Recently, I invested in a crossbody phone strap. This came off the back of a spate of security-minded shopping after my luggage got lost on a recent flight, but really it was because my nervous system couldn't take the jolt every time a cyclist pedalled a little too closely.

This got me thinking: why, at a time when most women I know are clutching their phones for dear life, is another trend emerging—one that sees some of the world's most expensive bags carried wide open? I'm not talking about an unclipped clasp here or an errant zip there. I mean wide open, all your wares there for the taking.

I find this especially maddening after a friend and colleague recently had her bag snatched at King's Cross. One man barged into her from behind while another stole her bag, taking her laptop, work phone and—more depressingly—her personal phone.

I suppose you could argue that if this can happen despite taking every precaution, what difference does an open bag make? I'd argue the point isn't the risk—it's what the open bag communicates: that you're too rich, too removed and too insulated from the concerns of everyday life to care.

It's an odd proposition at a moment when many people have become almost reflexively defensive about their belongings. Personal anecdote aside, phone theft has become so prolific across the capital that the Met has launched specialist operations targeting organised gangs, with more than 117,000 phones reported stolen in 2024 alone.

Fashion's response? Leave your handbag open. At first glance, it feels like another deliciously impractical trend. But the open handbag isn't really about handbags; it's about what luxury looks like now.

For decades, wealth was communicated through accumulation. Logomania. "Bling" (yes, I shivered writing that, too). Bigger wardrobes, never outfit repeating. Then came quiet luxury, where status was murmured through deftly cut trousers, creamy cashmere and an absence of branding every bit as conspicuous as the logos that came before.

Today, even that feels a little try-hard. Fashion journalist Amy Odell recently reported that some high rollers who bought Birkins are now "embarrassed" by them. She writes: "They worry it signals a willingness to buy into the Hermès game. They fear being perceived as placing a premium on status symbols. And they feel like they're playing into the Birkin's sheer overexposure, which has made it feel less special in the social media age."

The new aspiration, it seems, isn't simply owning expensive things; it's appearing almost indifferent to them.

As fashion psychologist Shakaila Forbes-Bell tells me: "An open and slouchy bag suggests the wearer isn't worried about protecting or losing their possessions, which suggests they have enough resources to replenish anything lost. That, in itself, is a symbol of luxury."

Owning expensive things no longer communicates quite enough. Real status lies in looking as though those expensive things barely register. Or, as Forbes-Bell puts it, "Luxury is no longer perceived as solely being tangible; it's embodied."

That feels like the defining aesthetic of the past few years: Quiet Luxury, Old Money, Stealth Wealth, Soft Life, The Clean Girl—none of them are really about products; they're about projecting a life free from friction. A life where mornings unfold slowly, inboxes remain manageable, burnout is somebody else's problem and, apparently, handbags never get stolen.

The open bag is simply the latest manifestation of that fantasy. Because if even fast-fashion giant PrettyLittleThing—a retailer once known for its day-glo bodycon clubwear—can rebrand around "heritage" and old-money aesthetics, what, exactly, are the truly rich supposed to do to separate themselves from the proletariat?

It all feels faintly... Versailles. Not because anyone carrying an open Birkin is especially Marie Antoinette-esque; the comparison is more about denial than decadence.

Hear me out, Versailles wasn't just aspirational because everyone wanted gold leaf and chandeliers. It was aspirational because everyday life appeared to evaporate behind palace walls. Labour and logistics disappeared because practicality was somebody else's responsibility. Luxury has never simply been about owning more; it's about appearing untouched by ordinary concerns.

Three centuries later, we've traded powdered wigs for "What's In My Bag?" videos, but the fantasy feels familiar. Vintage luxury reseller Evey Amery of Evey's Preloved has watched this happen in real time. "Rather than simply showing the exterior of a beautiful bag, people want to create a lifestyle around it by revealing what is inside," she says. "An open bag gives you a glimpse into someone's personality and lifestyle." Or at least, the version of their lifestyle they want you to see.

The inside of the handbag has become as carefully curated as the outside, says Amery. Where once, the status symbol was owning the bag, now it's owning the right notebook to casually leave poking out of it.

As Amery puts it: "Instead of simply saying, 'Look at the bag I've chosen to carry,' it says, 'Look at how this bag fits into my life.'"

This isn't just a street-style quirk, either; it's increasingly being designed into the bags themselves. At Fendi's spring/summer 2026 show, handbags were sent down the runway deliberately unfastened, their linings spilling out. Loewe, Chanel and Louis Vuitton have similarly embraced open, unzipped silhouettes. Of course, these bags can close securely—the open look is a styling choice rather than a design flaw. But the message is the same: the most fashionable way to carry a luxury handbag is to look as though you don't need to worry about losing what's inside.

Ironically, Amery says one of the biggest conversations she has with customers is about security. First-time luxury buyers routinely ask whether a bag zips closed, whether it's suitable for travelling and whether their belongings will feel secure. "Social media often presents handbags in an idealised setting," she says. "But my clients are thinking about real life."

Fashion has never concerned itself much with real life and its incumbent practicalities—how boring! But this trend intrigues me because it reveals what we're aspiring to against a backdrop of endless, frictionless consumption. If every metaphorical man and his dog can buy, if not a designer bag then a pretty convincing dupe, the next aspiration becomes the giddy idea of a life where you never have to think about losing your phone, getting locked out of all your accounts or checking over your shoulder.

I'd take that feeling over any It Bag. Unfortunately, I can't afford it.

As Victoria Starmer left Downing Street, stage left, on Monday morning, you couldn’t help but see the smile on her face as one of relief. Ever since her husband assumed the role of Prime Minister, every outfit she’s put on has been reported on and even highlighted as part of a pay-for access scandal (Labour donor Lord Ali had as it turned out, paid for her Me + Em haul). Walking into that viper’s nest, where you will be painstakingly scrutinised in the hope of finding fault, is an unenviable prospect, no matter how prestigious your new address might be. Mrs Starmer left Downing Street wearing Karen Millen, chastened perhaps by two years of headlines.

And so it was when Marie-France Van Heel stepped out of the car at Buckingham Palace that you felt an inevitable intake of breath, a new woman in a new dress, fresh meat for the rubber-necks to pick apart.

For what it’s worth, my first thought was “move over Pippa Middleton, her bum looks amazing in that.” Then I noted the tell-tale cut of a Victoria Beckham dress, the gently-ruched-style with loose sleeves that she’s made a lucrative signature piece. A demure length, a flattering neckline in a pretty summer-y colour. A proper British designer—smart!—but, oh god, they’re going to go after her for the price of it (£850).

Van Heel was of course instantly pilloried, with comments over the fit of her dress which curved over her small tummy. Her body being of more interest than the fact that this new high-profile representative of our country is a Cambridge-educated marketing director, who sits on the boards of charities, mother of three, who some 16 years ago, as a carrier of the BRCA1 gene, underwent a double mastectomy in order to lessen her chances of developing the breast cancer which killed her sister at 39. A woman who, through her own hard work, can clearly afford to buy her own clothes, from wherever she wants—shouldn’t we champion her agency and success? Are we just jealous? Must we be so predictably reductive?

But, given the lifestyle-section reaction to her husband’s appointment, there was little more to expect. Endless click-bait has been churned out debating the ‘health’ ramifications of the “Burnham belly”, spinning off into fitness and diet tips for how to get rid of your dad-fat. I know we want equality, but extending body-shaming to men feels somewhat to miss the point.

We live in a hyper-visual age, inundated with excessive amounts of imagery of which the demand for perfection is so high that we are happy to be seduced by AI influencers, selling us their ‘wellness’ tips and tricks. The fleshy reality of human bodies is hidden from us in the age of social media, perhaps that makes us more accusatory when confronted with the figure of a 56-year-old woman, who is not asking us to get ready with her, or showing us a skincare routine, but simply accompanying her husband on the biggest day of his career.

It’s all very well to scream ‘patriarchy!’ when women are compounded by the rigid beauty standards we cannot expel ourselves from, but in reality it is often other women appraising and admonishing each other when it comes to fashion.

As much as we might say we dress for each other, rather than men, we also hack into each other when we feel someone has transgressed the red lines of how we insist women should appear in public. Small, obviously. If your body has shape that should be smoothed down and covered appropriately. No visible belly-shape, please! No breasts outlined in a bra! Hair must be perfect, makeup there, but not too there. We complain about being forced to live in this aesthetic straitjacket of expectation, but sometimes it is there of our own volition.

If we want impressive, inspiring women to take up space in the public eye, we seriously need to rethink how we treat them once they are there. Are we all but one awkwardly angled photograph away from being viral hate-bait? We admonish celebrities for being too thin or too fat to the point that the slither of space we allow bodies to exist in is forever shifting. An impossible space to fit. No one can win this game, and aren’t we all just exhausted by playing it?

We might cry to be seen as we are, irrespective of our bodies, but we still fail to give ourselves or each other that same grace. If we want to be taken seriously as people who do things other than get dressed, we might just need to back track on the back chat.

Two years ago, during Euro 2024, I wrote about the rise in domestic abuse around England football matches. Violence against women and girls had just been declared a national emergency and, while the statistics were already well known to campaigners, seeing them enter the mainstream conversation felt like progress.

Last night, after England’s latest defeat, a friend turned to me and said, matter-of-factly: “I keep thinking about how many women are going to bear the brunt of this loss.” But the statistic I remembered was bleaker still: domestic abuse incidents rise by 38% when England lose—and by 26% even when they win or draw.

Given how much attention those figures have received, I had hoped things might be different. But when I reopened my 2024 article today, expecting to update it, I realised I was about to write almost exactly the same story.

I'd be reiterating, the same 2014 Lancaster University study, with those figures showing domestic abuse incidents rising by 26% when England play and by 38% when they lose. The same warnings from charities. The same insistence that football does not cause abuse, but that the heightened emotions, alcohol consumption and volatility surrounding major tournaments can exacerbate violence where it already exists. Something I always feel at pains to reiterate after facing a swathe of online abuse whenever I post about the correlation between football and domestic violence.

What Has Changed in Football Then?

What has changed since 2024, then, is not the underlying pattern; it is how prepared we have become for it.

Before this World Cup had even begun, Women’s Aid launched The Other Kick Off, a campaign built around 11.37pm: the estimated time abusive partners might return home after England’s opening match. Digital billboards appeared near fan zones and football hotspots, hijacking one of the tournament’s most searched questions—“What time is kick-off?”—and replacing it with the time many victims and survivors dread.

The Crown Prosecution Service also issued a warning that domestic abuse was expected to rise during the tournament, while police and prosecutors said they were working together to identify offenders and bring cases forward.

According to National Police Chiefs’ Council data, more than 300 domestic abuse offences were reported during Euro 2024 in cases where victims believed the perpetrator’s behaviour was linked to football. The CPS now says that four in five domestic abuse-flagged cases referred to prosecutors, where a charging decision is made, result in charges.

In one sense, this is progress. Institutions are talking openly about what happens around major tournaments. Police forces are preparing; so too are prosecutors and charities. Campaigns are more visible and better targeted.

But there is something deeply bleak about this level of preparedness. Have we really reached a point where a rise in domestic abuse is treated as another predictable feature of tournament football? As expected as crowded pubs, delayed trains and arguments over referee Ismail Elfath.

Before a ball is even kicked, helplines brace themselves. Charities like Women’s Aid and Refuge prepare campaign materials, police issue warnings, and journalists like me pull from the same decade-old statistics. Everyone knows what is coming—it’s right there in the campaign material: He’s Coming Home. That should shock us more than it does.

The 26% and 38% figures come from research published in 2014, based on reported incidents in Lancashire during the 2002, 2006 and 2010 World Cups. The study was limited in scale and researchers called for its findings to be replicated. Yet, more than a decade later, it remains the evidence base almost everyone reaches for. Why then has such an urgent, repeatedly cited finding not led to a larger national body of research?

Perhaps because awareness has become easier than action. Of course, awareness campaigns matter: they direct women towards support, help friends and relatives recognise signs of abuse, and remind people that coercive control, emotional abuse and financial abuse can be as devastating as physical violence.

But how many more awareness campaigns do we need before the emphasis shifts decisively towards prevention, perpetrator accountability and long-term cultural change?

Women’s Aid describes this summer as “another World Cup, but the same problem”. That’s difficult to argue with. Its latest campaign follows its 2022 He’s Coming Home campaign. Every tournament brings a new creative treatment of a reality that remains stubbornly familiar.

There Are Positive Signs Football Is Changing

There are signs that parts of football culture are beginning to grapple with masculinity more seriously.

UN Women UK’s Same Side campaign, in partnership with Vodafone Foundation, called on athletes to speak to boys and young men about empathy, vulnerability, relationships and respect. Its latest phase includes toolkits for teachers and sports coaches, recognising that sport is one of the places where boys learn what leadership, courage and strength are supposed to look like.

Other green shoots have come in the form of my social feed, which has been filled with clips of Jude Bellingham and Norway’s Erling Haaland embracing, supporting and defending one another, even when playing on opposing sides. And, of course, Haaland’s enviable Birkin collection. These are small moments: two footballers showing affection won’t dismantle misogyny, but still, it matters.

Young male fans are watching and absorbing what strength looks like, how men relate to one another, and whether intimacy, tenderness and emotional openness are compatible with elite masculinity.

But for real change to happen, we have to move the burden away from women and towards the men who abuse, as well as the institutions that respond to them and the cultures that excuse them. It would also mean refusing to treat this pattern as inevitable.

By Euro 2028, football will return home to England, Scotland, Wales and the Republic of Ireland. The celebrations will be enormous. The campaigns about connection, identity and national pride have already begun. One of the first, from BT, sees Frank Skinner and football legends from across the Home Nations celebrate the game's power to unite us. Football can be a great force for connection. But if we're willing to celebrate that power, we also have to confront what it reveals when some women still dread the final whistle.

As England looks to lick the wounds of last night’s loss, those campaigns will start gaining momentum, but I wonder whether the parallel campaign—the one warning women about what may happen after the final whistle—will still be necessary in two years' time. I hope not.

Last Friday, Madonna unveiled her new album, Confessions II, a follow-up to the acclaimed, seminal 2005 release Confessions on a Dance Floor. Whilst this is not her first album since the original instalment, it does mark a return to form, bringing back a dance era that has influenced countless artists since.

Every summer has a record that soundtracks months of abandon and fun. Between beach holidays, busy city beer gardens and hedonistic festivals, there is always one album I associate with a particular time. In 2018, it was Robyn's Honey; in 2022, Beyoncé's Renaissance; and, following its 2024 release, Charli XCX's BRAT has dominated every summer since. In 2005, of course, it was Confessions on a Dance Floor. I was only 10 years old, but I still remember "Hung Up" creating a cultural zeitgeist. The video was on every music channel, seemingly at all times; I'd play it on repeat, and the pink leotard etched itself into my mind's fashion mood board forever.

I also remember the backlash Madonna faced back then. Adults in my life were fans of her music, so I was aware of the conversations around whether she was "too old" to be a pop star. Newspapers and magazine columnists declared she was "past it", criticising her for not stepping away from the limelight. Even now, I still see zoomed-in photos of Madonna's face more than almost any other celebrity's, such is the obsessive nitpicking she receives.

"Hung Up" was released twenty-one years ago, and since then, Madonna has been the focus of repeated media backlashes centred on two things: her age and her gender. Of course, they are never named outright, but they remain the thinly veiled motivations behind so much of the criticism she receives. There is little serious way to critique Madonna's talent, given the body of work she has created. Instead, the conversation almost always centres on her appearance and whether she should still be dancing "at her age", as if that isn't entirely her own decision—and evidence of remarkable fitness. Her age is seen as an affront rather than an inspiration. Personally, I see her as an example of what it looks like to live a full life, one where passion and creativity continue to grow rather than diminish.

The main gripe people seem to have with Madonna is that she is not ageing "gracefully", because she didn't retire from music in her forties. Leaving your career with "grace" is something only famous women are expected to contend with. Grace is never demanded of men, because it isn't grace that anyone is after; what they really want is for women who have aged out of being objectified to quietly disappear. Older women are dangerous because they know who they are and are less vulnerable to the industry's manipulation. Despite Madonna's long history of pushing against expectations, once she reached her fifties, it was as though her career entered a new domain—one where she could never win.

Meanwhile, men perform well into the final decades of their lives and are celebrated as legends. Women don't even need to reach 50 before the pitchforks appear, and magnifying glasses are brought out to inspect whether they look their age. If they have the "right" amount of cosmetic work—an invisible line of acceptability—they may be granted a few more years of popularity. If they have "too much", it's over. The only other loophole is to perform a version of femininity rooted in demureness and quietness. God forbid they wear something joyful—say, a pink leotard—because that will instantly provoke outrage.

Madonna is more than a legendary pop star. She shaped modern disco, pop and dance music into what it is today, bringing the industry up to her level rather than sinking to its. She wasn't simply a pop star; she was the pop star: one of the last artists capable of dominating culture before fandoms and social media fragmented audiences into silos.

At every point in her career, Madonna has challenged the standards that treat women unfairly—sometimes deliberately, sometimes simply through existing. The ageism she has faced for almost two decades falls into the latter category. From the backlash to "Like a Prayer", to Pepsi dropping her, to the banning of "Justify My Love", to the outrage surrounding Erotica, Madonna has repeatedly found herself at the centre of cultural panic whenever she has challenged expectations around religion, sexuality and womanhood. The criticism she receives today follows the same pattern.

Confessions II is one of the best dance albums of 2026. Whilst the impossibly infectious lead single "Danceteria" is a standout, it isn't a one-hit wonder. Euro-pop banger "Read My Lips" transports me to a club filled with cigarette smoke in the Balkans; "Betrayal" should be blasting from rooftops in New York; "I Feel So Free" should be heard across Paris as the sun shines; "Love Sensation" deserves thousands of arms waving to it at festivals. It is an album made for this specific summer.

Yet, apart from rave reviews from critics, I have scarcely seen it cut through popular culture during its first week. Whilst culture journalists are shouting about it, and whilst the album is headed for chart success—and perhaps even a Grammy or two—it doesn't feel destined for cultural domination in the way albums of this calibre often do. That's not because of the music. Years of negative narratives surrounding Madonna have shaped how audiences approach her before they even press play. People can't shake the misogyny and ageism they have unconsciously absorbed.

