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...
Category - Rhetorics & Language
“Women are being edged out of the workforce,” says an article on The Lily that was doing the rounds at the beginning of the summer. In it, Aimee Rae Hannaford, a co-founder and chief executive of a Silicon Valley tech company, explains why she decided to dissolve the company and live off savings when the schools closed as a result of the pandemic, despite the fact that her son’s father was...
I’ve seen a good few comments recently about how it’s great that we can talk more openly about our birthing experiences, but how we need to make sure to also emphasise that it isn’t always like this, that some people give birth in the dreamiest of ways and ‘bounce back’ in no time. That’s true of course, and I get why the caveat is so often added – and yet I’m uncomfortable...
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...
I sang at a friend’s wedding a few years ago. The song was a Swedish classic, the main singer of which, Josefin Nilsson, died in 2016 after years of pain, anxiety, health complications and surgery following a violently abusive relationship back in the ‘90s – I just didn’t know that at the time. Last week, to coincide with what should’ve been the singer’s 50th birthday, a...
We’ve heard it all before: a man brutally murders a woman, and everyone’s in shock. Perhaps after the debate that followed the reporting of the murder of Clodagh Hawe and her three sons by her husband a couple of years ago, journalists and editors are thinking twice, even thrice before publishing praise of Mark Hennessy, the man now found to have strangled the young Jastine Valdez to death in...
‘So, I guess you support gender quotas too, then?’ I’m sure I’ll have to fend off heaps of pantsuit accusations for writing this post, but a colleague asked, and I’m not going to turn down the chance to explain why yes, indeed, I do support gender quotas. I think the thing that makes gender quotas hard for some liberals to stomach is that, in contrast to issues like bodily autonomy and...
Oh, the infighting on the left. If only they could get along and get their act together, and maybe they’d achieve something. In the aftermath of #coponcomrades, and after a couple of years of complete lack of consensus around Corbyn’s Labour leadership in the UK, it is easy to feel like the infighting on the left has become a pet peeve of many, interestingly especially those who aren’t...
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...
A few days ago, I snapped at a friend I haven’t spoken to in years. It was on Facebook, which I guess just makes it less surprising and more pathetic, but anyway, I did*. She put up an article entitled ‘Why have kids if you don’t want to spend time with them?’ and I thought ‘finally a piece that rips that stupid question to threads!’ and clicked on it. But the article did no such...