomful of strangers4, but most of the women there were in the same boat. By the end of an hour and a half, the Eagles – now affectionately known as my bib slags – were sort of thrown together but ready to fly.

Kayleigh, Kat, Zoe and Michelle are my core Eagles, with a revolving door of willing subs taking us up to the seven players needed each game. It’s been a genuine delight getting to know these excellent women as the months have gone on.

In a busy life dominated by the daily grind, responsibilities and the emotional pull of those close ties, it makes sense that a big joy in the small connections is you simply don’t need to invest as much. If that sounds mean, it isn’t meant to. There’ll be some new people, some small connections you meet who may well become bigger, deeper connections over time – something I’m finding with my bib slags – but the pressure’s off both ways, is what I’m saying.

It’s also a chance to try out a different version of you. While there’s comfort in people knowing who we are, knowing our history, our political opinions, our bad exes, best shags, failures, successes and all of the varied pieces that make up a person puzzle, it can sometimes feel claustrophobic, keep you trapped in the past, unchallenged in a bubble. There’s a huge freedom in someone just taking you at face value. Judging you purely on whether you can stay upright on a netball court; laughing when you run straight into a cupboard, play in the wrong direction, or accidentally punch your team mate in the fandango5.

My netball experience echoes the cheer in female connections I discovered as part of an all-women gym back in London when I started strength training five years ago. I didn’t go to that gym looking for firm friends, but ended up with a few you’d now have to prise from my cold, dead hands. So yeah, while ‘make new friends – join a club’ is a massive cliché, it works.

Unfortunately, netball has led to a fallout with a couple of people I thought we’re good friends, mind. I say ‘people’, I mean ‘my knees’. They hate me. Any young people reading, enjoy your knees while you still can.

And, alas, I’ve yet to meet a new pal who’s gifted me £5million out of the goodness of her heart, for me to spend on Ferraris or the gee-gees or whatever I want. Nige, if you’re reading, do let me know how that one works. Or, y’know, let the public know. Seems pretty fucking relevant, you barely sentient splat of worm jizz, particularly as giftee, British cryptocurrency investor Christopher Harborne, said he gave the money “because of [his] great admiration for the decades of work [Farage] had done to achieve Brexit.”

See, it’s this sort of stuff I don’t get bogged down with when I’m hurling myself across a leisure centre.

I’ll leave you with a couple of fun facts I learned about my body this week.

1. You can taste antibiotic eye drops. I mean, it makes sense given the body’s whole connectivity deal, but the back of my throat isn’t a fan.

2. There’s a hotline for my blood type. As a B-, I’m a pretty special blood bag. Just two per cent of the population have pessimism literally running through our veins. If that’s you, as well, we’re very much in demand, so if you can, please do donate. It’ll make you feel all warm inside and very special, promise.

* Big up also to the Scots, I will be celebrating you too. My grandad was Scottish, I like your shirt, and Lyndon Dykes plays for Charlton Athletic, dontchaknow?

If you want my opinion on that match, fuck it, I think we’re going to win. Yes, we have lost to them a couple of times when it’s actually mattered. Yes, the season ended unfathomably late and there is already some alarming chat about injuries. And yes, half** our team do look like they’ve been using that ropey bottle of factor six Hawaiian Tropic tanning oil, bought sometime between 2007-2015. But hey, they are English after all, and anyways, Luka Modrić is old now.

**Harry Kane, that’s why I always used to get a sunbed off the back of six months of GMT before a long-haul flight, too. You’re glowing, babes. (Sunbeds are very, very bad for your skin, kids).

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The build-up to our first match and some utterly sublime graphics on the Three Lions’ social media has gotten to me, and I am excited about a kick-off in a tournament I was previously planning to boycott. What can I say? I’m a hypocrite but the artwork is gorgeous.

But for every delightful invocation of togetherness, there’s an angry man on LBC, incandescent that a German won’t pledge allegiance to an English king (there’s a very obvious joke in here somewhere). I’d also bet there are a few more besides with their fingers hovering over the “post” button, ready to talk about the squad members who don’t look like molten spam after a week in the Kansas heat.

It’s hard to put the specific controversies regarding this World Cup to one side – the cost of tickets; the problems fans - even officials - have had gaining entry to the US and the fear of ICE rocking up at matches. There's the gross prioritisation of money over quality and even the safety of players, and the horror squared of the Infantino-Trump love-in. It’s the perfect storm in a late-stage capitalist teacup.Though, even without those issues, if we look closer to home, suffice it to say my feelings about an international tournament have become more conflicted in recent years.

For a start, a World Cup is bittersweet for me, personally. It reminds me of my brothers, and especially my eldest brother Stephen***, whose Italia ’90 shirt I got to pilfer after his untimely death by suicide in 2004. Naturally, I would punctuate this statement with the punchline “every cloud”, but I can already feel your unease.

***It won’t be the last time I tell you about this over the course of the next 10 months, but I’m running the London Marathon for the Samaritans next year, in memory of my brother. If you felt so inclined as to sponsor me, I would be most grateful.

Stephen is the reason I like football, probably the primary reason I give a shit about England, and I wear his shirt with pride during every international tournament. I miss him in these moments, but it’s also when I feel his presence most strongly, because my god, does football do nostalgia well.

Outside of the Offord household, if you’ve listened to the extended version of my interview with sports journalist Kate Mason this week, you’ll have heard me talk about this a bit already, but when I look at England as a nation, sometimes it’s very hard to truly believe we deserve nice things.

The rise of Reform and the legitimisation of rhetoric about our past, our present and our entitlement as English people horrifies me. I know that many of these people will celebrate our victories but will also be the first to throw stones at the very men they’ve allowed to instil pride in them over their perceived “Englishness”.

There’s also the rampant flag-shagging across our green and pleasant land, of an emblem that has more negative than positive connotations for many of us, which we’re now supposed to worship in the name of support. It’s hard to come together against this backdrop.

But it’s actually for these very reasons that I decided not to boycott this World Cup. When I look at our squad, I see a group of hungry, ambitious young men – role models, if you like – who look like the England I know. It is these kids who have the ability to instil patriotism in me, in a way that literally nothing else can. They represent me and mine far better than the minority of patio-chair throwers, who’ll probably find themselves under the relentless onslaught of a water canon before the night is through. We have to be louder than them.

This is the Englishness I choose to celebrate, why should we let that minority rob us of it?

SPOILERS: I’ve seen up to series two, ep 11 of The Pitt, all that’s currently available in the UK and have tried to be as spoiler-free as possible for people who have not yet watched any of it. But, you know, I couldn’t avoid them all.

What’s the opposite of a perfect storm? Endless blue skies? I dunno, but it was into this welcoming and wide-open market that HBO’s The Pitt first landed in the UK in March. The emergency room-set drama was already airing its second series in the US, brandishing multiple Emmys and a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

It had all the hallmarks of a show for our times, taking some pretty strong feelings about the current US administration and harnessing them to a nostalgia for the pre-Golden Age TV time when ER really was the best thing on the telly. Especially since the shows share producers and a star, Noah Wyle.

The Pitt arrived like a major emergency, all 15 episodes appearing on Sky and Now TV together as part of the launch of HBO Max. Meaning most people I know burned through it in a single rainy weekend. In fact, given the 24-like structure of the drama, it was possible to do a shift with the staff of the Pittsburgh-based ER, starting bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at 7am (a bar to me ever doing it) and lumbering exhausted across the finish line sometime after 9, having barely eaten or peed all day.

What a day that was, you could empathise with the show’s newbies, I can’t believe all those things happened in a single shift. Well, there’s your first problem. But I’m not here to talk about that.

But first, I need to say there’s definitely a lot to recommend in The Pitt. Dr Mel King, for one. The primary carer for a sister with autism and clearly on the spectrum herself, she’s a heady mix of earnest concern and unbridled joy. It’s a fantastic performance by Taylor Dearden, who benefits both from her real-life experience and the same expressionful eyes that have made her father one of the most respected actors in the world.