It is a vulnerable, affecting and joyful record. In a world without those biases, perhaps it would receive the BRAT treatment—or at least a slice of it—and be declared the album of the summer. Instead, the campaign of hostility surrounding Madonna has become so relentless that many people claim to dislike her without being able to articulate exactly why. That's how misogynistic smear campaigns work: hear something often enough, from enough different places, and it begins to feel like your own opinion.

Just weeks ago, Loose Women asked: "Trailblazer or trying too hard?" whilst discussing Madonna's recent performances. It is a debate male performers of a similar age almost never have to contend with. Artists of comparable stature continue touring without endless headlines questioning whether they've somehow expired: Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, Billy Joel and Bob Dylan.

Instead, coverage of Madonna continues to focus on her body, what she wears and whether she is "trying too hard". She is labelled "raunchy", "past it" and "embarrassing". One particularly revealing headline read: "Madonna, and other acts whose schtick hasn't aged well."

But what is ageing well if not an arbitrary set of social codes designed to keep women small? Men who age are called silver foxes; continuing their craft is seen as wisdom. Women doing exactly the same are treated as cautionary tales. A woman who refuses to shrink herself with age is still viewed as transgressive.

That's precisely why Confessions II matters. It isn't just a brilliant dance album—it is another reminder that, even after decades of reshaping music and culture, Madonna is still being judged less on what she creates than on the fact she continues to create at all.

In Elle, the Legally Blonde prequel, a teen magazine is tossed aside in the garden, its well-worn pages thumbed and flicked into crinkled obedience. An armful of brightly coloured shopping bags swings purposefully to the triumphant beat of a girl's first pair of kitten heels. A phone cord stretches and twists itself aimlessly around the same girl's finger as she gabs for hours on end.

By all accounts, these are the rather mundane images of teen life—albeit teen life of a not-so-distant, but most decidedly bygone era. And Elle captures this bygone era with meticulous precision. But its portrait of '90s teenhood isn't merely about slapping a bunch of trivial '90s-coded aesthetics on our screens. Instead, it's an achingly nostalgic reminder that the analogue adolescence really was something special—and its irreversible loss has stolen some joy from the teen experience for good. ​

A prequel to the iconic Legally Blonde films, Prime's Elle offers up a glimpse of Woods's Elle before she defied the stereotypes of Harvard Law, proving once and for all that, yes, a pink-obsessed sorority girl with Malibu blonde hair can graduate from law school! Set six years before the film's events, Elle opens in 1995, smack dab in the middle of our heroine's teen years. Elle's perfect pink Californian life hits a snag when, after botching a celebrity's nose job, her plastic surgeon father announces that the family is moving to rainy, dreary Seattle. And so begins Elle's first little taster of life outside of her pink bubble—an appetiser to her journey to come in her Harvard days, if you will.

​As Elle bumbles her way through the sea of grunge, plaid, and heavy-set frowns that is her new Seattle school, things aren't always easy. There are mean girls, culture clashes, and complicated school politics to navigate! Of course, there is the argument to be made in favour of our digital world. After all, Elle's analogue world has its drawbacks. She finds herself disconnected from her friends back in L.A., catching up with them only over a crackly car phone. It's a far cry from the steady stream of Snapchats she might have enjoyed today. Upon arriving in Seattle, she is shocked to discover that her wardrobe filled with Clueless-worthy preppy pink is sorely out of fashion—a problem a quick scroll on Instagram would certainly have prevented. And then there's her addiction to Cosmo magazine, which suffers from having to redirect her subscription to a new address. Imagine having to wait weeks on end for your favourite reading material instead of having it at your fingertips—or, indeed, thrown in your face every time you open your phone, like it or not!

For teens today, the problems that come with growing up—the mean girls, the cliques, the growing pains—are only amplified by the addition of an iPhone. Countless studies have shown that the digital world does more to separate and alienate young people than to keep them together. Social media use has been linked to anxiety and depression in UK teens. According to another 2026 study by the Molly Rose Foundation, a third of all teenagers saw suicide, self-harm and eating disorder content on social media in a single week.​

It's tough out there for teens, so it's no wonder that they seem to be craving what Elle has. Along with Elle, this year brought Disney +'s Love Story, about the '90s romance of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy—and with it, a resurgence in the '90s minimal aesthetic. Meanwhile, the "Mum, what were you like in the '90s?" trend took off online, inspired, seemingly, by young people asking their Gen X mothers about life in the distant pre-iPhone days.

Other social media trends also embrace the '90s aesthetic, from coastal grandma to Meg Ryan Fall. Then there is the seemingly endless stream of other sequels and prequels and reboots bringing back beloved stories and characters from '90s teen hits—see, for instance, Practical Magic 2, Romy and Michele 2, Freakier Friday, a Bend It Like Beckham sequel, The Devil Wears Prada 2—I could go on. Meanwhile, physical media and "grandma hobbies" are on the rise according to Pinterest Predicts and Etsy search data.

It's easy to see why the simple world of the '90s—the world of Elle—is so resonant for today's teens. Adolescence should be a time of learning and growing and becoming and experimenting. And for Elle, it is. Without the noise of a capitalist-driven algorithm dictating her tastes and sucking up her time, she is free to become her true self and enjoy her adolescence on the way.

Instead of taking inspiration from another TikTok aesthetic trend, she finds her sense of style by looking around her. By trying new things. By experimenting, and sometimes failing. A particularly sweet attempt at finding her Seattle style involves a Nirvana shirt customised with pink hearts over the 'X' eyes. She "leaned into its innate smiliness," people!

Instead of consuming an increasingly chaotic, divisive stream of opinions in the form of TikTok videos, she lives in a world that champions young women's media, whether that be in the form of a teen internship at Cosmo or a handmade culture zine passed around the school.

Instead of trading memes and selfies and DMs, she finds friends in the most unlikely places by—you know—going out and talking to them. There are phone-less house parties. Lively chats in the lunch room. Long chatty phone calls.

Of course, no matter how many sequels, prequels, or TikTok trends we consume, we can never really get the unique freedom of the analogue adolescence back. But Elle reminds us all that being a teen should and can be a little more fun. So, switch off, buy a mag, and call your bestie for a long talk about absolutely nothing. What, like it's hard?

When Conor McGregor, the UFC fighter whom an Irish civil jury found had raped Nikita Hand, walked onto one of America's most-watched talk shows, there was no difficult conversation or acknowledgement of that finding. Instead, there were jokes, promotion and the whirring machinery of celebrity rehabilitation.

It is hard to imagine a clearer message to survivors of sexual violence: even when the court believes you, the court of public opinion is ready to move on.

The Tonight Show appearance was far from an isolated incident. This came despite a court hearing medical evidence that doctors had documented extensive bruising across Hand's body following the assault, while a paramedic testified she had "not seen someone so bruised, with that intensity of bruising" in a long time. Yet just two months after the verdict, McGregor made his first major public appearance, attending Donald Trump's inauguration in Washington, D.C., no less.

That appearance was followed by a string of other high-profile outings, including another visit to the White House, as well as interviews with Tucker Carlson and Fox's Sean Hannity. Neither interviewer addressed the civil case, instead allowing McGregor a platform to sound off about immigration and his presidential ambitions.

We often talk about why victims don't come forward. We list shame, fear of not being believed, and the trauma of reliving an assault in court. All of those barriers are real. But there is another question we ask far less often: what incentive do survivors have to endure years of investigation and legal proceedings if the person they accuse appears able to resume public life almost immediately afterwards?

This week, the Crown Prosecution Service announced changes designed to make rape trials fairer for victims. Prosecutors are being encouraged to focus more on a suspect's pattern of behaviour, rather than placing survivors under the microscope. As Victims' Commissioner Claire Waxman said, survivors need confidence that they will be treated with "dignity, respect and fairness" throughout the justice process.

These are welcome reforms, but justice doesn't end when a verdict is delivered.

If the legal system is working harder than ever to encourage victims to come forward while wider culture continues welcoming powerful men back onto our screens, we create an impossible contradiction. We tell survivors that reporting matters while showing them that accountability may only last as long as the news cycle. "We all know reporting is essential for change but society must hold up its end of the bargain," says Tabitha Morton, Executive Director, UN Women UK.

As campaigner Eliza Hatch puts it: "It's not just an incredibly insensitive and thoughtless insult to Nikita Hand. It's also a slap in the face for all survivors of sexual assault and rape, who are constantly told that men's careers and future prospects are worth more than their pain, suffering and lived experiences of trauma."

That contradiction isn't reserved for celebrity culture, either. Just last month, three teenage boys in Hampshire who were convicted of raping two girls avoided immediate custody. The judge cited, among other factors, their youth, low IQ and, maddeningly, a desire to avoid "criminalising" them unnecessarily. The sentences are now under review.

Though the details differ, the underlying message feels depressingly familiar. Again and again, attention focuses squarely on the futures of perpetrators, not the lifelong impact on survivors. We've heard countless examples of judges worrying about perpetrators' careers, their prospects and their supposed sporting promise. Too rarely do we ask the same questions about the people they assaulted.

This pattern stretches back decades. Brock Turner, the Stanford swimmer convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman, received a mere six-month sentence after the judge cited concerns that a longer prison term would have a "severe impact" on him. His case became a global symbol of whose futures the justice system instinctively protects.

And though the country and court differ, the instinct to protect offenders is startlingly consistent.

As Sinéad Geoghegan, Head of Communications at the End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW), says: "The fact that a man found by a civil court to have raped a woman has been platformed on one of the world's most popular TV shows exemplifies the lack of meaningful accountability so many perpetrators face, particularly those with power and status. We see this time and time again and it sends a harmful message to all of society that rape isn't that serious, when in reality it devastates women and girls' lives." Morton adds: "Justice cannot live only in courtrooms. It must live in behaviour—in who we platform."

Of course, none of this is to argue that every offender is beyond redemption or that rehabilitation has no place in justice. But when we rush to restore powerful men to positions of influence while the people they harmed continue to navigate lifelong trauma, it sends a message, whether intentionally or not, about whose pain matters more.

When Olivia Rodrigo wore a — shock horror! — babydoll dress on stage earlier this month, the backlash was swift and severe. The 23-year-old singer was accused of everything from adopting a “Lolita” persona to leaning into “pedo-core.”

Collectively, we could’ve recognised the well-worn style as a reference to alternative girlhood aesthetics — as was Rodrigo’s now-confirmed intention — but no. Instead, the babydoll dress debacle became supposed evidence that she was deliberately attempting to infantilise herself for male consumption.

This week, she finally responded. Appearing on The New York Times’ Popcast podcast, she admitted the controversy had left her “so upset.” And why wouldn’t it have? If being branded as promoting pedophilia, as one viral tweet claimed, isn’t cause for distress, I don’t know what is.

“What’s really disturbing is I feel like I have worn outfits that are maybe revealing on stage,” Rodrigo told The New York Times. “I’ve been on stage in a sparkly bra and little shorts, which is my right... And that wasn’t ‘inappropriate,’ but me fully covered up in a dress that people deemed to be childlike was inappropriate.”

Her observation, which she ought to get more credit for, cuts to the heart of a contradiction women have spent decades navigating. A woman can expose her body without criticism, provided that exposure fits within accepted conventions of adult sexuality. But heaven forbid, a woman invokes girlhood in ways that are not explicitly sexual.

The reaction to Rodrigo’s dress reveals less about the outfit itself than it does about the lens through which we have been taught to view girlhood. We live in a society that simultaneously infantilises and eroticises girls. “It’s just this rhetoric we’re fed as girls since we’re so little, which is: ‘Don’t wear that because then a man is going to sexualize your body and it’s your fault,’” says Rodrigo, and she’s right: “It just shows how we really normalise pedophilia in our culture.”

We’ve become so conditioned to seeing girlhood as sexualised that we can no longer recognise when women are reclaiming its aesthetics on their own terms. The irony of the Rodrigo controversy is that she wasn’t drawing from a tradition of sexualised girlhood at all. Responding to the criticism, Rodrigo explained that she had been thinking about Kathleen Hanna and Courtney Love, women who famously used the aesthetics of girlhood not to invite male desire but to challenge it.

The riot grrrl movement emerged in the early Nineties as a feminist rebellion against the sexism of punk culture and mainstream media alike. Its adherents wore babydoll dresses, hair clips, knee socks, and childish accessories not to appear sexually available, but to disrupt assumptions about what power looked like.

In Smells Like Teen Spirit: Riot Grrrls, Revolution and Women in Independent Rock, Gayle Wald describes this phenomenon: “I think reclaiming stuff that looked girly is troubling to the culture at large. When you have women dressed as girls but exhibiting grown-up sexuality, it brought attention to the culture’s sexualization of young girls in a way that you couldn’t deny.”

Do we really think that when Courtney Love pulled on a babydoll dress and belted out Doll Parts she was trying to convey innocence? It’s all there in the lyrics: “I am doll eyes. Doll mouth, doll legs. I am doll arms. Big veins, dog bait. Yeah, they really want you.”

Similarly, Kathleen Hanna’s pigtails were never meant to appeal to men. Both women and the wider riot grrrl orbit knew that femininity itself had become a battleground. By embracing aesthetics associated with girlhood while rejecting the expectation that women exist for male pleasure, they exposed the absurdity of those cultural assumptions. As Marisa Meltzer explained in her book Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music, “With riot grrrl, you could enjoy the playful aspects of being a girl and want to fight the power at the same time.”

That is Rodrigo’s reference point: punk feminism, not porn. “I was like, 'This is so cool. I feel like I look like Kathleen Hanna or Courtney Love,' all these people who are my heroes,” said Rodrigo of her riot grrrl-inspired outfit. Yet the reaction suggests that many of us have lost the ability to distinguish between the sexualisation of girlhood and girlhood itself.

If every reference to youth is automatically interpreted as sexual, we run the risk of accepting that girlhood exists primarily as an object of adult sexual interpretation. If the only way a woman can avoid accusations of inviting inappropriate attention is by dressing according to what the most predatory observer might think, then the result is that women and girls are once again being told what they can and cannot wear based on how men might perceive them.

Ironically, that is the very rhetoric Rodrigo was pushing back against. “You shouldn’t be responsible for some guy sexualizing you in a way that was never your intention,” she concluded.

The answer to the fetishisation of girlhood isn’t to erase girlhood from culture altogether; it’s to stop viewing it through the lens of male desire. Maybe the most revealing thing about Olivia Rodrigo’s babydoll dress is that so many people looked at it and immediately saw pornography instead of punk.

As a woman, I’m an unlikely contender to have spent so much time in the Manosphere, but through reporting on Grok’s image abuse, the epidemic of violence against women and girls, and how women’s safety is being hijacked by far-right vigilantism, I have, unfortunately, spent a considerable time in the murkiest corners of the internet. It is here that we meet the subjects of Louis Theroux’s new Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere.

I didn’t get far into the documentary before contradictions began to abound. The influencers at the centre of Louis Theroux’s film talk constantly about independence: self-reliance, alpha mentality, becoming the kind of man who needs nothing and no one (a sad aspiration, but not wholly uncommon in our increasingly individualistic society). Strength, these muscled men proclaim, means standing alone, lone-wolf style. And yet their entire world – and, for the most part, their finances – depends entirely on being watched.

Every tirade, podcast appearance, and livestream is designed for an audience. They’re not even shy about it; in fact, they’re astonishingly candid about – to use their parlance – creating content for the clout. Harrison, or ‘HS Tikytokky’, streams for up to seven hours a day, creating content that, as Theroux puts it, consists of “performing provocations for the chat.”

Their careers rely on views, engagement and monetisation. For men who claim to have transcended the need for approval, their livelihoods depend almost entirely on it.

The influencers Theroux meets present themselves as entrepreneurs of masculinity, offering advice on how men can reclaim power in a supposedly feminised world. Their language will sound familiar to anyone who has spent time on productivity TikTok or entrepreneurial podcasts like the increasingly controversial Diary of a CEO: optimise yourself, grind harder, build your brand, dominate the market. In this framework, masculinity becomes a project; something to scale, monetise and relentlessly improve, hence the moniker Looksmaxxing, and, I assume, the hours upon hours these men dedicate to getting ‘ripped’ and ‘shredded’.

It’s tempting to treat the Manosphere as a strange internet fringe, but the ideas spread online have real world consequences. A study by Ipsos and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London, released just six days ago, shows that almost a third of Gen Z men believe a wife should obey her husband. An earlier study revealed that Gen Z boys and men think of feminism more negatively than any other generation. As Theroux makes a point to highlight, the Manosphere is mainstream, a fact made evident by more than one subject emphasising their ties to the Trump organisation. And while the worldview these influencers promote may be deeply misogynistic, homophobic, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, and racist (the list goes on…), the underlying philosophy is reductively familiar. For decades, online culture has celebrated relentless self-improvement, personal branding, and the idea that success is the result of purely individual effort. The Manosphere applies that same logic to masculinity itself.

The result is an outlook in which men must constantly prove their worth through dominance and competition. Emotional vulnerability is weakness. Relationships, often subjected to a strange, deeply gendered ‘one-way monogamy system’, become transactions. Community only comes through cross-promoting content. HS promotes OnlyFans creators while simultaneously branding them “disgusting”. In the Manosphere, everything is part of an ecosystem, including the boys and men they claim to be helping through their supposed self-optimisation content.

Given that the whole setup of the Manosphere is supposedly designed to create a community of men (with a capital M), you get the distinct impression that these men are all ultimately alone. There’s no sense of community, and, to be frank, they don’t seem to be having much fun—a peculiarity given that the central tenet of their branding is how they’ve supposedly ‘hacked’ the system and are offering men (who are willing to pay) their ‘cheat sheet’ to quick riches, respect, and female subjugation. HS says he’s “playing the game of life,” but if we’re to go off the documentary, it looks more like he’s performing life for an ever-present audience that he is simultaneously in command of and reliant upon.

