You can joke all you want about emigrants pathetically insisting on attempting to recreate a past that no longer exists. But it’s when I relive that past that the hole shaped like her is suddenly so painfully gaping and obvious.
Category - Personal
I remember very clearly the first time a friend of mine, a self-professed feminist, mentioned in passing that she uses Botox. At first, I was just really surprised. Soon enough, I realised that I felt disappointed. Worse, I felt deceived. I’d thought we had an unspoken agreement, a feminist pact not to engage with the bullshit inventions of patriarchy. But she mentioned it with such poise that...
Bits of Me is my new podcast about women’s bodies, all the things we should know about them, and all the stories behind them. We’ll be talking about bulging bits, hormonal hell-rides, collapsed vaginas, painful sex, birthing choices, shame, and everything in between. The podcast is available on all major platforms, including Spotify, Stitcher, iTunes and Apple Podcasts. If you like the...
You know the professor whose kids gatecrashed his BBC interview, causing him to panic repeatedly, resulting in the whole thing going viral? Well there’s a spin-off version that shows what would’ve happened if the professor were a woman and a mother. You guessed it: she’s grand. She comforts, feeds and entertains her young children without for a second letting her focus slip or losing her...
I started International Women’s Day by having a smear test. I guess in some twisted, far-fetched way, it is a form of self-care, after all. In many ways, today was far from an ideal day for me to do this thing – not because it’s International Women’s Day, but because it’s my monthly deadline in work, a day I when I’m responsible for quality checking in excess of 120 pages of...
The question was posed many times in the past few months: What will we do with all this time when we repeal? Rest, was one of the obvious answers from many: sleep for a week, rest for a month, take a year of just living. These were women who had spent every free moment talking and thinking about the campaign; mothers with ulcers and babies who didn’t sleep, who in spite of it all drove around...
She’s a lovely woman. She often stops by to chat when she’s on her way somewhere and my two sons are playing in the front garden. She tells me they’re adorable, such a gift. And she’s right – they are a gift. She means it in a slightly different way to how I see it, of course; she thinks of them as gifts from God. But we agree that they’re a blessing, if in a non-religious sense for...
“Happiness is within,” they say. Within you, within that cup of herbal tea and a gratitude journal and deep, deep breaths. You should try yoga. We’ll all have our 15 minutes of fame – if we just find that strength within. We’ll all be somebody, more than just selfless mothers – we’ll make our lives into works of art, copyrighted, patented, and with no one to thank but ourselves. One...
It’s funny when a straight, white man denounces the three-word descriptor as unfair because those are not the words he would personally choose to describe himself. Talk about missing the point – or helping to hammer it home. That’s exactly what privilege is: the identities that are so deeply accepted as societal norms that they become invisible. I didn’t grow up introducing myself as a...
I was standing in the airport security queue at Heathrow Airport when a group of middle-aged women started laughing, indiscreetly, at a trans woman just in front of me in the queue; and I wanted to say something, yet I didn’t want to cause a scene, didn’t want to make the experience any worse for the woman in front of me than it already was. Then we approached the security belt and staff...