Ditto Dr Jack Abbot (late-in-the-game heartthrob Shawn Hatosy) whose arrivals hit like Gandalf’s at the Battle of Helm’s Deep, even if he’s alone. A former combat medic, he carries an epic swagger that almost completely obscures a life-changing injury and no-doubt wicked PTSD. He’s knocked Shirley from Slow Horses off the top spot in the list of fictional characters I’d call in times of crisis, and I think, part of a genuine attempt to understand what would drive anyone to work in an ER, especially post-Covid.

You see terrible things, disgusting things, inexplicable things and if you’re lucky, you’ll get through the day without being verbally, or racially, or sexually, or physically abused. Or, you know, catch something and die.

“We’ve all got ADHD” is Dr Langdon’s theory, but let’s throw in adrenaline junkies, victims of childhood trauma and people burdened with the expectations of their families for good measure. And astride it all stands Wyle’s Michael Robinavitch, “Dr Robby”, Senior Emergency Attending Physician, a man raging against The Man and barely clinging on to his sanity. A mentor. A hero.

Yeah, I don’t think so.

Sometime around the mid-point mark of series one, I started to wonder, “is this guy just a prick?” Sure, I get that this day we’re spending with him is the fourth anniversary of his mentor’s death. In fact, “treat Robby with kid gloves” (I paraphrase) is one of the first things anyone says in The Pitt. And sure, who doesn’t like starting the day with the words “the boss is spoiling for a fight, so repress your own troubles and put up with it”?

But it wasn’t until around the time that Dr McKay had to explain to him that girls were human beings too, that I started to get a weird taste in my mouth. And while Dr Robby ends up taking her point on board, what a guy, the storyline resolves with him believing that he was, ackshully, right after all, so he gives her the responsibility and a free guilt-trip into the bargain and then presumably goes home to watch Adolescence for the umpteenth time.

All of which starts to put Dr Robby’s clashes with Dr Collins in a different relief. She is inarguably having a worse day than him, even if he doesn’t know it, but the fact that she might be doesn’t even cross his mind. These clashes are nothing compared to his explosive interactions with the Chief Medical Officer Dr Underwood, in which he is nothing short of obnoxious. Both of these characters, by the way, are played by black women.

Dr Robby’s constant low-key bullying of Dr Samira Mohan is also worth noting, especially when he accuses her of spending too much time on a case that is, she has noted, a textbook example of how black women are poorly treated in ERs. Even when Mohan later impresses him he exclaims “Slow Mo, no mo!” just to remind her he used to think she was shit.

But it’s not just the women in his team that Dr Robby fails to empathise with. It’s the women he treats too. Although to be fair, The Pitt’s writers give the team a dazzling array of Karens to placate and/or rage at. Anti-Vax Karen, Pro-Life Karen, Anti-Mask Karen, Can’t Keep Her Domestic Issues Out of This Karen, No I Won’t Respect My Dad’s DNR Karen, Drunk Karen, Keep Your Hands Off My Son’s Organs Karen.

Dr Robby’s growing rage at women continues into the second series, with Mohan subjected to a rant that goes beyond outrageous and into actionable. But she gets off lightly compared to Dr Baran Al-Hashimi, for whom Dr Robby can barely disguise his contempt. When “The Man” ascends from his office on high, this time he’s played by a white dude, so most of Dr Robby’s ire is pointed towards Dr Al-Hashimi, even if she’s got nothing to do with it.

Again, it’s worth saying this is all presented as part of wider collapse within Wyle’s character, after all he’s riding a motorbike and lying about wearing a helmet.

The events of series one have also added to his mental load, events in which, it is worth saying he adopted a very “do as I say, not as I do” attitude.

But he continues to make everything, somehow, about himself, including his whole handling of the discovery that one of his staff is an addict, a test of leadership he has spectacularly failed. And as for his uninvited personal advice for Dr Whitaker, I’m kind of speechless. Dr Robby’s clearly earmarked the young doctor as the one he sees himself in, which is grossly unfair because Whitaker is lovely. Telling him not to let people take advantage, essentially “have an empty life, like I do,” is among the most selfish uses of his time in the whole series.

So, while I think The Pitt’s thesis is probably supposed to be about the decline of one good man, under extraordinary pressures, to me, it really begs the question: is “he’s a good bloke really” ever any excuse for being a shitty boss? I’m going to go with no.

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It’s the return of “heroin chic” if you want to be a prick about it, although there’s truth in the idea that society has women addicted to chasing an arbitrary ideal1. That ideal changes, of course, for a woman’s body is merely a trend, a plasticine flesh-bauble she should morph to fit ever-shifting goalposts.2

Maybe in a decade, when its patent runs out and Ozempic is cheap as chips, we’ll see the pendulum swing back to body positivity. But I doubt it. Certainly not with any longevity, because keeping women small really tickles the patriarchy’s shrivelled pickle.

Of course there’s pushback against diet culture and nip and tuck ‘perfection’. Good. There has to be. And it is particularly joyful when we get to witness these trends being bucked on the bigger stage. On, say, the Sports Illustrated runway, down which total rockstar Ilona Maher sashayed a few days ago in a cheeky-as-all-fuck swimsuit.

There’s no doubt Maher is hot SAWCE. She oozes sawce, glistens with it, whether she’s bagging an Olympic medal on the rugby pitch, strutting her stuff on a catwalk or just showing up for the very many women who don’t look like the A-listers getting their bones out for the boys in Hollywood.

“I love it. I love showing my body,” said Maher. “I love showing what this body has done for me. I’ve been to two Olympics now. It does amazing things on the field and it’s just perfect for what it does and so strong. And I think other girls seeing that and feeling like, ‘Oh my gosh, I look like her. I have the frame of her’; I think not only has it helped me and made me feel more confident, I think it helps others, too.”

Maher’s great. I’m a big fan. Although it behooves me to add that her body is also totally unachievable for the majority of us, given she’s, y’know, an Olympic athlete who works her muscular butt off in the gym, rather than being brawn that way. Also worth noting is even she gets a lot of shit-talkers talking shit about how she looks because she rejects the underfed vibe currently in vogue.

And while there’s appreciation of the feats Maher’s body is capable of, there’s also too much focus on how she looks doing them. The aesthetics and sexualisation of a woman’s body is, it seems, where online media wants sole focus. Our anatomy outside of that is maligned – and, it turns out, censored.

Bit dramatic, Mick? Well, no. At the end of May, Emily Darlington, MP for Milton Keynes Central, sponsored a debate in Westminster with the title, ‘Censorship of women’s health and wellbeing content online’3 because, at the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, online platforms – Amazon, Google, TikTok and Meta – are disproportionately restricting or removing content relating to women’s health and wellbeing.

Earlier this year, the Independent reported a warning from more than 600 women’s health leaders that social media platforms were systematically censoring medically accurate content on topics such as menstruation, fertility and menopause – often misclassifying such content as “adult” material and limiting its reach.

This is mostly being done through shadow banning. If you’re not familiar with the term, it refers to a social media platform or online community limiting the visibility of a user’s account or posts. The defining feature – and FUN! bit – is that this restriction is hidden, so the user can still post and interact normally, without knowing their content is secretly being suppressed from others.

So we’re in the position where women are trying to have conversations about women’s health while women’s health content is being pushed out of the algorithm for mentioning normal anatomy and everyday conditions for women.

And I really do mean normal and everyday. Samantha Niblett, MP for South Derbyshire, shared a photo of the list of women’s health terms that lead to shadow banning. Here y’go.

FFS, right? Underneath Niblett’s post are hundreds of comments, many from women running care services and charities for women, saying thank you for shining a light on this and detailing how often their message has been shadow-banned.

If you read my last Substack, in which I detailed the massive funding (and indeed thinking) discrepancies between the Government’s Women’s Health Strategy and its Men’s Health Strategy, you’ll know closing the gender pain gap is already tricky and under-resourced.

It’s going to be even trickier if we can’t fucking talk about it.