Seen in this light, the contradictions become even more pronounced. Influencers like HS, who condemn women for monetising platforms like OnlyFans, are relying on the same attention economy. They pitch themselves as anti-establishment (an ideology summed up as being ‘red-pilled’) even as they game its most lucrative dynamics. These men might espouse the benefits of hyper-independence, being your own boss, and answerable to no one, but this is only achieved by constant dependence on an audience they have to perform for.

The more these men insist they don’t need anyone, the more fragile that claim appears. Their livelihoods require constant validation in the form of views, subscribers, and online engagement. The ecosystem thrives on constant interaction; supporters, critics, and yes, curious onlookers like us all feeding the algorithm.

That doesn’t make the misogyny any less real or harmful. But it does show that we live in an online environment that prizes visibility, controversy, and relentless self-promotion. In the case of the Manosphere, this means monetising anger and selling male supremacy.

For a movement obsessed with dominance and self-sufficiency, the Manosphere feels surprisingly lonely. Again and again, its rhetoric circles back to isolation: distrust women, avoid emotional vulnerability, and treat relationships as strategic exchanges rather than sources of intimacy.

Ultimately, viewers will be left feeling that he Manosphere is a lonely stage, its stars performing pigeon-chested bravado for an audience they can’t live without. And while the men profit, women are left to bear the cost in harassment, misogyny, and real-world harm.

Louis Theroux: Inside The Manosphere is streaming on Netflix now. Sign up to Netflix here.

If you were looking for a rousing update to fuel your working week, you won’t find it in today’s papers, where it’s reported that the UK gender pay gap won’t close until 2056. That means children born this year will be 30 by the time women earn at the same rate as men. And, more miserably, Millennial women like me who are already in their 30s will be nearing retirement by the time the gender pay gap finally closes.

There are plenty of digestible stats: millions of British women are effectively working almost 50 days a year for free, and female workers lose around £2,548 every year compared to their male colleagues. The thought that has been churning in my head, though, is that for my entire working life, I will have earned less than my male colleagues. I think back to a job I had pre-pandemic as Womenswear Editor at a luxury retailer, while my male colleague, in a typically old-school setup, was Menswear Editor. We had mirror roles, yet I knew he was earning more, though I was too afraid to ask just how much. When I discovered that our previous Menswear Editor, a good friend, was being paid more, I took it to my (female) boss, only to be told curtly that discussing salaries was against company policy.

About a year later, the UK introduced mandatory gender pay gap reporting under the Equality Act 2010. Employers with 250 or more employees had to publish annual figures on their website and a government portal. I thought this would change everything. “Name and shame!” became a rallying cry among my female colleagues. When the data was published, I remember crowding around a co-worker’s laptop to see just how bleak the discrepancy was (spoiler alert: men were being paid considerably more), and then… we went on about our jobs, literally. Yes, there were protests and outcry — this was pre-Me Too, and activism fatigue hadn’t yet set in like a thick fog — and yes, moves were made to close the gap, but I assumed, perhaps naively, that it would happen not only in my lifetime but within my working lifetime.

Now, when I hear politicians fret about falling fertility rates and suggest women should be having children sooner, all I can think about is 2056. For my entire working life, I will have earned less than my male colleagues, yet the message seems to be: focus on having kids, not securing equal pay. Motherhood remains one of the single biggest predictors of lower lifetime earnings for women, according to data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). So when we’re told to “start earlier,” I think what that really means is accepting the financial hit sooner. It’s hard not to see the contradiction.

Then there’s the recent suggestions that people without children should pay higher taxes to incentivise parenthood. One of the UK’s most talked-about by-election candidates proposed a so-called “negative child benefit tax” on childless people, and even floated removing personal income tax for women with two or more children.

All this and at a time when roughly a full generation of women are still set to earn less than men for doing work of equal value. Regardless of education or experience, ONS stats show that men still dominate high-earning roles. And that’s before we even consider the decades-long impact of motherhood penalties, part-time work, or career breaks, often necessitated by caregiving responsibilities.

Even more concerning is that part-time work, which is often the only realistic option for parents juggling sky-high childcare costs, hits women’s pay just as hard as long-term illness or unemployment. Every year spent in part-time work shaves around 3% off hourly wages. Whether it’s raising children, caring for elderly relatives, or running a household, this invisible labour is still landing mostly on women’s shoulders and comes with a real economic cost. Time spent outside full-time paid work now accounts for nearly 30% of the gender pay gap.

Meanwhile, men can work full-time, uninterrupted, enjoying the compounding benefits of steady pay and career progression. Even when all other factors are accounted for, like education, job type, full- or part-time status, women still earn less. And yet, here we are: decades from equal pay, still being told the real problem is that women aren’t having enough children.

“You’ll never get another loan like it,” my college tutor told me, reassuringly, when I was 18. He was right, though not in the way he intended. Aside from a mortgage, it’s unlikely I will ever take on a debt with interest rates this high, a repayment window this long, or such power to shape my adult life. Student loans weren’t just misunderstood by teenagers like me; they were actively downplayed and sold as harmless.

Like many British teenagers from working-class backgrounds – current stats put the number of first-gen UK uni students at 651,965 – I was the first in my family to go to university. Both my parents left school without finishing, and as far as anyone could tell, no one on either side had gotten to college. All this meant that my acceptance letter was greeted exclusively with adulation. We knew nothing about loans or league tables — and don’t even ask me about “red bricks” or “polytechnics,” because I only learned about those after I’d graduated.

Fortunately, or so I thought, I had plenty of tutors who could provide some guidance, and all of them, without exception, guided me in the direction of a student loan. Coming from a low-income, single-parent household meant I instantly qualified for the maximum amount, and I was encouraged to take as much as I could get. This is how it was framed: as if I’d be lining my coffers with the public purse, rather than taking on a tremendous debt with no real plan as to how I might repay it, let alone what I would be paying on top. Interest rates? That simply was not in my teenage vernacular.

I don’t blame my tutors. I think they were probably just parroting the student loan playbook. It does bother me, though, that knowing I came from a family that qualified for free school meals — a benefit so shamed in my school that I never once used it — and later EMA, no one ever mentioned I might qualify for a bursary. Instead, I was encouraged — like approximately 909,000 other students in the academic year 2010/11 — to take out a student loan: “You won’t even pay it back until you’re earning enough,” was the party line.

And so, I find myself in the unfortunate — but not at all uncommon — situation of having graduated in 2013 to a debt of 26592.43 and, 13 years later, still owing £21,907.18.

A quick roll call of peers reveals a similarly dismal situation. “I’ve supposedly only paid off 4k, but with interest, we know I’ve paid more,” says Isabella Silvers, 32. Like me, Silvers is a journalist who graduated to a debt of just over £25,000 and, sadly, also like me, now has a debt of a little over £21,000 despite over a decade of chipping away at it. “I don’t even know how to find that information,” was the response that came from another friend — several, in fact — who have taken the “ignorance is bliss” approach to their mounting debt.

All of this feels almost quaintly British. We call queues “orderly,” bullying is “building character,” and now student loans have been dubbed a “graduate contribution,” or “graduate tax.” This makes it sound like a helpful donation to the nation rather than what many of us now recognise as a compounding financial trap.

The cruel irony is that the people most affected by ballooning student debt are often those the system claimed to help. Students from less wealthy backgrounds borrow more, rely on maintenance loans, and have less family cushioning when repayments begin to bite.

The problem isn’t that we borrowed money. The problem is that we did exactly what we were told: study hard, invest in education, aim high. All under the belief that student loans weren’t like other debts — that we’d only repay if we earned enough, that any leftover balance would be written off, and that the debt wouldn’t even count against future additional debts, like mortgages.

And yet here we are, poorer than those who came before, struggling more than those who could afford to forgo a loan altogether.

Fast-forward to 2026, and many graduates on the far steeper Plan 2 are watching their balances rise even as their payslips say otherwise. For students whose university courses began in or after September 2012, their interest is accruing faster than repayments can chase it down.

Jessica Fortune, 28, is staring down a debt of £92,265.35, and in the four and a half years since she graduated, her interest has risen £2,566.10.

What makes this feel especially cruel is not just the numbers — though the numbers are eye-watering — but the sense of having been mis-sold a future. Many of us will repay for decades. Many could repay more than they borrowed. More still will never clear the balance at all. If, like me, you were paid the first loan on or after 1 September 2006, your debt will be written off 25 years after the April you were first due to repay. For graduates of the £9,000-fees era, that cut-off point sits at 30 years.

And yes, technically, the system is income-contingent, but the debt, contrary to the common narrative, is precisely that: a debt. “The student loan system here is predatory. I was shocked when I moved here that people thought it was normal,” remembers Sarah Waldron, 37, who stayed in Ireland for her studies. I shuddered in recognition, thinking back to how normalised taking on that debt felt as an 18-year-old.

I’d held onto that belief until I went freelance almost ten years after I graduated, when I realised just how much I’d paid compared to how much I’d actually paid off. It’s a statistic that hasn’t shifted now that I’m back in-house. Take my last month’s statement, for example, which shows that I paid £608 towards my student loan but accrued £618 in interest.

“Roughly for every £300 I paid each month to my student loan in the 2024–2025 financial year, £160-ish was added in interest,” explains Laura, 35, who graduated in 2013 to a debt of £39,220.80 and still has £28,090.64 left to pay, despite a successful career as Head of Marketing in EdTech. “I have grafted and grafted to earn good money, I’m very savvy with my finances, etc., and yet I still owe two-thirds of my loan back?” she wonders.

The debt that at first felt vanishingly unreal suddenly feels like a heavy weight shouldered by a generation. It shapes how we think about taking risks, starting families, buying homes — and even what kind of adulthood is possible.

Politically, the discomfort is becoming harder to ignore. The Financial Times is questioning whether student loans are set to be the next mis‑selling scandal. Martin Lewis has called Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ decision to freeze the salary threshold at which graduates start repaying Plan 2 student loans “not a moral thing to do.”

When graduates who have done everything “right” still feel financially stuck, something has gone wrong. If higher education is genuinely a public good — as we’ve been told it is, endlessly — then its costs shouldn’t fall so heavily on those with the least room to absorb long-term risk.

I’m tired of being told we live in a meritocracy when all around me I see signs of the opposite. If that story is to remain believable, student finance needs more than to be a talking point. It’s one thing for students to bury their heads in the sand, but it’s quite another for our leaders to do the same.

We can’t keep acting as if time alone will make this problem disappear. For millions of graduates, time is what is being taken from them.

Save for a childhood obsession with The Spice Girls and a questionable fascination with ’90s-era his-and-hers dressing, I’ve never been especially interested in the Beckhams. But over the past few months, they’ve become impossible to ignore, joining that small category of families I seem to know far too much about despite making no effort to learn this information. It brings to mind a phrase so often used about the Kardashian–Jenners: everything I know about this family is against my will.

Despite not engaging with any Beckham content, I’ve been repeatedly served their posts, and—more strikingly—the commentary beneath them. What I’ve seen isn’t gossip so much as a noisy confidence among strangers: a sense that they are entitled to instruct Brooklyn Beckham on how to conduct his relationship with his own family.

I have seen grown women—and men, but often it is women—leave warnings gussied up as advice under the elder Beckham’s posts. Ominous but clichéd sayings like “blood is thicker than water” and “no one will ever love you as much as your mum.” If we are to believe Brooklyn’s atomic statement last night, similar warnings were issued by his own family on the eve of his wedding.

I won’t retread the already well-worn ground of Brooklyn Beckham’s statements. They are, for want of a better word, juicy, and they’ve been treated accordingly—parsed, projected onto, and elevated to the status of cultural spectacle. All this, and at a time when families the world over are desperately trying to cling to one another, even as forces greater than themselves threaten to tear them from their roots.

Perhaps that is precisely why this story has proved so compelling: it offers a form of light relief, a drama at a safe remove, and one that we can comfortably take the moral high ground on. Well, I would never dream of cutting my family out, we might think.

And herein lies the problem. Because we all come from families—regardless of how harmonious or fractured they may be—everyone feels qualified to dole out advice. Much of it is no doubt well-meaning, but it undermines the very real pain caused by family estrangement.

I’ve spent a great deal of time occupying this space, both professionally and personally. I’ve interviewed countless people estranged from mothers, fathers, siblings—the whole shebang—and, as I’ve alluded to in those stories, I have my own experience with family estrangement. Does that qualify me to offer advice? No, of course not. My situation is entirely different from Brooklyn’s, and more than that, I know nothing of his.

Both parties have, in various guises, shared their versions of events. But it’s worth remembering that even in families where everyone lives under one roof, each person has their own experience. Siblings I’ve spoken to often report feeling as though they were raised by entirely different parents. And yet many of the most prominent—or at least most vocal—armchair psychologists have pointed to the seeming tightness of the Beckham unit sans Brooklyn. This tells us nothing.

Right now, questions are being volleyed across office floors, around family tables, in innumerable group chats. Should he have spoken out? What really happened? Where can we find a video of that wedding dance?

The implication here is that Brooklyn Beckham owes us clarity. That clarity would make us comfortable. We could soothe ourselves in the knowledge that this could never happen to our family. But families aren’t plays with a third-act reveal. They resemble something closer to weather systems, and as such, they change—often in ways totally unexpected even to the people within their orbit. What they don’t do is exist to be understandable and palatable to strangers, even well-meaning ones.

What’s striking about the fixation on Brooklyn’s relationship with his parents isn’t just the entitlement; it’s the moralising. Estrangement, in this instance, is being treated like a failure of gratitude, but being raised with privilege doesn’t protect anyone from the possibility of pain.

Collectively, we seem to have written a cultural script for families—especially glossy, famous ones like the Beckhams. When that image is challenged, it unsettles us. So we look for someone to blame. Often, it’s the child who steps away.

Brooklyn has been branded “spoilt,” “ungrateful,” a “loser.” Column inches have been dedicated to the fact that “he’d be nothing without his famous parents.” Commenters on social media have cruelly pointed out that he’d never have “bagged” his wife without his surname, and he should therefore be eternally grateful to have been born into the brand Beckham. I’ve seen this play out with estranged children without a famous pedigree, too. Something about estrangement—especially parental estrangement, and even more so when it involves the mother—deeply rattles people.

Much has been written about the way culture collapses nuance into spectacle, how the internet flattens people into archetypes that can be debated and discarded. Brooklyn Beckham is currently being flattened into “estranged son,” a role that demands context but denies any complexity. We want the mess, but only if it’s narratively satisfying.

It’s also worth asking why we assume reconciliation is the only acceptable outcome. Some relationships change shape. Some need distance to survive. And yes, some end. Social media is stuffed with chatter about boundaries, mental health, and “protecting our peace.” And yet, when someone actually enacts them—especially someone famous—we recoil. We demand to know what happened and, damn it, we want a reason good enough to satisfy us.

Maybe there is one. Maybe there isn’t. No one knows what happens inside a family except the people in it. Even then, everyone’s version is different.

Brooklyn Beckham doesn’t owe us anything. Not the gory details, nor the reassurance that our own families are somehow safer by comparison. The discomfort this story stirs up belongs to us, not to him.

If you’ve had the misfortune of being on the internet this week, you’ll likely have noticed that there is a disturbing—harrowing, really—new ‘trend’ littering the internet. It’s being referred to as the ‘Grok, put her in a bikini trend,’ but this is no harmless internet fad; it’s a form of online violence, and experts say treating it lightly is obscuring its real-world harm.

By now, examples of this abuse—AI-generated images that digitally alter real women and girls into sexualised scenarios—are well documented. Everyone (or at least every mainstream media outlet) seems to have realised that image-based abuse is no longer confined to shadowy corners of the internet but is running amok on, yes, Elon Musk’s Grok, but also TikTok and Telegram.

The problem with how we’re talking about Grok’s AI abuse

Researchers, journalists, and watchdog groups, however, had flagged the risks months earlier, after the chatbot was found producing sexually explicit content involving public figures like Taylor Swift, whose likeness Grok—or rather, human users using Grok—manipulated to generate sexualised images without her consent. North West, the 12-year-old daughter of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, has also been targeted.

What followed those earlier warnings was not a technical failure, experts say, but a familiar one: the refusal to take image-based sexual abuse seriously until it becomes impossible to ignore. Or, in this case, until enough people become rightfully enraged by it, as we have seen this week.

In the UK, Liz Kendall, Technology Secretary, has called on Elon Musk to “deal with this urgently” and is backing Ofcom to “take any enforcement action it deems necessary.” Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls Jess Phillips has vowed to “deploy the full power of the state to make this country safe for women and girls, both online and offline.”

Yet amid all the noise, a thornier truth risks being obscured. Digitally undressing women and generating images that sexualise children is, sadly, not a shocking new misuse of AI, nor an unforeseeable consequence of innovation moving too fast. On the contrary, experts say it is a predictable form of image-based sexual abuse, enabled by deliberate design choices and allowed to go on unchecked thanks to an unwillingness to treat harm to women and girls as urgent or enforceable.

Across law, ethics, journalism, and the arts, experts are aligned: the technology didn’t fail; the safeguards did.

“A rupture in women’s lives”

For Professor Clare McGlynn, a leading legal expert on image-based sexual abuse, the language used to describe AI-generated sexual exploitation has already done significant damage. Terms such as “nudifying” or “fake images,” she argues, minimise what victims actually experience.

Women describe this abuse as a rupture in their lives, McGlynn says. “They divide their lives between before and after the abuse, as it has such a disruptive effect on their lives.” McGlynn explains that it is experienced as a sexual violation—a form of sexual assault—“it can be life-shattering, even life-threatening.”

From her work with survivors, she has documented long-term impacts that are routinely overlooked: hyper-vigilance, social withdrawal, deep mistrust, and the constant fear that any message or notification could signal further abuse. While the images may be digitally altered, the harm is not abstract.

These are real images. They are online, on our phones. They feel real to victims,” she says. “The harm is the same whether the image is altered or not—they are created and shared to humiliate, to silence, and to push women off public platforms.”

McGlynn rejects the idea that this is a niche problem affecting only a few people. “We all suffer from this mass sexual harassment of women,” she says. “Because all women now know the threat of being online.”