Clio Wood, co-founder of CensHERship, which aims to tackle social media censorship of women’s health and sexual wellbeing content, said: “Social media is such a powerful and engaging way for people to learn about their health – the knowledge being shared can help break down taboos and in some cases be lifesaving.

“But our own data shows that too often it’s women’s health content that is restricted or removed because it is incorrectly classified as ‘adult content’ simply for referring to a female body part.

“This is a broken system and women deserve better - they deserve equal, uncensored access to health information about their bodies.”

In the made by men for men online world, women should be seen and not heard. If we want to combat this long-term, it’s going to take funding, fostering innovation and alternatives, creating collaborative spaces and strengthening reporting mechanisms.

But in the interim, maybe Aunt Flo and similar euphemisms need to be back in town. And indeed, to get around these bans, it’s now common practice for users to say and write other terms or emojis in place of certain words. Which sucks. But not as much as not having those conversations at all.

A huge congratulations, therefore, to the mighty Charlton Athletic Women, who gained promotion to the WSL (that’s the top tier – the “Premier League”, in case you’ve been living in a cave and/or other dark ages) after a dramatic penalty shoot-out in the first ever WSL play-off against Leicester City. Our goalie, Sophie Whitehouse, was a superstar.

We’re talking about Charlton Athletic, so naturally we didn’t make it easy for ourselves. About a month before the season’s end, we had a nine-point lead at the top of the WSL2, having gone 27 – TWENTY SEVEN – matches unbeaten, only to shit the bed right at the end. On the final match of the season against second-place Birmingham, we did it again and slid into third place, necessitating said play-off.

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Nonetheless, it’s a huge deal for the club. Once one of the most dominant forces in the women’s game, their women’s side were effectively disbanded back in 2007, after the men’s team were relegated from the Premier League. Too expensive, they said, despite the fact that it pre-dated professionalism of the women’s game by about a decade.

The story of Charlton Athletic women’s team might seem pretty niche, and if you are really interested in it, I can recommend you a good book, but it’s a reminder of how far the game has come. Back in our glory days, England’s most-capped player turned much-beloved pundit, Fara Williams, was homeless while she played for then top-of-their-game Charlton as a teenager.

In today’s game, a recent Instagram post by She’s a Baller celebrated Arsenal Women’s average home attendance of 33,809 for the season and was enthusiastically shared with me by a Gooner friend of mine. “Higher than eight Premier League clubs” she, and it, pointed out.

It’s a huge jump in attendance, and without doubt a figure to be celebrated. The presentation of it as Arsenal women being more popular than a third of Premier League clubs nonetheless made me uncomfortable. Not least because those eight clubs’ stadiums have a capacity of less than 33,000 and they are all – more or less – selling out. Arsenal Women have, for the last season, played all of their WSL home games at the Emirates, a stadium with a capacity of a little more than 60,000.

Meanwhile, in the last month or so Charlton Athletic women’s side have set record after record in terms of their own home attendance, peaking at 3,979 for that play-off match. These are good news stories, and we should be shouting about them, but for every Arsenal, there is a Charlton Athletic, and we need to be shouting about that as well. You can “yas queen” it as much as you like, but to not recognise the precarious nature of women’s sport and the massive room for improvement, as well as the opportunity for sustainable growth, does us all a disservice.

Because the story of Charlton Athletic’s women’s team also remains a stark reminder of how beholden women’s teams are to their male overlords. In June 2024 it was announced that Reading’s women’s team would withdraw from the then Women’s Championship due to financial difficulties. In May last year, Blackburn Rovers did the same, stating that they were unable to meet the league’s minimum standards on facilities, player welfare and staffing. What happened to Charlton back in 2007 could – and does – still happen.

I’ll rather shame-facedly admit that I only went to watch our women’s side for the first time myself at the end of this season. We are already season ticket holders for the men’s side, and getting to Charlton sometimes twice a week is a bit much. But my daughter is in something of a “boys smell” phase, and in fairness to her, she might have a point. After all, I got to drink a beer at my seat during those two games, because women can be trusted with beer at football matches.

So we’ll keep making the effort next season. For the time being, repeat after me: WE ARE GOING UP, SAY WE ARE GOING UP!

To be clear, this complex, chronic, whole body and lifelong disorder – with symptoms that tend to begin in late adolescence and include irregular or no periods, irregular ovulation, extra facial or body hair, acne, weight gain and hair loss from the head – will still affect one in eight women, but as of this week, it’s called polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS). Catchy, innit.

And look, I don’t want to piss on the newly minted PMOS’s chips. To be clear, this rebrand is great news. Because for years, the term PCOS has centred the conversation around ovaries, periods and fertility, which not only wasn’t the whole story, but also meant the very real metabolic and long-term health implications of the condition were downplayed. (Also, the ‘cysts’ of the old PCOS aren’t even cysts, they’re follicles containing eggs in arrested development. FFS. That’s the level of misinformation we were dealing with.)

Women have spent years being told it’s “just a period problem” while their skin, their weight, their mood, and their energy fell apart. PMOS is a much more accurate reflection of what the condition entails. “Polyendocrine” recognises it’s about hormones. All of them. Not just oestrogen and progesterone. “Metabolic” means it’s about how the body processes energy and sugar, which is why weight management feels impossible for so many women with PMOS (because it’s not just about calorie deficit). The ovaries still get a mention, because they are part of it, they’re just not the whole problem.

This rebadging of PCOS to PMOS, spearheaded by the endocrinologist Prof Helena Teede, director of Melbourne’s Monash Centre for Health Research and Implementation, is a global precedent. Nobody, Teede says, has put this much effort into a name change ever, and it comes after more than a decade of vigorous debate over the need for a name that more precisely and completely describes what women with PMOS are going through. And to be fair, change in medicine is no small shakes; that the biggest rebrand in modern medicine is in women’s health is massive.

What’s more, patient advocates have been hugely involved in this 14-year process, which is a real boon for the flicker of hope that any fucker is actually listening to women when it comes to women’s health. A more accurate name can, should, here’s hoping will shape: public understanding; diagnosis; research funding, and healthcare outcomes.

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But, well, those chips aren’t gonna piss on themselves. Forgive me if I’m a bit cynical this might just be semantics. But semantics is all it will be unless targets change and GPs are properly supported to help patients from the outset. Because while there’s currently a lot of talk about improving women’s health, about tackling medical misogyny, the only action appears to be, erm, more talk.

Last month, then health secretary Wes Streeting1 announced the NHS’s brand new Women’s Health Strategy. It follows the fresh Men’s Health Strategy published last November. Both strategies target gender-specific inequalities, with the Women’s Health Strategy focusing on dismantling medical misogyny, reducing wait times for gynaecological care, and improving menopause support, while the Men’s Health Strategy aims to address shorter life expectancy, suicide rates, and preventable cancers. And, y’know, men are from Mars, women are from Venus, so of course there’ll be differences in the strategies. But to what extent?

Yeah, put that chip down, because things are about to get real pissy. The Men’s Health Strategy has a named academic network, a formal research mandate, ring-fenced funding, digital pathways built into the NHS App, and a public accountability report committed in writing. The Women’s Health Strategy has… none of those things.

Women’s conditions are named, but not resourced. Inequalities are acknowledged but not funded. Men get an academic, women get an ambassador. Men get cash, women get intentions. Men get action, women get words.

So, Wes, given you’re all about listening to women when it comes to women’s health, listen to this: put your money where your strategy is, big fella. Right now, £80million2 is ring-fenced for the Men’s Health Strategy but just £5million3 for the women. A quick look at the population shows those ratios simply do not maths. We want, need, fucking deserve parity. Not in words. In investment, infrastructure and accountability. Otherwise it’s just more medical misogyny grist for the medical misogyny mill.

One day, when I was about eight, I came home with a record I hadn’t purchased. My mum, who at that point had a pretty solid grasp on everything I owned, immediately demanded to know where it had come from and, sensing I might be in trouble if I told her the truth, I clammed up.

It became a whole drama that eventually sucked in my sister, a friend and her mother, until my mum uncovered that I’d traded it with said friend for a ceramic heart on a ribbon I’d been given for my birthday (probably by my Nan) that I could find no earthly use for.

I think the lesson I was supposed to learn from this whole fandango was that stealing was bad. Given I’d not stolen anything, what I actually took away from it was that if I didn’t hold on to presents, whether I liked them or not, I would be found out. Hence, I have a box under my bed full of things I’m scared to take to the charity shop.

Feel free take away any message you want, but the salient point is that everyone in this story is working class.

Fast forward to now, where Donald Trump is either symptom or cause of some great moral decay in the US and the New York Times releases an opinion section podcast about the morality of stealing. Sure, sounds interesting. A philosophical debate for these times we live in. Why not?

In it, reporter Nadja Spiegelman speaks to controversial left-wing YouTuber Hasan Piker (who Helen Lewis and I discussed a few podcasts back), and not-totally-uncontroversial left-wing journalist Jia Tolentino. That’s one in the eye for viewpoint diversity, ain’t it.

The podcast was headlined, with the sort of irony that should live in infamy: The Rich Don’t Play by the Rules. So Why Should I?

If you’re wondering who the “I” refers to, join the club. Given Piker is a millionaire and Tolentino was doorstepped by the Daily Mail outside what it claimed was her $2.2m Brooklyn brownstone, the only not-rich person in this whole interaction is me. But it seems pretty clear on listening, that the “I” refers to these one percenters, who, for reasons that make sense only to themselves, do not see themselves as rich.

The podcast kicks off with some quick questions. Would you share your Netflix password? Would you get round a paywall? Tolentino encourages everyone to get round paywalls to read her work. Work I guess she’s already been paid for, but even so it’s a somewhat economically illiterate long-term career plan.

Piker says he would steal a car if he could get away with it, which is perhaps the most revealing thing he says during the whole podcast. It means his political beliefs go only as deep as consequences allow. It also means the only consequences that matter are those that affect him. Not the consequences for the poor bastard who needs to get their kids to school and finds their car’s been nicked. And lastly, it means he thinks breaking the law is cool but he’s too scared to do it. Pussy. Sorry, I mean voice of his generation, right?

Tolentino reveals she’s shoplifted from Whole Foods because it’s OK to steal from big companies. The admission is delivered and received in a tone that reminds me that a huge amount of shoplifting is done by middle-class thrill seekers.

The podcast guests discuss whether they’d steal from the Louvre, with Tolentino deciding she wasn’t smart enough to pull something like that off, obviously oblivious to the fact that it can be done with a ladder in broad daylight.

Piker laments the loss of good-old fashioned crimes, like bank robbery. I mean, you’d need to find a branch of one first. People stopped robbing banks for a reason. They don’t hold as much cash and it’s a lot easier to get caught. But sure, let’s bring it back. And let’s go with legalising blowing up pipelines like Tolentino suggested. That definitely seems like something more people should be doing. It’s all so fucking stupid.

And just to show that it wasn’t just Piker and Tolentino showing themselves up, Spiegelman gave it her best shot too, bemoaning how hard it is to live ethically in an unethical society.

“I’m constantly acting in ways that don’t align with my belief system,” she said: “And constantly having to justify that, like ordering in food when it’s raining out.”

If your ethical belief system can’t withstand rain, I don’t know what to say to you.

I could go on. The podcast certainly did. But I won’t because it is all so face-clawingly dumb. And out of touch. And exactly the opposite of what the Left needs to be doing right now.

“Are these the men with which I am to defend America?” Well, quite.

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If a frog is placed in boiling water, it will jump out, but if that frog is placed in cold water that’s slowly heated, it won’t perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. And so, for a long time before boiling point, before the screaming, frogs just sit in the water.

***

The first time someone called me a feminist, I balked.

Cliché alert: I blame my mum1 who, when teenaged me asked whether she was a feminist, looked at me like I’d enquired if she’d like to shit in my hand. Ann came of age in the 1960s; feminists, she told me, were terrible, troublesome creatures. Man-hating harridans – who burned their bras, Mickey! And so being a feminist hadn’t felt like an option. Who’d want to be a hairy-voiced, hessian-clad witch with tits not even a mother could love?

There had been things before then that had given me, let’s call it pause, when it came to men. A father who lashed out, then left, ordered by the courts to pay five pence a year in maintenance but never did. The neighbour who, from when I was six to when I was eight, sexually abused me, told me I was special in a way that made me ball my little fists and keep my mouth shut. The man who followed me home from school in the dark and assaulted me in the front porch.

I was wary of men. But still, hating men? That seemed unreasonable. Unseemly. Unfair on all the good ones. It seemed A Bit Much.

Can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, right? If you want to get ahead in the world as a woman, be more like a man. As a girl who grew up under Thatcher that seemed obvious, and as soon as I’d stopped wanting to be a cat, I wanted to be a boy. Everything looked easier and more possible as a boy, who would then be a man. How useful for men that women were told equality meant being more like men, meaning men had to do… nothing.

Fast forward to my first proper job, and I’m working for lads mags in the late 1990s. One of my tasks is the monthly nipple count. Women’s nipples, but you already figured that – they’re the dangerous ones after all. Too many of these saucy flesh discs amid the pages of a men’s magazine meant it got relegated (promoted?) to a higher shelf in the shops. “Porn for dwarves” is how I think of it now. “Empowering for those women” was how I was conditioned to think of it at the time. But back then I also thought it was cool to be cool about porn. Now I think porn is rotten to its insidious hardcore.

We live. We learn. The water gets hotter.

And here I am at my first feminist writing retreat a mere 27 years later. Time flies when you’re having patriarchal trauma forced upon you on a daily basis!

Our teacher is Rachel Hewitt, a prize-winning author whose fierce, beautiful, feminist prose I greatly admire. Our Jen chatted with her back in 2023 about her brilliant book In Her Nature (you can listen here). Rachel greets us, polished professional from the waist up, chic PE teacher from the waist down. That’s because as an endurance runner she covers impressive distances. But it struck me it’s also how a lot of women dress. In case we need to do a runner.

Through smartly structured workshops, Rachel also helps her guests cover a lot of ground. I’ll let her tell you what in an extract from her latest Substack.

“The subject matter of our discussions took in important and often distressing themes, including our personal moments of feminist awakening; the daily struggles we face in unequal domestic partnerships; experiences of medical misogyny; fury at being ridiculed and patronised in male-dominated workplaces; living with the constant hum of fear of men’s violence and abuse; living with trauma inflicted by men’s violence and abuse; impotent anger and despair at men’s perpetration of destruction against our beautiful planet; the difficulty of crafting a brave, bold, meaningful life in this era of virulent anti-female backlash; negotiating axes of oppression (such as ageism and racism and classism) which cruelly intersect with sexism; and realising the horrifying extent to which men are being encouraged to wallow in entitlement and a pornified resentment and hatred of women. Phew. There was a lot to talk about.”

Our first exercise is to write our own middle section to Kim Addonizio’s poem, To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall, which begins “If you ever…”, lists a series of experiences recognisable to, I’d wager, most women, and ends, “if you think nothing &/ no one can/ listen I love you joy is coming.” Our lists, much like Addonizio’s, featured much more shared pain than shared pleasure, and as we read them out, each final “joy is coming” sounded more and more plaintive.

And yet, this refrain became a release. Heads down, scribbling, inevitably one of us would break from documenting anger, or fear, or one of the endless litany of hostilities committed by men against women to mutter “joy is coming”. “JOY IS COMING!”, the rest of us would chorus, then cackle. The rage radiating from each of us vibrated, white-hot, but was punctured with regular belly laughs.

And look, it really flicks my anti-woo switch when people say they feel “free” or “in a safe space”, but – goddammit! – I felt free in a safe space! And it was clear the rest of the women around the table felt the same.

“I think I actually do hate men,” says one of the women. And I feel myself balk. It still feels a bit much. We chat around it. Her declaration isn’t out of nowhere; there are receipts. Every woman at that table has receipts. Every woman I know has receipts. So many receipts. Purses and pockets stuffed to brimming with receipts. Kindling for a bonfire of the manities.