Female violation is the point

Dr Arghavan Salles, a physician, and senior research scholar at Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research, has been vocal about what Grok’s outputs reveal about power, misogyny, and control.

“The men taking pleasure in violating women and children digitally are doing so for the sake of violation, not because they can’t find sexual images or videos—even abusive ones—online,” she says. “The porn industry exists. But these specific men are not looking for that—they are intentionally seeking out non-sexual images and sexualising them without the consent of those depicted in the photos because it is the violation of another person’s autonomy, the humiliation, the degrading that they enjoy.”

In Salles’ view, this is why arguments about user misuse miss the point. The ease with which Grok allows images to be manipulated—publicly, instantly, and at scale—fundamentally changes the risk profile. Unlike earlier deepfake tools, you don’t need to have any technical expertise or external platforms to quickly and easily generate a deepfake.

This is done with a short prompt, and moments later, the image is live on one of the world’s largest platforms, she says. “This is what has enabled the massive volume of these images.”

Claims that social media platforms can’t anticipate this kind of abuse are, Salles argues, implausible. “People will tend to abuse anything they have access to, it is incumbent on each of these companies to preempt the harm.”

The warnings were ignored

For Jurgita Lapienytė, chief editor at Cybernews, the most troubling aspect of the Grok controversy is not how quickly it escalated, but how long it was allowed to fester.

This problem didn’t appear overnight, she says. As far back as August, Grok was generating sexually explicit content involving public figures. Watchdog groups warned xAI exactly what would happen if this wasn’t fixed.

Five months later, she notes, the situation has worsened. “We’re now seeing children as young as 10 being sexualised.”

Lapienytė warns that if regulators fail to act decisively now, the implications go far beyond one platform. “If regulators don't force X to disable this immediately, we’re looking at the normalisation of on-demand sexual exploitation at a scale we’ve never seen before.” she says. “Within months, we could see this weaponised for revenge porn, sextortion, harassment of minors, and blackmail. ”

In the UK, it is estimated that half a million UK teenagers have encountered AI-generated nude deepfakes, while Ofcom research shows that around 50% of children aged 8–15 have seen some form of deepfake content online. Evidence of the impact of image-based abuse has been well known since at least 2021, when 14-year-old Mia Janin took her own life after being bullied by schoolboys who had also spread digitally altered images of her. “Kids were manipulating images of girls. And Mia was one of them. And took it very badly,” Mia’s father told the BBC last year. Although there is a lack of extensive data, a UK‑wide case study of young people aged 10–19 who died by suicide (2014–2016) found that 24 % had some form of suicide‑related online experience, and around 5 % had been victims of online bullying noted in coroners’ reports.

The technology, says Lapienytė, will not disappear—but where it is allowed to operate matters. “We can still decide whether this lives on mainstream platforms or is pushed back into the dark corners of the internet.”

Why outrage alone won’t stop AI abuse

Tabitha Swanson, a digital creator and AI expert, is doubtful that public outrage alone will drive meaningful change. Having worked with AI tools for years, she is sceptical that companies will self-regulate.

“Large systems don’t have individual morality,” she says. “The only way to change them is to create policy and enforcement measures that dole out known repercussions for hosting and creating things like child porn.” Andrea Simon, director of the End Violence Against Women Coalition, agrees: “Tech companies must be held accountable for proactively stopping deepfake abuse and other forms of image-based abuse on their platforms. But until they are made to do this, they won’t.”

Swanson, whose creative practice harnesses AI for innovative, positive work, frames the Grok controversy within a broader erosion of trust online, where AI-generated content increasingly blurs the boundary between reality and fabrication. “The far more concerning issue is losing a shared source of truth and losing the ability to discern reality. ”

For her, the danger lies not just in the technology, but in mistaking online outrage for action. “Posting online can help educate others, but any real change will have to be taken offline and put into policy.”

The law already exists—enforcement does not

In the UK, McGlynn points out, many of the legal tools needed to tackle this problem are already in place. The Online Safety Act, for example, requires platforms to assess risks and take steps to prevent foreseeable harms. In this case, she says, the failure lies squarely with enforcement.

“This is not about a lack of law,” she says. “It’s about a choice not to enforce it—and a failure to take the sexual harassment of women seriously.”

Both McGlynn and Salles reject the idea that AI-generated sexual abuse is too new, too complex, or too fast-moving to address. The question, they argue, is whether regulators are willing to treat this not as an unfortunate side effect of innovation, but as what it really is: a continuation of image-based sexual violence, scaled by design.

As Liz Kendall, the UK’s Technology Secretary, puts it: “Let me be clear: this is not the future we want for technology. We will not allow it to be weaponised to harm women and girls. Our laws make this crystal clear—sharing or even threatening to share non-consensual intimate images is a criminal offence. Offenders face jail time, and platforms that fail to comply with their duties under the Online Safety Act can receive significant fines.”

Until those laws are enforced, experts warn, the message is clear—and dangerous: women’s safety remains negotiable, and technological innovation will once again be allowed to outpace accountability.

There’s a moment in my debut novel, Room 706, in which the protagonist, Kate, hiding in a room with her lover in a hotel that has been taken over by terrorists, writes down a series of letters and numbers. “What’s that?” James, her lover, asks. “The password for the online grocery app,” Kate replies. Of everything she wants to tell her husband in case she does not make it out alive, this seems the most important, or at least the easiest, to write down.

Kate meets James in London hotel rooms every few months for no-strings sex, despite being happily married to Vic. When she tries to rationalise her actions to herself, she compares this to a shoe-buying habit, or a woman secretly having ‘tweakments’. It’s a kind of ‘me time’ that allows Kate to be a wife and mother the rest of the time.

Yet even as she goes to meet her lover, Kate is thinking about the things she must do, from buying after-school snacks for the kids to collecting the family’s pet rabbit from the vet. She’s remembering to restock bread rolls for the kids’ packed lunches and thinking about their playdates. Before she left the house, she put that night’s dinner in the slow cooker. Her life is full of ‘hidden work’, which Melissa Hogenboom, author of The Motherhood Complex, says is “hard to measure, because it’s invisible and performed internally.”

It was this incessant nature of the mental load, coupled with the exhaustion that came from parenting young children, that gave me the idea for Room 706. I am the mother of three children, all born within five years of each other. While recognising how very lucky I am to have exactly what I wanted in this regard – I had always hoped to have three children – at times when they were very young, all I wanted was to go alone to a hotel room and shut the door, to spend a few hours neither needed nor touched. When I shared this fantasy, though, people seemed to think I was saying I would like to go with a lover, and their reaction when I said no, my fantasy involved being entirely alone, showed that for some, the idea of a woman taking a lover was easier to understand than the idea of her needing to be alone.

Though it is terrorists with guns patrolling the hotel corridors that give Room 706 its plot, perhaps what gives Kate real fear is the never-ending to-do list she maintains both in her head and in an app on her phone, and whether Vic will be able to do all this if she doesn’t make it out alive. Worrying about this, she backs up the nearly 10,000 family photos from her phone, orders her daughter’s main Christmas present, schedules paying the balance of a family holiday, and buys a costume for her son’s dress-up day at school. Her brain is so full of the tasks she must do for her family that she needs other apps and services to look after her own body, receiving messages on her phone at various points to remind her to do her pelvic floor exercises and to check her breasts for lumps and changes.

This never-ending to-do list does not just affect women who are mothers. Whether they have children or not, women – both those who are single and those in relationships – tend to shoulder the majority of this hidden work, be it looking after ageing parents, arranging social occasions, or handling presents and cards.

I remember having a conversation once with a friend about toilet roll, a conversation that found its way into my book when Kate remembers to add them to the online shop she is doing. When you buy toilet roll, my friend had complained to me, it’s not just going to the shop to buy it. It’s noticing that you are running out. It is knowing which brand your household finds too scratchy and which brands are too thick and clog up your ancient plumbing. It is working out how much the economies of scale in buying a huge multipack are, versus where to store 48 rolls at once. It’s finding time to go to the shop and making sure there is fuel in the car, remembering the many other things you may as well pick up while there, and having time to unpack the frozen foods you’ve also bought before you have to rush out again.

At one point during the editing process, one of my editors suggested that I might like to tone down the to-do list of domestic duties, as there were rather a lot. That’s funny, I said, because I had just been rereading the manuscript and thinking to myself how there weren’t nearly enough to reflect the reality of women’s lives. (I took my editor’s advice, however, because novels are meant to be a form of escape).

That’s why, when people ask me what my novel is about, I have two answers, with neither being that it is about Kate and her lover. The first is that Room 706 is about Kate’s love story with her husband, which is brought sharply into focus as she contemplates the possibility of dying in this hotel room with another man. And the second answer, which is just as true, is that Room 706 is about the mental load, and the need to reset their domestic arrangements should she, and her marriage, survive.

So, is there a happy ending? No spoilers from me, except to say that Kate’s husband, even without a prompt from Kate, does remember to pick up the rabbit from the vet. There’s hope, she realises, that even if she doesn’t make it home, they’ll manage without her. And that feels like a happy ending to me.

Room 706 by Ellie Levenson is out 15th January 2026

I hate dinner parties.

Whenever my parents threw their annual Christmas party, I used to hide in the hallway, sitting on the bottom tread of the stairs, listening to the muffled din. As a very shy and introverted child, any large gathering felt tremendously overwhelming: too many people, too much noise. It was the same at birthdays, anniversaries, any kind of party, really. All of these get-togethers felt entirely overwhelming, so whenever I could, I would slip quietly away and sit on the stairs, in the utility room, even on the upstairs toilet.

As a less shy but still introverted adult, throwing a dinner party, especially at Christmas, is my worst nightmare. I live alone, so to throw a Christmas party would be to single-handedly choose the menu, shop for it, cook for it, clean the house, set the table, and, finally, and worst of all, to assume responsibility for my guests’ enjoyment. But as much as I dread real-life dinner parties, I love them in film and TV.

It has taken me a while to figure out why. Of course, to enjoy a fictional situation does not mean I would enjoy it in real life. I love horror films, but wouldn’t want to be caught dead in one. And it is great fun when fictional dinner parties derail, starters burn, punches fly, and chaos inevitably reigns. But what I noticed about the fictional dinner parties I love the most is that they all have a leading role for women who go through a personal transformation.

My favourite dinner parties take place in three very well-known films and series, but to set the scene, let me recap for a second. In Sally Potter’s The Party (2017), it is Janet who organises a small party for her friends. Janet is a British politician who has just been announced as shadow minister for health, and who, despite her busy schedule, insists on “doing a Thatcher” and preparing the canapés herself. In “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” one of the best episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, Meredith invites her friends and colleagues to dinner relatively soon after her husband died. And the second series of Fleabag, of course, opens with that famous engagement dinner at a fancy restaurant, where Fleabag sees her family again after a year without contact.

While there will be many exceptions throughout the world, I would say that women are still often the ones who shop, cook, and clean for a party. What I love about the stories mentioned above is that these women either fail spectacularly at some or all of these tasks, or do not even try at all. Janet very much tries, but after finding out her husband is terminally ill, she forgets about the vol-au-vents in the oven until the kitchen fills with smoke. Meredith opens the door to welcome her colleagues and finds that one of their plus-ones is Penny, the doctor who was partly responsible for her husband’s avoidable death. Frozen with shock, transported back into the past, and unable to focus on anything or anyone else, she mixes half a margarita, then abandons any attempt at cooking or hosting altogether. At the restaurant, Fleabag at first does not contribute to her family’s conversation, refusing to paper over the rift between them with polite small talk.

There is a kind of unleashing here, one that goes beyond simple unconventionality. These three women organise or attend a dinner party, but during the course of the evening, as starters turn to mains and the fault lines between family members and friends work their way toward the surface, they do not assume responsibility for others’ feelings, enjoyment, or expectations. I imagine that they, like me, grew up in an environment where girls were to some extent expected to do just that. For a long time, I moulded my life around these expectations, chased ‘proper’ schools and ‘proper’ jobs, friends and relationships because that was what my life was supposed to look like. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, I felt increasingly entangled in these unspoken rules and standards, and that only let up when I began to write novels: when I decided that trying to become a writer was a valid career to pursue. For Janet, Meredith, and Fleabag, that disentanglement is very much on show during these dinner parties.

While writing allowed me to step out of the bounds of my younger self into a person in her own right, their process of transformation, of course, looks very different. Fleabag helps her sister when she has a miscarriage, punches her brother-in-law when he makes a crude and painful joke about it, and finally reconciles with her sister. When Meredith finds out that Penny is starting work at the same hospital on Monday, she cannot help but announce to every colleague present that “perfect Penny killed my husband.” A blazing row ensues, and several of Meredith’s relationships are put under pressure, but at the end of the episode, Meredith agrees to work with Penny, and even to teach her. Janet makes to put the burned canapés into the rubbish bin outside and finds a gun there. When she finds out that Marianne, the woman she has been having an affair with, was also having an affair with her husband, she raises the gun and points it at Marianne as she is about to walk through the front door.

The culmination of these dinner parties, especially Janet’s, involves eye-opening realisations and harsh confrontations with hard truths. It is a painful process these women go through to step into themselves and see themselves and those around them clearly. It was painful for me, as it was sometimes painful for my family and friends to see that the person I was for years and years is no longer who I am, or who I want to be. But there is treasure to be found, too, in ripping the veil away and seeing what lies beneath. I hate dinner parties, but both in fiction and reality, I love them too.

Viola van de Sandt’s novel The Dinner Party is available now in hardback, ebook and audio download (Tinder Press, £20)

In a move that is almost embarrassingly 2025, the Oxford English Dictionary has declared ‘rage bait’ its word of the year. We could have had, oh, I don’t know, ‘hope’, or ‘repair’, but no — we got rage bait, a term that captures the emotional manipulation underpinning modern life and is, as such, perfectly fitting for being crowned “word of the year.”

So, what is rage bait?

At its simplest, rage bait describes the kind of content increasingly filling your feeds — the sort that seems deliberately designed to spark outrage: Kim Kardashian’s face shapewear, say (see also: the provocative campus collection, pube thongs, nipple bras… you get the picture), or that Sydney Sweeney ad. Posts that are so inflammatory that they spread like wildfire before you’ve even had time to question their validity fall under the category of rage bait. AI slop (surely a contender for next year’s Oxford Word of the Year) feels rage bait-adjacent, too.

Communication scholar Angèle Christin describes rage bait as “the negative, vengeful cousin of clickbait.” She adds that whereas traditional clickbait tries to spark curiosity (“You’ll never believe what happened next!”), rage bait goes further — “it engages negative emotions, often provoking you to make harsh comments.” You only need to open your social media app of choice to see this in practice.

And yet, you’d be forgiven for wondering why anyone would want to actively incite such fury. The answer lies in the power that rage bait gives its creators. Take Donald Trump, for example, a man famously unafraid of controversy. Earlier this year, I started a roll call of everything he had done since becoming president — ending DEI programmes, stating only two genders should be recognised: male and female, and expressing unwavering support for the death penalty, to name but a few — but ultimately found that tracking executive orders was a full-time job in itself. And yet I couldn’t help myself from obsessively following the updates and inevitably heading to the comments after just to really wind myself up.

Academics call this the confrontation effect: when users engage more with ideology-inconsistent content online than with content the agree with. A study published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes found that people (like me, and perhaps you?) are more likely to interact with political posts that challenge their views rather than align with them. Reporting on the phenomenon of rage bait, the authors write: “Individuals are strongly driven to voice their outrage toward those with whom they disagree.”

It’s not just politicians who can rile up the masses. In fact, 2025 has seen its fair share of rage-baiters across the political and cultural spectrum. The extended Kar-Jenner clan have long peddled in rage bait-y behaviour. Weighing in on SKIMS’ “The Ultimate Bush” thong hoopla, social scholar MJ Corey of the Instagram account @kardashian_kolloquium and author of the upcoming Dekonstructing the Kardashians: A New Media Manifesto dubbed the affair a way to “stir up a little light, campy body-humour controversy.” Corey also notes — in reference to another Kar-Jenner maelstrom — that “the influencer economy has completely revolutionized media and pop culture, and people with big followings who have made themselves famous for being #viral hold more cultural power than many people want to admit.”

That desire to go viral above all else can act as rage bait’s catalyst. In the ever-more competitive fight for eyeballs, we’re seeing creators embark on increasingly provocative stunts to boost engagement. Take adult entertainer Bonnie Blue, for example. Her appeal fits the same psychological patterns identified in research on divisive public figures: she uses highly polarising, identity-charged messaging that creates a strong in-group of supporters who interpret her bluntness as authenticity. Her style also mirrors what studies describe as “outrage-based influence”: direct, confrontational communication that thrives in algorithmic environments. In today’s media landscape (especially on social platforms), controversial and emotionally charged content (like having sex with 1,000 men in 12 hours) is amplified because it drives engagement: shares, comments, reactions. Neutral or nuanced discussion often doesn’t. This phenomenon has been described as part of the Outrage Industrial Complex.

In short, divisive figures both depend on and benefit from media structures that magnify outrage and reinforce group-specific worldviews. And still, even against that backdrop, the fact that “rage bait” has risen to the top of our collective vocabulary hints at a deeper societal question: in 2025, are we expecting to be manipulated — and, moreover, are we too obliging?

We know by now that outrage is profitable: it keeps us clicking, commenting, spiralling, and — most importantly — returning. Social media’s attention economy has evolved into a finely tuned machine that rewards spectacle over substance. Rage bait becoming ubiquitous reflects this shift: we are naming the tools being used on us — and yet (and yet) still falling for them.

The word of the year isn’t just a lighthearted commentary on the internet’s worst impulses; it marks the point where provoking hatred has become a mainstream content strategy. And when outrage becomes part and parcel of our daily digital consumption, the emotional baseline changes. Cynicism becomes instinctive, compassion fatigue sets in, and public discourse hardens into an ongoing, tiresome battle.

But constant outrage has a dulling effect. It makes real issues like climate change, inequality, and democratic backsliding harder to distinguish from made up ones. Anger being turned into entertainment gives us a glow of self-righteousness, a sense of belonging to the “right” side. It also allows us to perform morality instead of practising it. We can see this in the way so many of us are not only exhausted but disengaged, and yet (again, and yet!) somehow more reactive than ever.

Acknowledging rage bait feels like a sad recognition that we’re being manipulated — by politicians, creators, media outlets, and often by one another. But this realisation also, in a way, feels oddly hopeful: the more aware we become of rage bait, the less effective it becomes.

I can’t help but think of the sayings my family cycled through when I was getting bullied at school, things like “Rise above it” and “Ignore them and they’ll get bored.” Except now the bullies are billionaire tech bros bumping rage bait to the top of our feeds to piss us off and keep us on the platforms longer. The sayings are still as unsatisfying as I remember (“What do you mean ‘words will never hurt me’? Of course words hurt,” I find my inner child yelling), but maybe mother’s wisdom prevails. Maybe, for the sake of our own sanity, the best thing we can do is resist the temptation to engage in rage bait. We might not be able to control the algorithms or the opportunists who thrive on inflaming tensions. But we can control our own participation in the cycle; we don’t have to take the bait.

Warning: Contains references to suicide and abuse

“I want justice for my daughter,” says Christine Flack in the new Disney+ documentary, Caroline Flack: Search for the Truth. The two-parter shows a mother’s unflinching quest to uncover what really happened in the final months of her daughter’s life.

In the five years since Caroline Flack took her own life after months of intense media scrutiny and public speculation about her private life, her name has become a kind of shorthand for tragedy and a cautionary tale about fame, mental health, and the cruelty of the public eye. But this documentary asks us to look past the tabloid frenzy to see the woman behind the story: the daughter Christine lost.

The series doesn’t dwell too much on Caroline’s career before the night that would change her life — Strictly Come Dancing, Love Island, The X Factor — so I won’t either, but to call her a TV star feels like an understatement. Paul Martin, a showbiz reporter and the only journalist to appear in the documentary, recalls her as “the golden girl who delivered for so long.” Even at her lowest, she continued to ‘deliver,’ at least in terms of selling newspapers. Martin recounts an especially brutal moment when an editor told him, speaking of Caroline, “If she’s not willing to talk to you, f*** her over then.” It’s hard to imagine a male celebrity being treated with the same calculated cruelty.

Fronted by Christine Flack, the documentary retraces the months before Caroline’s death, revisiting the relentless media circus that turned her daughter’s life into a macabre spectacle. What emerges isn’t just the story of a woman undone by fame, but of a society addicted to outrage, quick to condemn, and insatiable in its appetite for so-called retribution.

It’s easy, and perhaps more comfortable to blame the press, but vampiric though it is, it is not solely to blame; we are all complicit in fuelling the fire. Without a public reaction, sensationalist stories would soon stop being printed.

Revisiting the time just before COVID-19, the documentary takes viewers through the social media mobs and the public bloodlust for punishment. Caroline’s solicitor, Paul Morris, says she was “prosecuted for being Caroline Flack.”

The moral outrage might’ve felt righteous at the time, but I wonder how anyone who indulged in tearing her down feels now? Like the social media commentator who wrote that “women like her disgust me.” Or those who commented on photos of her leaving the court hearing, calling her a “hooker” and a “slapper”. Would similar insults be levied at a man in the same position?

Caroline’s greatest fear, the documentary reveals, was the release of the bodycam footage showing her in the private moments of a mental health crisis. It’s a tragic reminder of the stigma and shame that still surround mental health. Headlines like “Mad Flack Beat Lover With Lamp” weren’t just cruel and sensationalist; they reinforced the dangerous stereotype of the “crazy woman.”

Through Christine, we learn that Caroline had long struggled with her mental health, something she not only felt she couldn’t share but worried that if it came out, she would be ruined. Watching the documentary, the hope is that others in the public eye today wouldn’t have these same concerns, that as a society we have progressed, but I’m not sure how confidently I can believe that.

Caroline’s story is exceptional only in its visibility. The mechanisms that destroyed her — online pile-ons, armchair moralising, and the desire to take women down — show up everywhere. When Laura Whitmore was chosen to replace Caroline as the host of Love Island, commentators were quick to pit the pair against each other, despite being friends in real life. It seems to be an almost knee-jerk reaction when women share the same spotlight. It’s not the reserve of celebrities either. Women are constantly pitted against each other, judged more harshly than men, and rarely afforded second chances.

Caroline Flack: Search for the Truth forces us to confront the uncomfortable reality about society’s appetite for cruelty. Episode one opens with Christine explaining her motives for pursuing the project Caroline had originally considered before she took her own life. She says she wants to find out why her daughter was treated so badly by institutions that should have protected her. The lingering question I have is whether we’ve learned anything since.

If you or someone you know is struggling, you can call Samaritans for free at 116 123 or visit samaritans.org

When it comes to things that could drive an MP “mad”, TV adverts might not top the list. Yet, Reform UK MP Sarah Pochin told a caller on TalkTV, “It drives me mad when I see adverts full of black people, full of Asian people.”

Following a swift backlash, Pochin apologised, claiming her words were “poorly phrased” and saying her real concern was what she described as the advertising industry’s “DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] madness.”

Even taking that at face value, her comments closely resemble themes that have been circulating within anti-immigration groups this year—particularly the idea that diversity itself threatens a supposedly “normal” Britain. It’s a narrative that mirrors debates in the United States, where some have linked similar rhetoric to the rollback of DEI initiatives.

“The only way we are going to defeat this racism is to call it out and confront it for what it is,” said Labour MP Wes Streeting, who also criticised Reform Party Leader Nigel Farage for his “deafening silence” on the controversy. Streeting wasn’t alone: MR Dawn Butler faced parliamentary censure after calling Pochin “a racist” during a heated exchange in the Commons.

Dr Emma Briant, an expert on propaganda, sees a worrying pattern: “Pochin’s arguments reflect a public discourse where ‘dog whistles’ to the far right have done their job—they’ve made way for explicit racism to be voiced boldly in public.” While researching her book Bad News for Refugees, Briant found that overt expressions of prejudice rise when politicians and media fail to challenge narratives “cloaked in moderate language but rooted in bias and falsehoods.” The consequences, she warns, are tangible: “rising tension, emboldened extremists, and more violence in British communities.”

Labour MP Zarah Sultana echoed that concern, writing on X: “This poisonous politics fuels far-right violence against minorities and migrants.”

Pochin’s follow-up remarks, blaming the “woke liberati” and “arty-farty world” for sidelining “average white people,” prompted further criticism. Critics argue that such framing positions whiteness as the default and diversity as deviation—a theme often found in nationalist or anti-immigration rhetoric.

Professor Vian Bakir of Bangor University sees it as part of a larger shift. “Discussions of race in British politics can’t be separated from the relentless anti-immigration narrative pushed by Reform and the Conservatives to scapegoat minorities for economic and social failings.” She sees Pochin’s comments less as a dog whistle, "as that would suggest that she was using coded or suggestive language to garner support from a particular group without provoking opposition”, and more as “speaking from the heart”. This presents an even more frightening prospect: that we’ve reached a point where MPs feel they can make what MP Wes Streeting has condemned as “racist” statements in public spaces.

Reform UK has long been accused by commentators of echoing far-right talking points on immigration and national decline. When a front-bench MP uses language resembling themes associated with extremist rhetoric—intentionally or otherwise—it sends a powerful message.

Critics say that’s the real issue: not who appears in adverts, but how resentment toward diversity is becoming normalised in public debate. Each time such language enters mainstream politics, they argue, it legitimises prejudice and encourages others to repeat it. That, they warn, is where the true damage lies—not in the representation of diverse faces on our screens.

“In my years with them, they lent me out to scores of wealthy, powerful people,” writes Virginia Giuffre in her posthumous memoir, Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice, released today. Key allegations had already entered the public domain over the last few days, and they make for harrowing reading. Among them: “Prince  Andrew believed having sex with me was his birthright.” The memoir does more than catalogue a lifetime of alleged abuse—beginning at just age 6—it reflects the devastating toll of years spent fighting for justice and enduring public doubt and vilification. Giuffre, who took her own life in April of this year, had spent decades being treated not as a survivor, but as a problem to be managed or erased. Three weeks before her suicide, she wrote to Amy Wallace, her book’s ghostwriter, to say: “It is my heartfelt wish that this work be published, regardless of my circumstances at the time.”

Now, in light of the book’s publication—and an explosive report by the Daily Mail alleging that Prince Andrew enlisted his taxpayer-funded Metropolitan Police bodyguard to investigate Virginia Giuffre, passing along her date of birth and even her U.S. Social Security number—serious questions need to be asked. Why do such tactics, aimed at discrediting women—and certainly not exclusive to Giuffre—continue to work so effectively?

The smear campaign claim is chilling, though perhaps not surprising. The alleged attempt to use state resources—paid for by taxpayers like you and me—to gather private information on a woman who accused a royal of sexual abuse is, if true, an abuse of power of the highest order. But more than that, it fits a longstanding pattern: when women speak out against powerful men, the response is often not accountability, but retaliation.

Even after Jeffrey Epstein became a convicted sex offender in 2008, powerful men across finance, academia, media, and royalty continued to associate with him. They flew on his jet and dined at his homes. Sure, few publicly defended him, but fewer still said anything at all. Survivors, meanwhile, were painted as liars, opportunists, or forgettable collateral. When accusations resurfaced, the instinct was damage control.

As Dr. Emma L. Briant, an expert in propaganda and information warfare—whose research played a key role in exposing the Cambridge Analytica–Facebook data misuse scandal—puts it: “There is a lucrative industry in character assassination for hire that powerful and wealthy individuals and companies can deploy to dredge up dirt and minimise the damage of assault allegations by attacking the accuser's credibility with PR or online astroturfing of support.” That’s precisely why smear campaigns have remained such an effective tool: they work not only to discredit individuals but to protect networks of power.

For too long, discrediting a woman’s character has been one of the most reliable ways to neutralise her voice. When a woman makes accusations of sexual violence, the tactics are both ruthless and well-trodden. Question her motives. Expose her past. Frame her as unstable, promiscuous, vindictive, or a fantasist. A headline from the time—from the same paper now alleging “Andrew told Met to dig up dirt on Virginia Giuffre”—read: “Jeffrey Epstein Accuser Was Not a Sex Slave, but a Money-Hungry Sex Kitten, Her Former Friends Say.” In the court of public opinion, the faintest whiff of doubt is often enough to turn the tide—and powerful men know it.

Virginia Giuffre was subjected to all of this and more. Her courage in speaking out about her alleged abuse was met not just with legal threats and denials, but with an orchestrated effort to dismantle her credibility, the memoir claims. Sadly, Giuffre’s circumstances are faced by many women, and her experience reflects the deep-rooted issues women face when making public allegations of abuse.

Why do these tactics still universally work? Because the cultural scaffolding that enables them remains firmly in place. In the media, when alleged assault involves someone in the public eye, it is treated as a scandal rather than potentially systemic abuse. Legal systems allow reputational management to masquerade as justice. And the public, conditioned by centuries of misogyny, remains more inclined to doubt the woman than to question the man.

As Dr. Jilly Kay, a feminist media scholar at Loughborough University, explains: “Contemporary culture is profoundly shaped by very long histories in which women’s voices have been discredited and disbelieved… False accusations are vanishingly rare, but these myths still have a very powerful hold over the ways that many people think about sexual assault.”

That historical context is crucial. As Nicholas O'Shaughnessy, Emeritus Professor of Communications at Queen Mary University of London, notes: “Smear campaigns are perhaps the oldest form of propaganda and one of the most effective… Even if denial is effective, there always remains a stain—people think there might be some grain of truth after all.”

He points out that women, in particular, are more often the targets of these enduring narratives—especially those that sexualise, discredit or morally stigmatise them: “Typically in history, certain women have been depicted as sexually voracious—the mythology of the nymphomaniac. Women can be vulnerable and yet still blamed.”

Worse still, these smears are not only personal attacks; they’re deterrents. They send a message: this is what will happen to you if you speak up. We saw it in the way it took literal video evidence of Cassie’s abuse at the hands of Sean “Diddy” Combs for her to be believed. We saw it when a 22-year-old Monica Lewinsky was vilified, while her 49-year-old boss, and the President of the United States, was painted as a hapless man who fell prey to temptation. It is, quite literally, a tale as old as time: Eve and the apple, and all that.

Professor Vian Bakir, an academic specialising in journalism and political communication, agrees: “Whether they silence the targeted woman is another matter, but they certainly could have a chilling effect on other women from taking public oppositional stances against men in power.”

“Smear campaigns can be incredibly sophisticated,” adds Isabella Theocharous, an Associate at Carter-Ruck, which specialises in reputation management, privacy law, and crisis response. Often, even when the victim knows who is behind the campaign, it is difficult to get a claim off the ground, explains Theocharous. There’s also the simple reality that smear campaigns, especially when backed by wealth and institutional influence, are unfair battles. Survivors rarely have access to the legal firepower, PR teams, or political protection afforded to their alleged abusers. The reputational damage done by even a whisper campaign can take years to undo, that’s if it’s undone at all. Dr. Briant warns of the infrastructure that supports such efforts: “The media feed on conflict and scandal… This encourages men to seed the public discrediting of women with disparaging information.”

And yet history is full of moments when women have spoken anyway, refusing to be silenced and shifting the culture in the process. Virginia Giuffre is one of those women. Her story has helped expose a global web of exploitation and the lengths to which the powerful will go to protect themselves.

Smear campaigns work because they exploit our worst instincts: to doubt the vulnerable and protect the powerful. The only way to break their power is to confront those instincts—with vigilance, solidarity, and an unwavering commitment to truth.

When Dame Sarah Mullally was named the first female Archbishop of Canterbury, it should have been a moment that spotlighted her — the woman making history. After all, she is the first-ever woman to hold the position of Archbishop-designate — the spiritual head of the Anglican Communion and one of the most influential religious figures in the UK.

A moment that should have celebrated Mullally’s historic leadership was quietly reframed through the lens of someone else, someone male.

Despite the nature of the appointment — the first of its kind since the founding of the Church of England in the 6th century and an indicator that it is trying to modernise — headlines from some of the country’s biggest mainstream media outlets chose to highlight her husband instead. Even in 2025, the coverage doesn't fully reflect the significance of the moment. In fact, it runs counter to it.

“It’s wild that Sky named the literal Archbishop’s husband instead of naming her,” says Claire Gibson, a spokesperson for the Amnesty Feminist Network, who shared the post on X. “Women’s names have been erased throughout history — and we're still doing it in headlines in 2025.”

Recent research from Ancestry reveals just how deep this erasure runs. Nearly a third of Brits (29%) believe women haven’t received the recognition they deserve in history. Yet when asked to name pioneering women, the knowledge gap is staggering. 96% of us don’t know who Hilda Hewlett was (the UK’s first licensed female pilot); 95% have never heard of Noor Inayat Khan, a British resistance agent during WWII; and 93% failed to recognise Eleanor Rathbone, the social reformer who paved the way for child benefits.

And it’s not just about prominent names like Dame Sarah Mullally. Our own female ancestors are missing, too. Ancestry notes that historically, women were excluded from baptism records, and were often referred to only by their husband’s name in newspapers and legal documents: “Mrs. John Smith”, say, instead of their own identity. In fact, mothers' names weren’t even included on children’s marriage certificates in England and Wales until 2021.

“These women, often unrecognised in history books and documentation, played a crucial role in shaping the world we live in today,” says Laura House, Family History Expert at Ancestry. And yet their names, and their stories, continue to be omitted.

“Even in the corrected version, [Mullally’s] marital status and her motherhood are listed before her career background, which is infinitely more relevant to her appointment," says Gibson. "We're still measuring women by who they're married to and whether they're mothers — not by what they've achieved.”

This pattern doesn’t just obscure our past; it distorts our present. If a woman can rise to the highest position in the Church of England and still be introduced to the world via her husband’s name, what hope do any of us have of truly being recognised?

While the original article has since been updated to lead with Mullally’s name instead of her age and marital status, it may have been an honest (albeit baffling) oversight. But the fact that it happened at all suggests that socially, we are still not entirely comfortable with women in positions of power.

“Having a woman as Archbishop of Canterbury is a win for feminism,” Gibson says, “but headlines like these show we’re still uncomfortable with women in leadership roles. We’re still a long, long way off from achieving gender equality.”

That discomfort shows up in countless ways. 82% of Brits don’t know when women gained equal voting rights with men (1928), and 85% are unaware of the year the Equal Pay Act came into law (1970). This kind of erasure isn’t limited to headlines or history books; it’s everywhere. There are more statues of Paddington Bear than of women in London. Less than 15% of the capital’s blue plaques honour women. Women make up 51% of the population yet hold only 40% of parliamentary seats.

Dame Sarah Mullally’s appointment is undoubtedly historic — but it’s also telling. It shows that even now, women are still not allowed to stand at the centre of their own stories. And while we can’t rewrite history, we can start naming the women who shaped it, and the women shaping it right now.

My painful periods weren’t the only reason I left my full-time job at a magazine in 2023 to go freelance, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say they were a major factor. With few other options available to me, I realised that I couldn’t go on forcing a round peg into a square hole: full-time work without flexibility, while living with abnormal periods, was burning me out. And so, I turned to self-employment to give me the flexibility I needed.

Since then, I have been shaping my work around my cycle, keeping the worst three or four days free of in-person commitments, and building in room to work from the sofa when excruciating pain and heavy bleeding made normal office life impossible. Despite working in women-dominated industries, I never felt period pain would be taken as a valid enough reason to miss work. Maybe this was projection or societal conditioning, but it became unmanageable. Covid lockdowns had shown me what flexible working could look like, and the thought of going back to commuting into an office every month while doubled over in pain felt unbearable. I should have asked for more flexibility or support, but, as we are primed to do as women, I didn’t.

When I first heard about Portugal’s new menstrual leave legislation, I felt hopeful. As of April 26th, employees who experience severe and disabling menstrual pain caused by endometriosis or adenomyosis can take up to three consecutive days of employer-paid leave per month. Spain led the way in 2023, passing similar legislation. Now, a new petition calling for the same in the UK is gaining traction, with over 60,000 signatures (it’ll need 100,000 signatures before making it to Parliament). However, after spending well over a decade trying to get my own PCOS diagnosis—and still awaiting further investigations into endometriosis and PMDD—my trust in systems to support women through gynaecological issues is low.