Because inevitably as I’ve got older, there have been more personal receipts. But it’s been the experiences of my female friends, the stories of other women, that have shaken me, awoken me, enraged me. Not least the very many women I’ve spoken to for Standard Issue, fighting for women’s rights and safety, fighting for their fucking lives in the wider world. Trauma upon violence upon hate.

So many men hate women. Men hate women secretly and men hate women openly and men hate women structurally. And yet we do not call these men women haters. Why is that? Well, men want to quarantine such moments, as if they occur outside the wider world – because to admit they are the wider world risks the system that enables them.

I probe the question like a loose tooth: do I hate men?

There are men I love so very much. Good men who do good things, including my husband, a man I trust with my, well, my everything.

And yet. I don’t not hate men.

***

Later that week I opened social media to be hit by what felt like a tsunami of screams, countless female frogs hitting boiling point as one. CNN’s investigation into a global “online rape academy”, initially reported at the end of March (although not in any UK mainstream media I can find), had gone viral. It reveals that in shocking group chats containing thousands of men, men encourage one another to drug and assault their wives and female partners – and swap tips on getting away with it. With a heads up it’s harrowing reading, here it is.

There have been three huge news stories recently that women have been consumed by: Gisele Pelicot, the Epstein Files and now the so-called rape academy. But none of this is new. Men have been abusing women and girls, including raping their wives, throughout history. Except for most of history it wasn’t illegal. Rape within marriage only became illegal in this country in 1991. I was 14 and I’m pretty sure it’s in the living memory of most people reading this post. The internet just made it bigger. Just made it more open.

Listen, there are other screams too: because half of those frogs in the potriarchy’s boiling water2 are men. But their screams are different. “We’re lonely!” “We don’t know how to be men anymore!” “Our whole self was wrapped up in subjugating women!/Our whole self was wrapped up in protecting women!”3

I mean this with all my heart: diddums. Because men created this. And every single man, even if he is not perpetuating it, even if he is one of the rare men speaking up about it, benefits from the system. This is a men problem.

Women didn’t create nonce island, where they squirrelled men and boys so that other powerful men could fuck, abuse and rape them. Women didn’t start a ‘rape my husband’ website, sharing tips on how to drug and rape male partners and get away with it. There are no countries where it is illegal for boys to get an education. Illegal for boys to sing. A female president hasn’t started a war to distract from her connections with a convicted paedophile. Women aren’t killing one man every ten minutes. Women aren’t posting viral videos of them practicing martial arts, loading guns, stabbing cushions, “training”, with the tagline “practicing for if he says no”. There are no female-led religions laying down laws that restrict men from everyday life.

These are (some of) the reasons my voice has grown hairy, hessian’s quite comfy actually, I take ‘witch’ as a compliment, and I no longer give a shit what anyone thinks of my tits. And the world feels very heavy.

But women, listen, I love you. Joy is coming.

She comes in bright flashes; flashes that shine brightest in the darkness. There’s joy in knowing we’re not alone. In the knowledge that, despite what we’re told time and time again, women mostly have each other’s backs – whether or not we agree with her choices. It’s in the shared defiance. In the hands that redo us when we come undone.

Joy is there in the company of witches. Witches with kindling. Witches with matches.

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3

Rachel has a brilliant Substack on this, which she has kindly gifted to Standard Issue:

Small Revolutions, Every Day

Men are very angry about the disappearance of male-only spaces - and they're taking it out on women

There are only TWO days left to benefit from the massive discount on the price of monthly and annual subscriptions to my Substack. Don’t miss out! Also, please remember that an annual (or founding) subscription - even one purchased at the reduced rate - will bring you a 10% discount off the price of my creative writing courses and retreats…

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7 months ago · 250 likes · 118 comments · Rachel Hewitt

So with the bad (but, y’know, also hilarious) news covered, the sun shining, and the fact that tomorrow I get to send my daughter to school dressed as a cat*, I dedicate this week’s Substack to a few good news stories.

*for reasons

The Women’s Six Nations got underway last weekend and will be back in action on Saturday. Great news if you’re a rugby fan and, let’s face it, probably even better if you’re an England fan. On the back of their World Cup victory last summer, The Red Roses face Scotland on Saturday, while Wales take on France, and Ireland play Italy. You can still get tickets for many of the matches, and I’m absolutely sure the respective hosts would love to see you there. We’ve got to put our money and our bums** where are mouths are, if we want to see the trajectory of women’s rugby continue to rise in the same way as women’s football.

**Y’know, like, on a seat.

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Speaking of women’s football, ALL of the home nations and the Republic of Ireland brought points home in the World Cup qualifiers on Tuesday. Can I get a whoop whoop? Wales thumped Albania 4-0, Republic of Ireland pipped Poland to the post 3-2, Northern Ireland walloped Malta 4-0, and Scotland held Belgium to a 1-1 draw. Finally, England beat Spain – SPAIN! – 1-0 at Wembley, and I can only imagine how pissed off Spain were by what must have felt like a maddening defensive effort from the Lionesses.

(I don’t usually enjoy this behaviour on the pitch, but I did appreciate Lucy Bronze’s wry smile as she shrugged off a yellow card for hauling one of her opponents down in the final five minutes. Truly, she is a double-hard bastard.)

How about some wildly positive news from the world of men’s football? Over in the Bundesliga – that’s Germany’s top flight, for the uninitiated – Union Berlin have appointed Marie-Louise Eta as interim head coach following the sacking of previous manager, Steffen Baumgart. Eta was already the league’s first ever female assistant coach and now becomes the first ever woman appointed as head coach of a men’s team in one of Europe’s top five leagues.

Now, this was only a matter of time, so pleeeeeeaaaase let’s pray for a sudden change of form under her stewardship, to really aggravate the silly sausages out there who are kicking off over her appointment.

Nonetheless, nicely played Union. And further props to their director of football Horst Heldt, not only for having the best name I’ve ever heard, but also for backing Eta.

“We’re talking about a highly competent leader here, and you can be sure that everyone here at Union, whether in the stands or within the club itself, stands 100% behind this decision.” Yes, Horst Heldt. Yes.

V&A East opens this weekend and lucky me got to have a nose around the truly incredible building on Wednesday. Landmark exhibition and V&A East opener, The Music is Black: A British Story, nearly reduced me to tears with a montage showcasing the very many influences of the African diaspora on British music. I’m pleased to report that Simply Red made the cut, and also that the woman next to me chortled heartily when Roachford’s Cuddly Toy started blaring.

Not to deep it, as the kids possibly still say, but with so much less-than-positive chatter about immigration in the run-up to what will probably be quite disheartening results in local elections, it was a stark reminder of why immigrants came to Britain in the first place (lads, it’s because we were pricks), and how Brits have quite undeservedly been the real economic, social, and cultural beneficiaries of that.

Oh go on, then..

“This is completely horrific. It shows the depths to which Britain has sunk,” tweeted Truss on March 19.

What was she talking about? To be fair, there’s a lot she could be referring to: arson attacks on Jewish community ambulances; restaurant raids by the Home Office’s immigration compliance and enforcement officers singling out non-white, foreign-born workers; two of the leading political parties promising to plunge hundreds of thousands of kids back into poverty by immediately reinstating the horrific two-child cap should they get into power; Irvine Welsh using the word “sass” about a forthcoming Trainspotting musical; a forthcoming Trainspotting musical – the list’s exhausting.

But no, Truss was reacting to the House of Lords voting to protect women’s bodily autonomy. Yep, England and Wales moved one step closer to decriminalising abortion last week, when peers voted to defend it in the Crime and Policing Bill (with 185 in favour, 148 against), and to protect pills-by-post provision (191 to 119). Well done (185/191 of) the Lords. My jury’s still out on what to do about how some of you got to these positions of enormous power, but for now I’m grateful, because this is a truly historic and positive moment for women’s rights.