For women like me, a law like Portugal’s could be life-changing, but our optimism is peppered with doubt. Rebecca, a 36-year-old psychotherapist from London, describes being unable to do anything but lie on the sofa with painkillers and a TENS machine during her period. She’s apprehensive about what this leave could look like in practice: “I imagine this leave could be used in the way sickness leave is now: it’s there, but management doesn't like it when you take it. It could be yet another reason misogynists give for not hiring women,” she says. Her concern is not misplaced. The Guardian reported that in the 11 months immediately following Spain’s menstrual leave becoming law, it was taken just 1,559 times.

Others see it as an overdue recognition of women’s health. Samantha, a civil servant from the North East, says paid menstrual leave would have reduced stress in her early career: “Trying to schedule my period on my days off and making up excuses for calling in sick was exhausting. Knowing I could just take time off would have helped my mental health.” Alexia, 32, a clinical research practitioner in London, agrees: “Paid menstrual leave would mean I wouldn’t have to push through a full workday while dealing with endometriosis pain. It’s about health, not privilege.”

Experts back them up. Dr Sula Windgassen, a leading health psychologist, believes menstrual leave could be transformative: “A policy like this improves workplace accessibility for those with debilitating chronic illnesses. It reflects a sense of truly valuing employees, which actually enhances productivity. It’s a win-win.” But she warns that long diagnosisdelays—seven to nine years on average—mean too many would miss out unless access is widened.

Changing policy, though, isn’t enough. Menstrual care in the UK lags in research funding, education, and workplace culture. The burden falls heaviest on marginalised groups: working-class people and people of colour. A 2024 report found one in ten people with periods had been told not to talk about them in front of others, with Asian and Asian British people among the most affected. Furthermore, research from ethical period care brand TOTM has found that 94% of people with periods said period pain has disrupted their working day, and over half don’t feel comfortable discussing periods at work.

Menstrual leave won’t solve every problem, but it’s a crucial first step—and long overdue. The government must act swiftly to make it a reality. Yet true change requires more than policy alone; broader cultural shifts are essential, driven by education and awareness, to genuinely improve the lives of women living with painful periods.

I thought it was the toxic fashion and modelling industry that had made me the way I am, which could best be described as “mostly comfortable with my body and general image but with an abject horror of things getting worse.” But the more I speak to friends who spent their formative years in the eighties and nineties, the more I realise it’s a generational curse.

As I write in the prologue of my memoir How Not to Be a Supermodel, “I like to think I came away from my twelve-ish years in the industry relatively unscathed. Apart from a deep-seated fear of gaining weight and a hyper-critical eye for my own perceived physical imperfections, I’d say that I’m completely normal and unaffected.”

But it wasn’t until I started getting messages from women my age, all saying how deeply they relate to this passage, that I began to realise it isn’t just my experience as a model in the noughties that shapes my relationship with my body, food, and exercise. In fact, my entire life has set me up for the idea that a body is something you should never be quite totally happy with—or at least not complacent about. It’s a thing that needs eternal tweaking and near-constant monitoring, so as not to “let things slide.”

It’s not as though these thoughts dominate my day—I never wake up and let my appearance dictate how I feel—but I am aware that there’s a constant, low-key undercurrent of body awareness and the pervading need to stay slim that dictates lunch choices and means I often run up the escalators.

Where does this low-key undercurrent of body awareness and the need to stay slim come from? The eighties. I’m sure of it. A time rife with crazy cottage cheese diets, Lycra-clad women on exercise bikes, and the easy, open ridicule of fat people in society and the media. Body positivity? The nearest you’d get to that was a well-meaning uncle saying, “Don’t worry, some men like them chunkier!”

Slimness wasn’t just ingrained as an ideal; it was ingrained as the norm. Which made anything other than slimness problematic. Larger sizes and rounder shapes weren’t celebrated as diverse; there was no body positivity movement. We had Uncle Buck and Chunk from The Goonies, the latter doing the “truffle shuffle” with his belly fat to great hilarity. We had women’s magazines with article after article on toning up, shifting baby weight, and slimming down two dress sizes in a month.

So how does this Gen X woman (just scraping in by a month, I’ll admit) get on board with body positivity? How does she learn to feel comfortable in her body in all its forms, to appreciate its strength and what it does for her—rather than just judging it at face value, pinching at love handles during PMT week and still sneaking onto the scales once a month?

I think there’s a place in between “EAT ALL THE CAKE!” and “a minute on the lips, a lifetime on the hips” that sees you just doing things in quiet moderation. A bit of exercise—not fanatical—a croissant but not every day, a common-sense approach to living that ignores the social media noise that thrives on confusion and uncertainty.

Because here’s the thing: I’m not sure the general attitude to slimness has changed all that much since the eighties—let alone the noughties, when I was travelling the world as a jobbing fashion model. People are often horrified when I share stories of being measured with a tape measure, in my underwear, in front of a room full of peers, or of being deemed ‘too fat’ for a Tokyo contract despite still fitting into a pair of age eight C&A shorts. But have we really moved on from that perfection-seeking, diet-obsessed world—or have we just become more careful about how we talk about it? The language might have softened, but the message hasn’t, because once again it seems as though thin is back. The re-emergence of ’90s aesthetics—heroin-chic silhouettes, visible hip bones, low-rise jeans—combined with the rise of Ozempic and weight-loss jabs has surely only reinforced the idea that smaller is still better.

Perhaps, though, it’s possible to not have an extreme, clickbait-worthy position on body image; to be resigned to appreciating your own body but still recognising that there are things you’d like to change about it. Right now, my stance sits somewhere along the lines of recognising that I have deep-seated, ingrained body biases, but trying to be at peace with them—peace, not perfection.

How Not to be a Supermodel is available to buy now

Without Carnival, I wouldn't exist – literally. My parents met at Notting Hill Carnival in 1994. "I think it was at the Jungle sound system on Tavistock Road," my mum tells me over the phone. Two years later, I was born and would regularly return to the road with them. As a child, I'd ride on my dad's shoulders, weaving through the compact crowds, passing all the glamorous masqueraders to meet his friends at the sound systems. More than anything, I wanted to be one of those beautiful women in their dazzling costumes, proudly flaunting their perfect brown skin and wonderful bodies. I could stand and watch them pass for hours, but my parents were insistent on spending the day at the sound systems.

During my teenage years, when partying with my parents lost its appeal, I started going with friends and discovered so much more. I had the freedom to roam, meet new people, try foods from different islands, and allow myself to be pulled in by the floats that sang to me. Last year, for the first time, I was one of those beautiful girls in bejewelled costumes, dancing behind the ropes as people admired the craftsmanship of my costume.

Participating in Notting Hill Carnival is an entirely different experience from just spectating. You are part of a show, part of someone's carnival memory; you are the colour that makes the day special, and once you've done it, it is impossible to skip out on again.

Earlier this week, I headed to Porchester Hall, where 70 years ago, my Caribbean elders attended Carnival dances. These events were organised by promoters who hired bands and partied into the night, bringing a slice of joy to the Caribbean community during an otherwise difficult time. Though their events were often shut down or raided by police, the defiance of their spirit kept them returning – and here I am now.

When I arrive at the venue, I enter a small room where Hype Mas, a Carnival Band, is distributing costumes to excited attendees. I pick up my jewelled rose quartz costume for Monday and a T-shirt for Sunday's Dutty Mas.

Just 20 minutes up the road, on Southam Street, 65 years ago, a murder occurred that would change British society forever and birth the largest street party in Europe – the reason I'm making this journey. "Carni," as the young have regrettably started to call it, is a three-day celebration of Caribbean culture and identity in West London. The vibrant colours, food, and festivities conceal a more sinister origin, as the late broadcaster and activist Darcus Howe reminds us: If there hadn't been race riots in Notting Hill, I don't believe we would have had the Notting Hill Carnival. If it weren't for the murder of Kelso Cochrane, Carnival wouldn't have happened.

As Howe reminds us, the senseless killing of an Antiguian carpenter and aspiring lawyer led to unrest in West London and a need for deep healing. First came the children's street fayre, organised by Rhaune Laslett, a local community activist. Then, in 1959, Claudia Jones, a Trinidadian human rights activist, organised the first-ever BBC-broadcast indoor Caribbean Carnival. Jones' event then spread across London in the 1960s before taking to the streets in 1966 and becoming the celebration we all know and love today.

Carnival has never been able to exist freely. Talk of its cancellation has been ongoing since the start. In a 1979 interview on Thames at Six, Howe was asked about this very issue. His response: “Unless they show the rest of the world that they're vindictive, corrupt, anti-black, and pro-colonial in 1979 – unless they show that – there’s no way they can stop Carnival when half a million people want it, and thousands are willing to take part.”

Each year, the focus shifts to the arrests and crimes. It’s one of the few events where police crime statistics are released right away. But despite 2019 findings from Statista and HuffPo showing that arrest rates at Notting Hill over three years are almost identical to those at Glastonbury when the number of people attending is taken into account, media outlets continue to run fear-mongering headlines that misrepresent the spirit of Carnival. This only serves to strengthen the call to shut it down.

Then there's the pervasive impact of gentrification. With Caribbean migrants selling the homes they once owned in Notting Hill and being replaced with non-Caribbean implants, the existence of Carnival became a nuisance to residents rather than a moment of unity. Their calls to axe Carnival grow louder every year – they feel harder to ignore.

This year felt markedly different; a leaked letter from Carnival chair Ian Comfort stated that failing to secure additional funding "risks compromising public safety and jeopardising the future of the Carnival." As the Carnival grows year on year, the demand for support increases, but the funding doesn't keep pace. When the news broke, a sense of fear swirled amongst revellers who anticipate the festival every year. At the last minute, City Hall, the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, and the City of Westminster provided the funding for the event to proceed.

Worryingly, though, the deputy leader of Kensington & Chelsea Council, Kim Taylor-Smith, stated that the emergency funding it offered would only be for 2025, leaving the 2026 Carnival in an uncertain position. I shudder to think of London without Carnival. The event has been a staple for over half a century and draws in crowds from not only the city but the world.

As the Caribbean population in this country ages, younger generations lose their connection with those who first arrived from the islands; we also lose the stories, memories, and culture that kept us connected to our roots. You can see the collective identity crisis happening among younger generations of Caribbean people who are now, according to the latest census, mostly of mixed heritage. There are many ways we've failed to preserve our cultural heritage as Black British Caribbean people, and losing Carnival would be a devastating blow.

I hope this Carnival is not my last and that future generations – those who are far removed from Caribbean ancestors – still feel a sense of pride in this event and recognise its importance for years to come.

Maybe it’s my c-c-c-curly hair, or my overuse of rhetorical questions. Most likely, it’s because I’m a thirty-something woman living in a cosmopolitan (get it?) city and writing for a living. But throughout my career, I’ve been compared—fondly, I hope—to Carrie Bradshaw. I’m not alone in this comparison; countless column inches have been dedicated to writers claiming their likeness to Candace Bushnell’s iconic protagonist. This speaks to Carrie Bradshaw’s profound impact on women—not just of my generation (millennials), but of many others, too.

Now, and just like that… after 27 years on the air, Carrie Bradshaw is closing the chapter.

I was only eight when the pilot aired in the UK on 3 February 1999, and thirteen when season six wrapped in February 2004. I never experienced the show in real time, but in many ways, my peers and I are products of Sex and the City. Studying Fashion Journalism in the 2010s, my lecturer would often lament “that bloody Carrie Bradshaw” for raising a generation of girls to believe they could make a living penning one column a week. Admittedly, graduating into a recession and a crumbling media landscape, I’ve harboured my own resentments, but I’ve never managed to hold a grudge for long.

While I can’t remember a time pre-SATC, I’ve watched enough TV to know that, before, female characters were often written as accessories to a man’s narrative or reduced to tired stereotypes: the saint or the seductress, the wife or the sidekick. Then came four women strutting down a Manhattan street in pin-thin Manolos, talking frankly about sex, ambition, ageing, and insecurity, and the cultural landscape shifted forever.

Yes, the women—Carrie in particular—would obsess over men, but the real love story was the friendship between the characters. In a world that often pits women against each other for male approval, SATC switched the script and made female friendship not only visible but foundational. It taught me early on that the love between friends can be as life-changing as any romance.

Having grown up with Disney princesses (many of whom, peculiarly, had no friends at all), this was a revelation. Not just that a woman’s most enduring relationship could be with her friends, but that those relationships could be as rich, dramatic, and emotionally resonant as any romance. Sure, I lusted after the push-pull excitement of Big and Carrie (forgive me, I was young), but what I really yearned for was the friendships. This is still what strikes me most when I rewatch it now. In fact, at times, I’ve even wondered if shows like Sex and the City and Friends gave millennials like me unrealistic expectations of adult friendships.

SATC taught me that friendships need to be tended to with as much love and devotion as we dedicate to our romantic relationships. It taught me that the best friendships are romantic.

The show also validated the centrality of chosen families—especially for single women in cities where traditional markers of success (house, marriage, kids) tend to be delayed, redefined, or rejected entirely. Now, as a 34-year-old woman, I can appreciate this even more. I’ve seen in my own life how different life paths can act as a wedge between friendships, but in many ways, Carrie and her crew offered a map for navigating those shifts.

In Miranda, we learned that having a baby needn’t erase your identity (and that you can still have a kid and not like other people’s); Samantha’s sex-positivity showed us that our bodies, pleasure, and desires are ours to claim, without guilt or compromise. She also delivered the line: “I love you, too, Richard, but I love me more.”

There’s a well-explored theory that every woman is either a Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, or Samantha. I tend to think most of us are a mix. But whatever combination, SATC encouraged me to embrace myself wholly—even the messy parts—and romanticise my life.

The show might’ve been the spark that first lit the road towards another way of living, but it’s also been a security blanket. I’ve watched it in bed with my own Charlotte (and a chip pitta) after bumping into an ex on a night out; on repeat throughout an entire weekend following a long breakup with a friend who was going through the same thing. When I started panicking about turning thirty, it was SATC I turned to for reassurance—and later found my concerns mirrored back at me when Charlotte had a similar meltdown about turning 36: “I’ve thought about it and I’ve decided I’m sticking at 35… Because I’m just not where I thought I'd be at 36.”

Despite the show’s many and much-discussed flaws, it has undeniably forced us to challenge the status quo. Without it, we might never have questioned the moral superiority that sometimes comes with parenthood—or celebrated forgoing it (a moment’s appreciation for Samantha throwing an “I’m not having a baby” baby shower). We also wouldn’t have examined the “single tax” and how that cost is never rebalanced if you choose to forgo the milestones that society has deemed worthy of celebrating. For my part, SATC gave me permission to love something else fiercely and without apology—London, and it gave me a handy catchphrase to boot, one I also share with my two close friends when the occasion arises that “I’m on a date with my city”.

So yes, Carrie Bradshaw may have singlehandedly destroyed a generation’s understanding of personal finance—and given a certain wannabe writer very inflated ideas about salaries—but she also helped change the way women were written, watched, and witnessed on screen. Now, two years older than Carrie was when the show first aired, I think I’m ready to say goodbye. After all, as Carrie herself says, "Maybe the past is like an anchor holding us back. Maybe you have to let go of who you were to become who you will be." Or, maybe, it’s time to load Season One, Episode One again.

...And just like that, our girl is twirling in a tutu once more.

It’s time for media, fashion, and social platforms to stop turning the image of the schoolgirl into something ripe for adult consumption.

It seems strange to have to point this out, but given the cultural climate, it bears repeating: a girl in a school uniform is just that — a girl in a school uniform. She is not “jailbait.” She is not “asking for it.” She is not a nostalgic fantasy, a marketing opportunity, or a Halloween costume.

And yet, the sexualised schoolgirl remains one of pop culture’s most enduring tropes. Across film and fashion, music and social media, the aesthetic of adolescence is constantly polished and repackaged for adult appeal.

Britney Spears was just 17 when she wore that now-iconic school uniform in Baby One More Time, but the image has endured for decades, serving as both a pop legend and a cultural warning sign.

More recently, Kim Kardashian — ever attuned to a lucrative marketing moment — launched the new Skims Campus collection ahead of the “back to school” season. Think flannel pyjama pants, baby tees, tube socks, pom-poms, “novelty accessories,” and plenty of plaid. These are classic collegiate hallmarks, styled on what Skims exclaims are “real college students!” But the visual language of tiny shorts, cheerleader energy, and soft-focus sleepover vibes clearly suggests something more than cosy loungewear.

As a ’90s kid, I’m hardwired to respond to the aesthetic. It reminds me of the teen flicks we played at sleepovers: Jawbreaker, She’s All That, even Not Another Teen Movie — basically any film featuring Solo cups and 25-year-olds playing badly behaved teenagers. Today, it’s actual 18–21-year-olds fronting ad campaigns built on decades of male-gaze fantasy.

The Skims Campus collection — like the brand’s viral face wraps — will no doubt sell out. And to be clear: Kim Kardashian alone isn’t the problem. She’s a product of this system too. But when we continue to sexualise schoolgirls, we contribute to a culture that endangers them.

Why, in 2025, are we still so invested in dressing up adolescence for adult attention? Why, more than 70 years after Nabokov unleashed Lolita on the world, are we still so culturally obsessed with sexualising schoolgirls?

Hannah Nixon, a writer whose play LOLA explores similar themes, notes the dissonance between the book and the widespread social understanding of the relationship between Lolita and her abuser-stepfather Humbert Humbert: “She’s a child being sexually abused by her stepfather, and so it’s very indicative of society that the narrative of what happens to her has been turned on its head and turned into something that is about a teenage child — actually, she’s not even a teenager — having some sort of power sexually over a man.”

Evocative of Adrian Lyne’s 1997 adaptation of Lolita, a young, blonde Skims model is shown blowing bubblegum in a baby pink tube top and hot pants — the outfit also brings to mind early Britney or Christina Aguilera. Elsewhere in the campaign, another familiar porn trope appears: the “sexy secretary.” A young girl in thin-rimmed glasses poses with a pencil pursed between her lips, gazing seductively into the camera. This isn’t just playful branding — it’s a well-worn formula: stylised, infantilised, sexualised.

The sexualised schoolgirl has long been a fixture in the porn industry, too. “Teen” is the most-searched category on major porn platforms, and its impact is far-reaching. Research suggests that “barely legal” porn, while technically featuring adults, functions much like virtual depictions of minors by activating “youth‑focused sexual schemas,” which, over time, may contribute to emotional desensitisation and escalation to content that is more extreme or deviant.

Now, with the rise of AI-generated “schoolgirl” content, that exploitation is colliding with technology in terrifying new ways. Studies indicate the surge in AI-generated “barely legal” content can normalise and reinforce the sexual interest in minors, according to research by the National Library of Medicine.

Then there’s the world of online sex work, where the influencer economy meets pornography.

In the much-discussed documentary 1,000 Men and Me: The Bonnie Blue Story, the OnlyFans creator details her “Schoolies” strategy: showing up at Australia’s end-of-high-school party week and distributing business cards with QR codes to her account. She later toured university Freshers’ Weeks around the world, seeking out “barely legal” young men to film sex acts with.

More recently — and more disturbingly — Blue filmed a so-called “sex education” class, using visibly young-looking OnlyFans hopefuls dressed in school uniforms. As reported in the documentary, these young women — and young men — weren’t paid, but participated in hopes that Blue’s fame would boost their visibility and, in turn, their earnings. The classroom setting and uniforms weren’t just a backdrop — they were the entire product. They also serve to reinforce the damaging idea that schoolchildren, or any child for that matter, can somehow be complicit in their abuse.

In defending her content, Blue made a chilling point in an interview with Janice Turner for The Times: “Men have made porn content with schoolgirls since day one... no one has ever caused an uproar about that. So why can’t I do a schoolboy?”

It’s true that the cultural obsession with “barely legal” girls has rarely been met with sustained outrage. But that doesn’t mean it’s harmless. A concerning Harvard study showed that after prolonged exposure to pornography, viewers perceived rape as less serious, endorsed shorter prison terms for offenders, showed less empathy for victims, and developed greater sexual callousness toward women — even in scenarios involving minors.

When we glamourise schoolgirl imagery, whether in porn, fashion, or influencer content, we feed a system that trains girls to see themselves through the eyes of adults. We make them more vulnerable to grooming and harassment, and to self-objectification at younger and younger ages. We teach them that their value lies in their desirability.

Just this week, Lil Tay — the “Youngest Girl On OnlyFans” — claimed she made $3M in just three hours on the site mere hours into her 18th birthday. In the run-up to her milestone birthday, Lil Tay began promoting the fact she would be releasing the “youngest link of the century” (OnlyFans bans under-18s on the platform), with an “18th Birthday Countdown.” At 12:01, she began filming content and claims to have made $1M within three hours.

Dr Charlotte Ord, a psychologist and author of Body Confident You, Body Confident Kid, a guidebook for helping parents teach their children to develop a positive body image, is concerned about the impact of young viewers in the current media landscape. “Exposure to sexualising material at a young age, whether adult film or physical intimacy itself, would interrupt healthy psychosexual development in that way.” Ord says she is worried that viewers, particularly younger viewers, “might think that they have to emulate that kind of behaviour in order to get attention, to get on in life, or at the very least become completely desensitised [to] very extreme sexual behaviours.”

It’s a concern shared by the UK pornography taskforce, which has proposed banning “barely legal” content after Channel 4’s Bonnie Blue documentary. The show has reportedly accelerated the taskforce’s work and prompted calls for legislative change, aiming to close legal loopholes around “barely legal” themes and limit the normalisation of youth eroticisation both online and offline.

The UK government’s new Online Safety Act and emerging initiatives also signal a shift. As Ofcom prepares to enforce age-verification rules and restrict sexualised content that fetishises youthful aesthetics, we might finally be seeing a turning point in how our society defines protection versus permissiveness. It is long overdue.

When teenagers absorb the idea that being watched, desired, and consumed is part of coming of age, their self-worth becomes tethered to sexual validation. Glamourising the schoolgirl trope is not just playing dress-up, it has real-world consequences. It’s time to end the Lolita fantasy once and for all.

It’s been a bad week to be on the internet. Kim Kardashian’s Skims has launched a new line of shapewear… for your face. Sydney Sweeney fronted a controversial campaign for American Eagle, igniting debate about race and Western beauty standards. Then there’s Bonnie Blue’s latest documentary and the dark underbelly of sex as spectacle. Oh, and to add to the Black Mirror-ness of it all, Gwyneth Paltrow cosplayed as the new CEO of Astronomer, Donald Trump Jr shared an AI-generated image of Donald Trump in double denim parodying the aforementioned ad, and the White House released a deportation video captioned, “When ICE books you a one-way Jet2 holiday to deportation… Nothing beats it!” overlaid with the infamous Jess Glynne track.

So, what does all this tell us—aside from the fact we’re all going to hell in a handbasket? Though face shapewear, a woefully tone-deaf advert (if we’re being generous), and OnlyFans might seem unrelated, in many ways, they all point to the alarming direction social media is headed (hint: backwards).

Everywhere I look, signs point to the digital world—which once promised progress, self-expression, and democratised voices—paradoxically becoming an engine for reviving regressive beauty standards and reactionary politics. Far from liberating us from outdated norms, platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are now complicit in amplifying hyper-conservative aesthetics and ideologies that roll back decades of social progress.

This is all the more worrying when you consider that Gen Z is set to spend 25 years of their life on their phones. A new study, focused on phone use in education, revealed that usage was dominated by social media, messaging, and streaming. This aligns with research commissioned by Heineken, showing the average adult spends 5 hours and 48 minutes a day on their phones—that’s 88 days a year. By now, we’re well aware of the mental toll of doomscrolling and comparing our lives to the curated perfection of those we follow, but what’s emerging is far more insidious. Social media is fuelling a rise in real-world regressive politics and outdated beauty ideals.

There’s always the risk of looking back through rose-tinted glasses, but at one time, social media felt like a haven for body positivity and the rejection of narrow beauty ideals. Increasingly, however, the most viral beauty trends promote an uncanny return to ’90s thinness, Eurocentric features, and surgically enhanced femininity—often under the guise of “natural” beauty.

We’ve seen this in the rise of the “clean girl,” the “trad wife,” and the “hyper-feminine baddie” aesthetics, which glamourise highly curated looks that depend on wealth, whiteness, and conformity. Platforms reward visual content that fits an algorithmic mould of desirability. We should be worried about who is determining this matrix.

Glassy skin, tiny waists, big eyes, and symmetrical features dominate our feeds not because they are more common, but because they are more clickable. Beauty today is narrow, hierarchical, and increasingly retrograde. Sydney Sweeney is currently in the eye of this storm, not least because she conforms to these beauty standards. Of course, the fact that she’s been embraced by America’s right-wing is through no fault of her own. She’s simply the latest in a long line of All-American sweethearts. I assume this is in large part what attracted American Eagle to her, but it’s also what made the advert so disastrous.

For anyone lucky enough to have missed the media maelstrom: in American Eagle’s latest campaign, the camera zooms into Sweeney’s cleavage, bursting out of her denim two-piece, overlaid with a breathy audio: “My body’s composition is determined by my jeans (or is it genes)?” In another ad—no longer on social media—she reclines on a vintage Mustang, reciting inherited traits: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality, and even eye colour.” She continues: “My jeans are blue.” Defenders say it’s a hackneyed play on words; denouncers call it a dog whistle for white supremacists. The online discourse is deafening, so I won’t add fuel to that particular fire. Yet what seems undeniably true is that the return to so-called “traditional” beauty standards is now the dominant aesthetic.

Further proof? Another launch that sent the internet into a tailspin: Kim Kardashian’s Skims face shapewear, which the official press release describes as “a must-have addition to your nightly routine.” The backlash was swift: “SKIMS: Making women feel bad about themselves since 2018,” read one comment. “What in The Handmaid’s Tale am I looking at?” asked Michelle Elman. Alex Light, a body confidence coach, likened the “Ultimate Facewear” to post-surgical compression garments as well as the Scold’s bridle—a medieval torture device used to punish and humiliate (primarily) women deemed as “scolds” (women who spoke too much). The Kardashians do not act flippantly; they will go down in history as some of the most prolific and profitable marketers of all time (schools literally teach their methods). So I cannot imagine a world in which this product launch is anything but calculated.

It seems even in sleep, women are expected to self-optimise—the shapewear claims to sculpt your jaw while you sleep, though Harley Street Skin Clinic’s medical doctor Dr Nikita Desai says that at best, face wraps of this kind offer “temporary changes...and may help with de-puffing your face”. Desai also theorises that the design has taken inspiration from TikTok’s ‘morning shed’ trend, which promotes the idea “the uglier you sleep, the prettier you wake up.”

Skims’ shapewear doesn’t exist in isolation, it is part of a wider cultural shift that normalises weight-loss injections and promotes an AI-driven vision of homogeneous womanhood, argues Light.

Just as beauty ideals regress, so too do politics. This has played out in the “trad wife” phenomenon, where influencers like Hannah Neeleman, better known as Ballerina Farm, and Estee Williams, with huge social followings, espouse submissive roles, homemaking, and—in some cases—anti-feminist values. These creators often cloak their ideas in soft aesthetics and visions of domestic bliss, making the return to patriarchal norms feel less like oppression and more like personal choice. At the other end of this spectrum, Bonnie Blue also subscribes to this form of “choice feminism.”

The “choice feminism” narrative—the idea that any decision made by a woman is inherently feminist—blurs the line between agency and internalised oppression. Wearing face trainers, enjoying promiscuous sex, or embracing traditional gender roles isn’t inherently anti-feminist, but when these choices are made in environments where conformity is the price of visibility, they’re less about liberation and more about metrics.

This blend of nostalgia and performance is potent. Social media romanticises eras marked by rigid gender roles and systemic inequality, reframing them as times of simplicity and “natural order.” Users, especially younger ones, are often drawn to these aesthetics not for their historical accuracy but for the illusion of stability and meaning they provide in an age of uncertainty. That, to me, is worrying.

Of course, this isn’t the whole story. Many creators are using the same platforms to challenge these trends—amplifying inclusive beauty, dismantling gender norms, and pushing back against the romanticisation of oppressive pasts. Recognising the politics behind the aesthetics is the first step. Without it, we risk social media not only continuing to shape how we look but also what we believe. We’re all at the mercy of the algorithm, and in its current iteration, platforms that once promised a better vision of the future are turning into portals to the past.

I’ll admit it: scrolling Instagram for holiday inspiration is probably—sadly—one of my favourite, or at least most common, ways to while away the time. And yet, I’m not in the least surprised that new research from Icelandair shows social media is actually having an adverse effect when it comes to going abroad. So much so that 47% of us say social media negatively impacts our holidays. That number rises to 77% of Gen Z and 67% of Millennials.

Will that stop me from typing “Euro Summer” into my search bar? No, of course not. But I think there’s value in acknowledging the ‘Instagram versus reality’ disconnect. You see, holidays have been aestheticised. TikTok is stuffed with candyfloss sunsets, sparkling seas, and Pretty Little Thing holiday hauls, all largely void of any context.

Travel, like much of modern life, has become a backdrop for content. Take Hailey Bieber’s Mallorca getaway earlier this summer, which doubled as a launch for her Rhode ‘Lemontini’ lip gloss. Elsewhere on a yacht in the Med, Kylie Jenner lived out her own Euro Summer, using the setting to debut the Khy x Frankie’s Bikinis collaboration. Jenner, who toured Europe after attending the $50 million wedding of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez, sparked online debate after a Greek restaurateur praised her visit to his family taverna on Instagram—only to face backlash for what some perceived as preferential treatment. In fact, much of Jenner’s Euro Summer has been mired in controversy, beginning with the billionaire Venetian wedding that ignited criticism from locals concerned about worsening overtourism.

Mass tourism isn’t new, but social media has supercharged it. The hashtag #holidayinspo has over 271,000 posts on Instagram and #holiday pulls in more than 12 million views on TikTok.

The serendipity of discovery has been replaced by viral itineraries, GPS geotags, branded content ops and TikTok “travel hacks” that broadcast secret spots to millions. Nary a day goes by when I’m not spammed by a TikToker imploring: “Come with me as I show you London’s hidden… [insert market/restaurant/coffee shop].” Invariably, these “hidden gems" aren’t hidden at all. Just last week, a video promised to unveil a “secret” flower market, which turned out to be Columbia Road—a renowned tourist trap for the 15 years I’ve lived in the city.

It’s easy to mock this new wave of content, even as many of us fall for it (guilty), but the consequences go beyond not being able to get a table at your favourite local. Take Hallstatt, Austria: a lakeside village of just 700 residents that inspired Disney’s Frozen. It now sees up to 10,000 visitors per day during peak season—more than 3.5 tourists for every local. Data from the UN and World Tourism Organisation shows Spain has one of the highest tourist rates in Europe—helping explain the country’s recent protests and new tourist caps. “Like Spain, parts of France are also battling overtourism and have introduced caps to control visitor numbers,” says Sarah Findlay, a travel expert at Total Travel Protection.

Iceland’s waterfalls, the once-silent Scottish Highlands, and Bali’s rice terraces are all groaning under the weight of their own commodified beauty.

Bali is the latest victim of the influencer-industrial complex. Zoe Rae, a fitness influencer and older sister to Molly-Mae Hague, faced backlash after claiming she was duped into travelling to the island for her first wedding anniversary by influencers—of which she is one.

Rae spent just 48 hours in Bali, which takes approximately 18 hours to reach from London. Had she not been an influencer herself, with a combined following of over one million across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, her comments might be easier to dismiss as tone-deaf or just poor planning (she seemingly relied entirely on social media to plan the trip).

But Rae isn’t just a naïve traveller. She’s a part of the aesthetic economy, where likes and views are currency and travel becomes performance. Increasingly, destinations aren’t experienced; they’re staged. “Social media has undeniably reshaped the travel landscape,” agrees Nicholas Smith, Holidays Digital Director at Thomas Cook. He adds: “While it’s a powerful tool for inspiration, it’s also contributed to the concentration of visitors in a handful of Instagram-famous locations.”

Bali, like so many global hotspots, is now catering to this kind of travel. In Ubud, jungle swings dangle over dense canopies—built not for views, but for Instagram photos. Off-camera are queues of tourists and trash scattered below the platforms. This isn’t unique to Bali, but Rae seemed surprised nonetheless.

In her 20-minute YouTube video, she complains that influencers depict an airbrushed version of the island: “We had seen on social media that everyone was having such a lovely time. Lovely places to eat and beaches, and lovely gyms and coffee shops.” She goes on: “But I don’t think the reality of Bali is shown much at all, and I do think it is down to a lot of influencers posting the more luxury side of things.”

What exactly she expected isn’t clear. But it’s obvious that she bought into the same illusion she’s complicit in perpetuating. A bit more research might’ve helped. When I planned a trip to Uluwatu—where Rae stayed—I was spammed with the typical wanderlust fanfare, but peppered within were warnings about rogue monkeys snatching phones and the chaos of (some) inter-island boat transfers.

Says Rae: “We got told Uluwatu, where we are now, is one of the best places to go, so if this is one of the better places, I’m not sure what the other places are like.” I think this speaks to the problem with the TikTokification of travel: we’re so used to the instant gratification of social media that when places don’t immediately align with our expectations, the answer seems to be to go elsewhere (Dubai, in Rae’s case).

The deeper issue, though, is that social media flattens entire countries into easily digestible, marketable aesthetics. A user posts a stunning location. Others flock to recreate it. The destination gains traction. Infrastructure buckles under the weight. Roads, water systems, and waste management the world over have become strained. Cultural landmarks have been disrespected and in some cases, destroyed.

In 2023, a German tourist stripped naked inside a sacred Balinese temple after skipping out on paying several local hotel bills. Another etched his and his girlfriend’s names into Rome’s Colosseum walls. Someone else did the same at the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

Nick Kleer, a wildlife guide and photographer, documented huge overcrowding in Serengeti National Park. The photos show scores of tourists outside of vehicles that are blocking the wildebeests’ traditional river crossing points. “This isn’t nature taking its course,” says Nick. “This is people interfering with one of the most iconic and fragile spectacles on Earth.”

The post highlights the duality of social media as both a driving force in overtourism and a vehicle for showing the impact of overtourism. It’s a complicated paradox, and the answer isn’t straightforward. “Social media can be used in an incredibly positive way to support responsible tourism,” adds Nicki Tempest-Mitchell, Managing Director at Barrhead Travel.

And while it’s easy to scoff at the absurdity of a 48-hour trip to Bali or yet another “hidden gem” that’s anything but, the reality is far less amusing—especially for the people who live in these destinations, and for the planet. Bali is a developing country; according to WWF data, four percent of locals live below the poverty line. Overtourism is undoubtedly a concern, but it’s also true that tourism makes up between 60–70% of the regional GDP. Denouncing the island over some supposed ‘Instagram versus reality’ shortfall—and hightailing it to Dubai so they can “enjoy our anniversary somewhere we know that we love and can relax and can drink the water,” on a video that currently has 239k views—can have far-reaching consequences. Side note: bottled water is cheap and readily available across Bali, with many hotels—including, presumably, the Radisson Blu where Rae was staying—using mineral water in showers.

By rushing to capture the perfect moment, we run the risk of turning the world into a backdrop, but real places aren’t props and real people live there. Perhaps if paradise feels disappointing, the problem isn’t the place: it’s the lens you’re looking through.

Oracle cards, astrology forecasts, guided meditations, crystal hauls—spirituality has carved out a glossy, fast-paced niche on TikTok. But is this a genuine spiritual renaissance or just another algorithmically fuelled aesthetic trend?

I recently RSVP’d to a launch celebrating the new aura-coloured collection of Stanley Cups; the clincher was the promise of aura readings. Like most millennials—and, I would hazard, most people—I yearn to be defined. Sure, I like the idea of moving through the world with an air of mystery—“Who is she?” I imagine passersby saying—but I also want to be seen, heard, understood. This is a fairly universal desire and probably has a lot to do with the endurance of anything that claims to offer it: astrology, tarot, Oracle cards.