What’s more, in a particularly significant move and landslide vote, women who currently have police records for seeking terminations of unwanted pregnancies outside of the specified permissions will be pardoned.

Let’s hear [read] what Heidi Stewart, Chief Executive of BPAS, said, presumably while knee-sliding and pulling her shirt over her head: “For too long, women have faced the possibility of police involvement at one of the most vulnerable moments in their lives.

“By supporting an additional amendment to pardon and expunge the records of those who should never have been investigated or prosecuted in the first place, peers have taken an important step towards recognising the harm this legislation has caused to some of the most vulnerable women and girls, including victims of domestic abuse, human trafficking and children.

“Last year, MPs made clear that criminalising women for ending their own pregnancies has no place in modern society. This latest vote ensures that those already harmed are not left to carry the lifelong consequences of a law Parliament has now rejected.”

Okay, now I’ve buoyed you a bit, let’s return to Truss. Adding insult to ignorance/being thicker than mince, her tweet was a quote tweet. A quote tweet of a lie.

This, my friends, is absolute tomshittery. Decriminalising abortion does not change limits to abortion timeframes. The Abortion Act 1967 allows women to end their pregnancies under medical supervision up to 24 weeks, or beyond in certain circumstances, such as if the life of the mother is at risk or if the foetus has a serious abnormality. Them’s the rules. Them’s STILL the rules. Last week’s vote simply brings abortion in line with other healthcare provisions and ensures the procedure is regulated without threat of criminal investigations.

Because once more for the people at the back*: Abortion is necessary healthcare. Not least because the opposite of having an abortion isn’t not having an abortion. It’s the risks to the female body and mind that come with pregnancy. It’s the risks to the female body and mind that come with childbirth. Pregnancy is a physical and emotional sacrifice unique to women, who aren’t merely passive vessels for new life – because there is nothing fucking passive about growing and being responsible for another human. You can opt-out of being an organ donor, right?** Fair fucks then you can opt out of the whole body donation that is pregnancy. To quote Sarah Ditum back in 2013: “In a world where it’s possible to end a pregnancy safely and legally, it seems like rank brutality to force anyone to carry to term against her will.”

*Yes, I’m aware most of them are never going to fucking listen. Yes, I’m still going to keep shouting. We have to.

**I’m sorry, you absolutely CANNOT have my eyes

Sorry, we’re going back to Truss again. On the same day she also asked, “Is the country headed for total collapse?”. Given we’re still feeling the ripple effects of Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s turbulent mini-budget, I didn’t think she had that question in her. But no, Liz, we’re not. And if it feels redundant to still be taking potshots at Truss three-and-a half years after she tanked the economy and killed the Queen***, look at the numbers on that screenshotted tweet. People agree with her. She – and it pains me to type this – sort of knows what she’s doing when it comes to agitating certain masses. And I can only apologise if you read that as a euphemism.

***Look, it’s a theory.

The web of 'small' trapping women

For Truss is currently courting Trump’s America. And while she’s, thankfully, got fuck-all power here, Nigel Farage does, and he is also courting Trump’s America and keen to bring it to the UK. An America where the protections for women of Roe v Wade have been gone for nearly four years. An America where a woman in Georgia – a state with the death penalty – is facing murder charges tied to allegations she used abortion pills to end a pregnancy. An America where Texas saw a 12.7% increase in infant deaths above expectation after its abortion ban, driven primarily by an increase in deaths of infants with congenital defects. An America infiltrating the UK, with many US anti-abortion groups now having branches in Britain.

With so many women’s rights under threat, what happened in the Lords last week is progressive. And it upset Liz Truss. Now that’s a pro choice.

It’s funny, but then it’s hard not to find elements of Tate comedic. (Although, not the allegations against him, or the drip feeding of poisonous ideals to impressionable young minds, you understand.)

Are people getting less intelligent? It’s hard not to wonder when considering the appeal of Tate. Maybe watching Louis Theroux’s new Inside the Manosphere, which I’m hoping to do before the next Outside The Box, will help.

I don’t in any way wish to blame women for the so-called manosphere or any kind of misogyny, after all, you can’t consent to being conned, right? But it’s fair to say there are plenty of female influencers with pretty wild views about relationships between men and women, and the expectations we should have of one another in this context.

Is the manosphere the problem or just the internet as a whole? It’s a salient question and one Theroux himself discussed in an interview for The Romesh Ranganathan Show podcast, about the commodification of opinions. The idea that a lot of the beliefs espoused online are done for cold hard cash, rather than any specific ideology.

To some extent, this isn’t anything new. As someone who has written a few opinion pieces myself (yes, I’m writing one now – the irony!), if you can bosh one out in an hour or two, they’re pretty profitable in an industry that largely pays absolute bobbins for a full dayshift.

But the reach of those views and the demographic of the people “buying” them has changed with the advent of social media and the market is almost entirely unregulated. You don’t find many 14-year-olds sitting down to mull over Allison Pearson’s latest textual bile, but there would (hopefully) be some consequences if it contained outright lies.

Journalists are supposed to check their sources and the information they put into the public domain. But anyone can apparently, for example, literally accuse someone of racism and “wrongly assert that Tourette’s tics are an expression of internally held beliefs” without consequence. And if you want a great example of the economics and ethics of all this, the caption on that video has been updated as per the previous quote, but the video still hasn’t been taken down. *Scratches head*.

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But it’s also about who is doing the talking. The Guardian reported this week about the more than £374,893 in fees charged by Reform UK leader, Nigel Farage, for personalised videos via the platform Cameo.

Having analysed more than 4,000 clips produced by the “politician”, it reports that videos include Farage repeating mottos associated with far-right groups, references to antisemitic conspiracy theories, and a comment about US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s breasts. In his defence, a spokesperson for his party highlighted the sheer number of videos sold by Farage, and said that “at that scale, the occasional mistake can occur.”

So, you really can say anything, it seems.

Concerns around the age of the people consuming misinformation online, and misinformation in general, are well-documented. But what is the scale of the information – both good and bad – doing to our brains.

When I interviewed the writer Ellen Atlanta about her brilliant book Pixel Flesh, I was struck by a comment she made about Instagram. How back in the day people largely stayed within their own fairly localised areas, and had little-to-no access to faces beyond those they saw day-in, day-out. Human beings are simply not designed to see the number of faces that the digital age gives us access to.

After a break-up last year, falling into the pretty specific Instagram “it’s not you it’s him” subsection (it was him, to be clear), the bombardment of the algorithm was extreme. Within days, I became far more confident than anyone with no psychiatric training should be, that I could diagnose a narcissist at 40 paces. And social media is literally full of people (with no psychiatric training) doing just that.

Reflecting on that time, I wondered how helpful that particular wormhole had been, but more importantly, how helpful the torrent of opinions are in general. Perhaps human beings are, in the same way as with faces, simply not designed to take in so many of them.

You’ll forgive the super exciting start to this, but last week I was vacuuming under the sofa cushions and it occurred to me that I no longer expect to find any money there.

Once upon a time, a quick rummage in the sofa, my desk drawer, between the rubber bits of the washing machine and underneath my car seats, could net a haul of up to £5 in battered shrapnel. Around the same as a disappointing car boot sale but at least you didn’t have to get up at 6am and stand in a muddy field to earn it.

Some people still require hard currency: craft fairs, taxi drivers in Rome, drug dealers, shops experiencing a power cut, and my mother. But the £20 and the 20 euro note I carry just in case are starting to feel like curiosities. I did once try to give the £20 to a young person and they looked at it like I’d offered them a travellers’ cheque and asked if I could transfer it into their bank account instead.

There’s a load of reasons why it’s not exactly great that we’re sleepwalking towards a cashless society, but it seems especially sad that we’re increasingly unlikely to ever again feel the joy of putting on a winter coat and finding a tenner in the pocket.

Some people, it seems, get their joy from who is on the banknote rather than the possession of the note itself. Does their interest in the Britishness of the note correlate to how many of them they have? I dunno. But also, I assume, yes.

The Bank of England’s announcement that wildlife would be replacing historical figures on its next batch of banknotes has caused unrest in the quarters that are only just getting over the last thing that enraged them about the decline of Britishness.

Now to be clear, I’m not going to pretend I don’t care about who is on our banknotes. Consistency is a rare enough thing. Back when Caroline Criado Perez was campaigning, in the face of much misogyny, to have Jane Austen put on a banknote, I thought it mattered a lot. It’s a bit like MBEs and Oscars, I wouldn’t care if they didn’t exist, but since they do, they shouldn’t just be passed between friends.

As Lord High Fantasiser about the good old days, Nigel Farage is perhaps unsurprisingly puce that we might now have a hedgehog on a fiver. He called the plans, and you wouldn’t get odds at Ladbrokes for this, “woke”. Although I can’t help but suspect he thought the addition of Austen and Alan Turing “woke” too.

The Bank of England, he added was going “PC mad and loony” (demonstrating a total disregard for “woke speak”, and indeed tautology) over the decision, which was made after wildlife came top of a list of suggestions during a public consultation. Heaven forbid we listen to the people, rather than what Farage says the people want.

His main concern appeared to be the perceived slight to Churchill, natch, who he claimed would be replaced by a beaver. I guess he means the animal, not the dib dib dib kind. Or indeed the dab dab dab kind, although that’s surely what Criado Perez and her friends at Big Vagina had planned next, right Nige?

A further public consultation is apparently coming soon and although I’m sad “Danny Dyer in a Sinclair C5” is no longer an option, I’m hoping if I ever encounter a bank note again, it’ll have an otter eating his dinner off himself on it. Because I can’t think of anything much more British than that.

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To be clear, this body fascism is focused on my own. My own precious flesh suit that has kept going through all sorts of turmoil in my life, and survived some pretty heinous shit as both child and adult, including various bouts of disordered eating and me generally treating it like boiled crap because it didn’t look as I thought it should. As pop culture, as society told me I ought to think it should.

But at 48, doing what I do for a living – celebrating women, lifting women’s voices, helping women make noise and take up space, and not giving a toss what they look like as they’re doing it – I’ve stopped all that arbitrary, partiarchy-driven, women-controlling nonsense now, right. Right? Erm, yes and no. I’m definitely better at nourishing and caring for my body, making it strong, keeping it moving. But I still pick at it, I still judge it, I still size it up and find it wanting, I still sometimes let a number on the scales dictate my relationship with it. Why? Well, it’s something you’ll have heard me say a lot on the podcast: social conditioning’s a hell of a drug.*

*A tip of the chapeau to women who can block out the noise. Who don’t give a stuff about the arbitrary beauty standards thrust upon us and just crack on being themselves with nary a critical glance in the mirror. If that’s you, I’m genuinely chuffed for you. Oh, for it to be me.

But seriously, what do you expect in this world where an increasingly skeletal yet pumped and plumped 62-year-old Demi Moore** is held up as a role model for older women to look like now, for younger women to aim to look like in their future. She’s ‘ageing like fine wine’, guys!

**It is KILLING me not to make the ‘Demi Less, amiright?!?’ Joke. Thank you. Sorry.

She’s not. Demi Moore is, in fact, ageing in exactly the opposite way to fine wine. Fine wine does best when left to itself with a high sugar content in dark, stable, moderately humid conditions away from light, vibrations and interference. And fuck me if that doesn’t sound absolutely delightful right about now. Women: to the caves with some jelly babies!

No, Demi Moore is ageing like a woman who has unlimited access to extremely expensive cosmetic surgery, enhancements and (I’m calling it) GLP-1 injections. Demi Moore is ageing like a woman with the time and energy to dedicate to erasing the years lived showing on her face and body. Demi Moore is, to be fair, ageing like Demi Moore: her body, her face, her choice. And part of me sees photos of her and knee-jerk thinks, “I wish I could look like that now, let alone at 62”. Social conditioning’s a hell of a drug.

But I also see a woman who looks fragile and gaunt and uncomfortable in her (taut) skin. Because Demi Moore is ageing under the pressure of perhaps the brightest of patriarchal lights when it comes to female aesthetics: the celebrity spotlight. I’m just a middle-aged woman living by the English seaside and I feel the pressure, so I can’t comprehend how heavy (no pun intended) that must feel for the women in Hollywood. In fashion. In the public eye. I understand the why, Demi. No shade. No shame.

Imagine though, if we didn’t talk about women’s bodies.

Imagine if there wasn’t constant noise about how women “should” look.

Imagine if ‘skinny teenage girl’ wasn’t the beauty standard set by men for women.

Imagine if we interrogated the fucked-upness of that last sentence and actually punished some of the pieces of shit involved in the Epstein Files.

Imagine if watching the manipulation and abuse and picking apart and emsmallening*** of women’s bodies explored in Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model felt like a time capsule of something very much in our past rather than a reflection of what is once more prominent and celebrated on red carpets and across swathes of social media.

That, my friends, would be a more peaceful, balanced, women- and girls- supporting world.

***Shhh now, it’s a perfectly cromulent word.

But that’s not the world we live in. And so here I am, talking about women’s bodies even though I’ve been told it’s rude to stare and it’s rude to comment. Because I know women being kept busy keeping small is a form of patriarchal control. And I’m not being rude about them, I’m being rude about that, because that can fuck right off.

To be hungry is not empowering. Thinness is still sold and therefore seen as discipline, but people underestimate how mentally all-consuming — and boring and exhausting — not eating can be. And once we buy into this, we’re never ever off the hook. And now we’re being told youth is just a matter of discipline, too. In the year of our Lord 2026, we are being invited to admire Demi Moore because she does not look her age. BUT WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?

Because let’s get one thing clear: whatever she looks like doing it, Demi Moore is ageing. And in a world that worships youth, a world with an obsessive, pervasive interest in making teenage girls sexualised, a world where girls were trafficked to an island so men could rape and abuse them as if it was their right, we’re sold the idea that it’s a woman ageing which is unforgivable.

But you can’t out-surgery Time. Tick tock will always beat SkinnyTok. As the journalist Linda Weltner asked back in 1993: “Do I have to stay thin until I die? Am I supposed to look forty when I’m sixty? … Is there food in the afterlife?”

So I’ll keep working on being kinder, or at least more neutral, to my body as an act of [un]small resistance. And if that’s not already you, please join me.

There’s not a lot I could add to what’s already been said, and Hannah will be chatting to someone about the much misunderstood condition in the coming weeks. Though, of the many, many takes I’ve seen on all-round horrendous incident, this one by Dr Peter Olusoga, a senior lecturer in Psychology and host of the Eighty Percent Mental podcast, is one of the better takes I’ve seen.

I suppose I might add that as well as joining the chorus of voices criticising the BBC, the rest of the media needs to do its bit, too, and I include the social media accounts of both big and small names in this. It’s one thing to post a load of ill-informed garbage on an Instagram account with more than 250K followers in the heat of the moment before being comprehensively taken apart for your dangerous, ableist views, it’s quite another to add a number of further posts doubling down on your position in the three days that follow.

I also don’t know who Metro’s source is in its article, which I’m also choosing not to link to, about Jordan’s alleged reaction to the incident, but I find the language of “repulsed” and “grossed out” to be pretty offensive in this context.

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On top of that, I find it really sad that the discourse around it has detracted from the massive achievements of Ryan Coogler, who became the first black winner of the award for Best Original Screenplay for Sinners, and friend of the podcast, Wunmi Mosaku (who you can hear chatting with Sally Wainwright, Ruth Jones, Fern Britton, and The Boss, Sarah Millican, here) who took the gong for Best Supporting Actress. I’m very much hoping she’ll win the Oscar so that we can say that two members of our gigcast alumnus went on to win them. Are we the common denominator? How can we ever really be certain?

There’s not been enough chat about good things, this week. But as ever, where Donald Trump fails, thank god for Flavor Flav’ coming up, well, trumps.

You’ve probably heard by now about Trump’s phone call inviting the Olympic gold medal-winning US men’s ice hockey team to the State of the Union Address. In said call, he’s heard fan-girling his knickers into a right old twist about their performance and what a top time they’ll all have together, and who he’ll introduce them to. I MEAN… in the current climate I’d be slightly wary about that guy’s introductions, but there we go.

In a throwaway comment he adds that he’ll also have to invite the gold medal-winning US women’s ice hockey team. If he doesn’t, he might get impeached! He and his new ice hockey bros LOL their little dicks off. The japes!

I was pleased to hear that when the invitation was extended to the women’s team they said, nah mate, we’re busy. I’m fucking delighted to hear that when unexpected champion of women’s sport Flavor Flav’ extended an invitation to the women’s team to hang out with him in Las Vegas, they said hell yeah. Well, you would, wouldn’t you?

In fact, the Public Enemy star has gone one further and invited “ALL the female Olympic and Paralympic medalists from the United States” to join in, adding, “I’m your official sponsor and hype man – we got you covered.”

Flav’ – and I really can’t believe I’m writing this - is a lesson to us all. It’s not hard to be an ally, and it’s not hard to see beyond our own point of reference or lived experience if we want to. This is the kind of shouting we all need in our lives.

Here’s a widely reported headline from this week:

You might understandably be expecting some context here. Surely there’s an explanation, some extenuating circumstances. Nope. A Blackpool doctor found, on the balance of probabilities, to have raped a young woman at his home, avoided being struck off because the tribunal panel decided it was a “one-off” attack. The panel went further, stating Aloaye Foy-Yamah had not “abused his position of trust as a doctor” because the victim was not a patient, the attack did not take place at work, and he’d received a series of glowing testimonials from his colleagues.

I mean, sure, why not take a punt that the rapist in a position of authority over people in vulnerable situations will have learned his lesson and won’t do again what he got away with the first time. It’s only women, right?

Women.

Women as collateral damage.

Women as objects.

Women as chattel.

Women don’t matter.

And so – inevitably – I return to the Epstein Files. I think we should all be returning to the Epstein Files. It should be mandatory to think about the sheer horror of what happened to those women for at least five minutes a day. We know more than 1000 women and girls were trafficked. There are hundreds of Epstein survivors, as well as those who, like Virginia Giuffre, did not survive. And I know as the grim revelations keep on coming there’s a lot of horror to squeeze into a day. It’s overwhelming. It’s too painful. It’s *puffs out cheeks, exhales* A LOT. Tiptoeing the tightrope of being informed about the world while not making ourselves so indescribably sad we cannot properly function has never felt harder. But we must not get off that tightrope. Because women and girls matter.

Already there are noises from certain quarters that maybe all this is being blown out of proportion, or as Brendan O’Neill decrees, that it’s “morphed into a moral panic”. To which I say, in my trademark erudite manner, fuck the fuck off. We should be panicking about this. You can’t blow something like this out of proportion, because the proportion is HUGE. It’s all-consuming. It could and maybe should swallow the world as we know it. These are truths so big they feel like a conspiracy theory. It’s all so appalling we don’t want it to be true. But it isn’t a conspiracy theory. It is true. And these are just the bits we’re currently being allowed to know. We know there’s more.

Because these things are never just a one off. Am I suggesting there’s another nonce island we don’t yet know about? Well, how surprised would you really be if it turned out there was? Like it or not (I’m going with not), we live in a world where it’s deemed acceptable to rape a woman “just the once”. We live in a world where misogyny, where control, where abuse of girls are all embedded in power structures throughout our culture, a world with an obsessive, pervasive interest in making teenage girls sexualised objects, a world where Jeffrey Epstein thrived, a world where a convicted paedophile was never short of friends in the highest of places. What did they get out of it? Well, not their just desserts, that’s for sure. We live in a world where there are victims and victims and more victims and evidence and evidence and more evidence – and just one person in jail.

All of this means my rage is further enraged by some of the smug, virtue-signalling “Look who’s NOT in the Epstein files” on socials. In one, a woman paints then taps signs like she’s Andrew Lincoln’s creep in Love Actually: “drag queens” “trans athletes” “black journalists”. Alright babes, for a start, this is specious nonsense. Wanna know who else isn’t in the Epstein Files: Fred West; Jimmy Savile; Jack the Ripper; the man across the road who sexually abused me starting when I was six, and, go on, let’s do a version of Godwin’s Law, Hitler. None of them on the (incomplete, so many names still REDACTED) list. Yet still, y’know, categorically bad people.

Using these horrors to further whatever the fuck cause you think you’re furthering is a disservice to the very many victims of Epstein and his terrible network of abusers. Moreover, it minimises the ubiquity of abuse. Because we can scale back the old adage ‘power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely’ made so plain by these revelations to too many homes across the entire spectrum of society. People with power can abuse it. A lot do. And do you know what, some of them are drag queens, or librarians, or black journalists, or undocumented migrants – no group of people is immune to this heinous shit. What message do you think their victims are being sent?

So, call me a pearl clutcher, accuse me of moral panic, but I’ve lived it and I matter. My panic was present before I was old enough to own pearls or really understand why what was happening to me was so morally wrong.

We need to keep our focus even when the details make it hard to keep our dinner down. It’s never a one off. So clutch your pearls, raise your voice in moral panic, and say it with me: women and girls DO matter.

In it, psychoanalyst and author Anouchka Grose writes about how, in 2000, she took the decision to cut down on her life admin by shaving her head. As a new mum, she had been feeling the weight of her maternal responsibilities and the nigh-on impossibility of getting out of the house. I’ll be honest, it feels like an extreme way to ward off feelings of loneliness, but whatever works for you. I can see the appeal having wanted fewer strangers to talk to you (though not entirely compatible with the other objective).

Alas, she writes, having wanted less people to bother and coo over her and her tiny baby, the impact was extreme. People immediately stopped talking to her after her number two (the haircut, you understand) and suddenly offers of assistance with her buggy evaporated. It was, she writes, “a harsh lesson in what happens when you step outside gender norms”

It’s a weird thing, not being noticed. I felt like I spent my entire adolescence and young-adulthood not wanting to be seen, but once you start to disappear, you are very aware of it.

The doors stop being opened for you, the glances from strangers vanish, the cat calls abruptly end. While you never really wanted any of those things, once they are gone many of us realise how conditioned we were to expect them, or see our value in being objectified to varying degrees.

For me (and most mothers I know, but apparently not Anouchka) this switch happened almost as soon as I gave birth to my daughter. I went from being a glowing, squishy, rounded symbol of PEAK femininity - strangers literally stopped me in the street to congratulate me – to being someone who regularly couldn’t remember if they’d brushed their teeth, let alone washed their hair, someone people would not even make space for to push an infant child past.

Not coincidentally, that is also the point at which I started quite openly calling people “twats” in the street. Someone will probably take umbrage, one day.

The rage is real. Not because men don’t look at me as much anymore, or because the hormones that used to urge me towards a rose-tinted view are dwindling, but because there are so very many things to be angry about, having tolerated them for an ever-increasing number of years.

You don’t have to look far to find them – Anouchka, the news, or having to deal with Vodafone will make them apparent. But here’s one not so widely reported on in the findings of a research project by Lindsey Simpson as part of her Master’s degree in Workplace Health and Wellbeing at the University of Nottingham. Delivered in collaboration with the Women’s Sport Collective, the survey of 260 women working in elite sport in the UK (60% of whom were under the age of 40) found that 88% of respondents had been the victim of at least one incidence of sexual misconduct in a work-related setting in the past five years. Some 87% had experienced sexual harassment, 40% sexual assault, and 2% had been the target of rape.

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Becoming invisible has its benefits, but it’s hard not to resent having to put up with this much shit in the meantime, and feeling like we’ve had to dim ourselves until we get there.

If you need an antidote to rage (not Ian Holm’s because that guy is fuming about the secrets of the loch), I’m going to recommend this week’s Rated or Dated pick, 1996’s Loch Ness. Not convinced to watch? Maybe have a listen to this, first.