Still, even as someone who’s not averse to the odd New Age idea, I can tell there’s been a notable shift in mysticism hitting the mainstream. That same week, on somewhat of a social streak, I clicked ‘attend’ on an event that promised dinner and tarot readings—a harmonious pairing I’d discovered last year at a dinner in Bali. The thing is, though, Bali is a country famous for its spirituality, not a new North London hangout. All of which is to say: what’s behind all the woo-woo?

Take Oracle cards, for example, which are booming on TikTok with 16.1 million posts tagged under #OracleCard. Content on the platform varies, but one of the most popular formats sees users post “card pulls,” where they draw one or more cards live, offering advice or predictions for themselves or their audience.

Posts often include themes of self-love, manifestation, healing, and spiritual connection, and while creators typically offer free readings, there’s usually a prompt to encourage followers to comment for a personalised message (at a charge).

I’m not the only one whose ‘For You Page’ is starting to feel like a digital altar lately, either. “I don’t know if it was because I needed something,” says 34-year-old *Jenna Lidell, “but when I broke up with my ex, these tarot readers started cropping up on Instagram.” She watched a few. Then a few more. Soon, her feed was full of cards, candles, and women with confident voices saying things like, “They’re thinking about you. They regret what they did.”

“It kind of validated how I felt,” she admits. “They really do suck you in. They say the same thing in 1,000 different ways, but they get quite addictive when you’re in a mind space where you need some validation.”

She’s not alone. In a world increasingly defined by crisis—climate collapse, economic precarity, social injustice, a turbulent 24/7 news cycle—it’s not surprising that people are reaching for meaning.

“I definitely see it,” says Semra Haksever, a self-described Electric Witch and founder of Mama Moon Candles. “People are looking for faith to help them through. Believing that there might be higher forces at play can both take the edge off believing that humans can be so cruel and also offer respite that something good is coming.”

Rebecca Moore, a wellness expert and author of Radical Self-Care, agrees: “In a world that feels increasingly disorienting, people are reaching for practices that anchor them in something real and true.”

Critics, though, argue that the boom in spirituality is more about aesthetics and curated crystal grids than self-actualisation. Pinterest has noticed an uptick (+1,598%) in Libra make-up alone, prompting the platform to highlight ‘astrology make-up’ in its Summer Trend Report, along with ‘summer aura nails,’ which are up +277%.

The viral spiritual content flooding social media often blends ancient symbols with influencer tropes. As Semra points out, “The only problem with modern-day spirituality that we see online is that it is based around Western capitalistic individualism… it kind of misses the point that sharing a faith should be that we are all working for the greater good.”

Zak Avery, Community & Culture Director at Shoreditch-based wellness hub &Soul, has noticed the same hunger showing up in the real world. “From ecstatic dance and breathwork to sauna ceremonies and dynamic meditations, there’s a growing appetite for experiences that foster inner connection,” he says. “These aren’t just trends. They’re responses to very real mental and emotional needs in our society.”

Leila Sadeghee, a priestess and energy worker, argues that deep spiritual work truly shifts how we engage with the world. “Rather than falling prey to your darker thoughts or being mesmerised by every little disturbance of emotion,” she says, “you learn to see beyond the surface of your experience… You stop looking for exits.”

However, like any algorithm-fuelled trend, what begins as support can slide into simulation. For Jenna, this looked like reels of AI-generated tarot readers. “That’s when I realised it had gone a bit too far and I needed to stop engaging with this content,” she says.

Others have noticed issues with online spiritual practices. “The spiritual space is largely unregulated,” warns Jill, co-founder of East London spiritual studio She’s Lost Control. “And people often come to it when they’re vulnerable or seeking answers.”

This is the paradox of online spirituality: it makes ancient practices accessible in ways never seen before, but also threatens to flatten them into trends, shoppable links, and 60-second explainers.

“There’s a noticeable rise in online spirituality,” says Liza Al Sady, founder of We the Conscious Studio. “But it’s not just about the resurgence of ancient practices. It’s about a collective reckoning with how disembodied modern life has become. We’re more disconnected than ever—from our bodies, our emotions, each other.” In her view, people aren’t turning to breathwork because it’s trending: “They’re burnt out, alienated, and quietly overwhelmed. They’re not looking for enlightenment—they’re looking for relief.”

That sentiment resonates deeply with Cameron Tewson, whose lifelong fascination with psychics took on a new weight when his partner died suddenly in 2024. “In the midst of my ongoing grief, I found immense comfort in connecting with him through a medium,” he says. “It gave me a chance not only to feel closer to him, but also to seek understanding about what had happened. It brought clarity and peace during an otherwise heartbreaking time.”

Cameron wasn’t influenced by social media, but he has noticed spiritual content following him around online. The algorithm always knows.

This spiritual turn isn’t entirely new—mysticism has always surged in turbulent eras. What’s new is the delivery: bite-sized, algorithmically optimised doses of meaning. And while sceptics may dismiss it as commercialised esotericism, for many young people, it’s offering something they’re not finding in traditional institutions: hope, connection, and a sense of purpose.

“What’s changed,” says Jill, “is the nature of the search. We’re now seeing people coming to spirituality not just for individual healing, but to process collective challenges like eco-anxiety, social injustice, and financial instability.” She believes that when done consciously, spiritual practices can support mental health and resilience. “But they should never promise a shortcut to healing.”

Of course, not all spiritual seekers are lost in a woo-woo wormhole. “Sometimes when you don’t know what way to look, you need someone to guide your focus and tell you what to do,” says Jenna. “And these women felt like they were talking to me. Which, in a weird way, was comforting.”

So, is the spiritual resurgence just another algorithmic aesthetic? A coping mechanism wrapped up in #cosmicvibes? Or something deeper — a sign of a culture grasping for meaning in the middle of collective collapse?

Maybe the answer is about how we use it. Whether it’s oracle cards, breathwork, or a TikTok spell under the full moon, the focus should be less about what we’re reaching for and more about why, and whether we’re willing to go beyond the scroll.

Yesterday, TikTok banned SkinnyTok — the internet immediately found a workaround.

A one word caption on influencer Liv Schmidt’s pinned post says it all — REBIRTH. It refers to the latest incarnation of her weight-loss community, The Skinni Société, a Millennial-pink–branded “mindset,” not movement. As the account’s bio insists:

“Skinni is a mindset
This isn’t a restriction. This is just taste.
Not Disordered. Just Disciplined
Structure. Not Starvation.”

It’s the kind of language that conveniently toes the line between self-improvement and self-erasure and it launched just one week before TikTok finally banned the hashtag SkinnyTok.

For the uninitiated (or un-algorithmed), SkinnyTok was a dark—though ironically pastel-coloured—corner of TikTok where aspirational thinness was a religion. Or, as critics put it: a cult. Here, users, typically young and predominantly female, uploaded calorie-counted meals, thigh-gap inspo, and body-check videos disguised as health and wellness content.

At the center of much of this skinny storm was, and still is, Liv Schmidt, who critics are calling the poster girl for a new era of Pro-Ana content. Prior to being banned from TikTok last year, Schmidt racked up millions of views by espousing the benefits of what many see as dangerously restrictive eating habits.

A “Skinny Girl Breakfast,” according to Schmidt’s Amazon Storefront—where she earns commission as one of the retail giant’s Top Creators—consists only of protein powders and electrolyte mixes: “My hunger-crushing combo that keeps you full all day long”. Just looking at this page of powdery sustenance makes me feel sad and empty, though not in the way Schmidt might hope.

As of today, a search for SkinnyTok will direct you to a wellness announcement instead of a slew of aestheticised starvation diaries. However, a search for Skniytok, which the platform suggested after I typed “sk” into the search bar, led me to a video captioned, “Give me toxic motivation and tips to loose [sic] weight.” That video prompted another search: I Drank This To Lose Weight. Going down the algorithmic rabbit hole, I landed on a page bursting at the metaphorical seams with #caloriedeficit content, “fat loss coffee,” “chia seed water”, etc, etc,.

Later, I was prompted to Shop for skniytok, which led me to a storefront of collagen gummies, Summer Fridays’ Lip Butter Balm (Schmidt is a vocal fan of the brand), and a smattering of K-beauty. The sheer volume of acne-related products suggests to me that the algorithm is catering to a teenage demographic, though the workings of TikTok’s recommendation engine remain closely guarded. A request for comment on the SkinnyTok ban went unanswered.

A third search for skniytok triggered a pop-up headlined “You are more than your weight.” When I clicked to read the rest of the PSA, I was directed to a blank page, which felt a little on the nose.

“I think the TikTok ban is partly good, as it serves as a symbol of solidarity and shows that they’re not standing with it,” says Chloe Laws, a TEDx speaker and founder of the feminist platform FGRLS CLUB. “But ultimately, I think it’s a little too late.” It would be easy to pin all of this on TikTok. Health experts and organisations like the National Eating Disorders Association had long warned that the surge in SkinnyTok content could harm viewers—especially younger ones—by glamourising disordered eating. TikTok didn’t invent these ideals; but it did amplifiy them.

The real issue, however, is societal and it’s bigger, more pervasive, and probably more profitable than ever. Just look at how quickly Ozempic hit the mainstream. Originally developed to manage diabetes, the injectable drug and its cousin, Wegovy (which you can now buy in Superdrug) has become an unsaid status symbol. #Ozempic has over a billion views on TikTok and unlike cigarettes or diet pills, Ozempic has entered the wellness arena with medical legitimacy, making it far harder to challenge.

For those of us who grew up in the Nineties and Noughties, it all feels eerily familiar. One of the ‘games’ girls used to play in my secondary school was seeing who could squeeze through the narrowest gaps between tables. It was kind of like a reverse limbo and I remember drawing in deep breaths trying to contract my ribcage to squeeze through the cavity. In P.E., our year’s skinniest girl (who inexplicably also had D-cup boobs and was therefore the envy of quite literally, everyone), would hoist up her Aertex polo shirt so everyone could admire her concave tummy as she stretched out on the mat. Girls would trade ‘tips’, many of which are still circulating today on TikTok, Instagram and The Skinni Société, such as drinking a pint of water before, during, and after each meal. For an all-too-brief moment in the 2010s, it felt like these damaging ideas and body ideals had finally fallen out of favour, but they never really went away.

The only discernible difference I can tell between the 90s and 00s diet culture and now is branding. Today’s obsession with thinness is wrapped in the language of “wellness.” Skinni Société might not promote smoking to suppress appetite but the goal is still the same: be skinny.

Ultimately, TikTok should have acted long before SkinnyTok became a trend. By allowing it to proliferate unchecked, the platform helped promote dangerous body standards and legitimise a culture of extreme weight loss. A ban now, while welcome, can’t undo the damage already done to the countless number of users who have internalised those ideals. “It is their responsibility to ban content like that and to not create such a space for it to thrive like they have been,” adds Laws.

TikTok didn’t invent SkinnyTok. But by letting it grow unchecked, they helped feed it.

Once the preserve of couples on the rocks or the over 70s, sleeping in separate beds is having an online renaissance. Sleep divorces are trending again, pushed by everyone from Victoria Beckham to reality star Ferne McCann, and, of course, TikTok. But is there more to this than a trend?

Like most chronically online people, life hacks and health advice tend to come to me in the form of 30-second TikToks, which is how it came to be that I began laying my lifelong (of at least, 15+ years) insomnia on my boyfriend (of nine years).

TikTok has turned sleep divorces from a retro sitcom quirk to a #wellnesswin. One viral video espousing the benefits of sleeping sans spouse has over 2.5 million views. Some of the top videos about sleep compatibility (another new internet obsession) on Sleeptok—the platform's dedicated space for all things shut-eye-related—have upwards of 2.2 million likes. Google searches for “sleep + divorce” spiked by 478% this week. Clearly, we're all looking to enhance our eight hours.

The science behind the shift is fairly straightforward: we humans are bad at co-sleeping. Our partners snore, toss, turn, steal the covers (guilty), wake early, or stay up late. Add in children, pets, phones, and the ever-lingering stress of modern life and what should be a sanctuary becomes a battleground of bad sleep cycles.

“Poor sleep significantly impacts our well-being,” says sleep expert Martin Seeley of MattressNextDay, adding that it raises irritability and frustration, and has long-term links to anxiety and depression.

The cultural drivers behind the shift are harder to pin down. Sure, there’s something to be said about younger generations eschewing tradition: millennials are leaving the workforce in droves, forgoing marriage and delaying—or putting off altogether—parenthood. But from my millennial vantage point, I see sleep divorces are one more sign that the demands of modern life are making intimacy unsustainable.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that sleep divorces are booming alongside burnout, rising childcare costs, housing unaffordability, and job precarity. We’re all overstimulated, underslept, and desperate to take control of something at a time of growing instability. We’re not sleeping separately because we’ve suddenly become enlightened about circadian rhythms. We’re sleeping separately because we’re exhausted—by work, by screens, by crumbling social security—and carving out sleep as one last vestige of control.

Abandonment issues aside, I recoil at solo sleeping because I disagree that sleep, that most basic of human functions, is something that should be endlessly optimised. I feel the same way about sleep trackers and while I’m not immune to the pull of sleep aids (give me a sunrise alarm clock and some Lush Sleepy Lotion any day), I like to tell myself I enjoy the aesthetics and ritual of sleep routines. Of course, the reality is that my intermittent insomnia has never been because I ran out of lavender spray or let my Headspace membership lapse. Sleeplessness has always been fuelled by outside forces and I draw the line at letting those forces kick me out of my own bed, damn it.

Perhaps I’d feel differently if I weren’t the problem sleeper, perhaps my partner does feel differently, but as it is, he sleeps soundly despite my relentless tossing and turning and passive-aggressive pillow fluffing. And yet, the pressure to get sleep “right” is everywhere. Couples are investing in bespoke sleep environments: blackout curtains, ambient lighting, temperature-controlled mattresses. As an insomniac, the idea of turning our sleep spaces into little self-care sanctuaries pleases me—in theory. In reality, for much of the week, either my partner or I work in the bedroom. Beholden to the London rental market as we are, the concept of turning the bedroom into a ‘digital detox zone’—as has been suggested to me by various GPs during bouts of sleeplessness—is essentially just a nice idea, like retiring at 50 or the “dual master suites” being designed to cater to the growing market of high-net-worth sleep separatists. And while I’ve always longed to live in a home with twin bathrooms, when it comes to separate bedrooms, I can’t help but feel that sleep divorces are just another way that the pressures of modern life are driving us further apart. Separate bedrooms offer a seductive illusion of peace, but what we really need is societal change: flexible work policies, more support for families, fewer screens, more community.

Can you hear that? It’s the sound of £4,500 worth of crystals coming together to form Lauren Sánchez’s Eiffel Tower-shaped handbag—or perhaps it’s the death rattle of quiet luxury, as the fiancée of the world’s second-richest man, Jeff Bezos, rings in a new Gilded Age for the 1%.

This weekend, Kim Kardashian, Kris Jenner, Katy Perry, and Eva Longoria joined the ranks of Sánchez’s inner sanctum to celebrate Sánchez’s Parisian hen party. Also in attendance were October Gonzalez (the wife of Sánchez’s football-player ex, Tony Gonzalez, with whom she shares a son), businesswomen Elsa Collins and Natasha Poonawalla, and Fox Sports presenter Charissa Thompson.

Given where we are as a society—where private space travel for the ultra-rich garners little more than a collective shrug—it makes a strange sort of sense that Sánchez, helicopter pilot, media personality, and betrothed to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, would throw a hen do so astronomically lavish it all but sounded the death knell for stealth wealth and quiet luxury.

Photos from the weekend, which flew across social media with the speed of a Blue Origin test flight, show Sánchez surrounded by a bevy of glamorous women, wrapped in pristine white robes and oversized sunglasses, iPhones in tow (a wink, perhaps, at how the spectacle played out across social platforms?). The dressing gown-and-shades combo is an Instagram trope, as common on the app as the caption “Office for the week” when posting about one’s holiday. But that’s where any similarities between your average hen and this supersized soirée ended.

There was a stay at the ritzy Cheval Blanc hotel, dinner at the city’s esteemed Lafayette’s restaurant—where guests reportedly snacked on fried chicken starters—and a champagne-fuelled cruise along the Seine. All in, reports put the cost at £500,000. The wedding itself, reportedly due to take place in Venice next month, is rumoured to come in around the £5 million mark, with Elton John and Lady Gaga supposedly set to perform. The Times reported that the fleet of water taxis required to ferry glamorous guests around will cost £250,000 alone—almost ten times more than the average, albeit exorbitant, cost of a typical wedding.

Then, of course, there were the outfits: bridal whites, long a mainstay of hen parties, came in the form of an Arctic-white furry coat, a corseted co-ord by French brand Murmur, lashings of diamonds, and that Judith Leiber bag. There was also an Oscar de la Renta moment—a white crop top and matching mini skirt appliquéd with blooms.

It’s easy, and tempting, to dismiss the entire spectacle as simply the rich being rich, but as the images filled my feed—despite my not following Sánchez or any of the attendees—it became harder to console myself with the old adage: money can’t buy taste.

Sánchez, it’s worth noting, is no idle ornament in Bezos’s orbit. A pilot and entrepreneur with her own (much-derided) Vogue cover shoot, she has become a kind of First Lady of Billionaire America. That her hen party doubled as a spectacle isn’t only about vanity—it’s about visibility. The weekend, too, wasn’t just a party; it was a statement.

What that statement is, exactly, remains open to interpretation. What became increasingly clear, to me at least, as the weekend unfurled is that the rich are tired of pretending they aren’t. It felt like a middle finger to modesty, as well as a knowing wink to the haters (see again that bathrobe shoot and the mock horror as one of her hens checks her phone).

Of course, it could simply be exactly what it looks like at first glance: a party so ostentatious it can only exist in the gravity-free world of the ultra-rich—Marie Antoinette with a ring light. When it comes to this new Gilded Age, the rocket has already left the launch pad. It doesn’t much matter whether we’re inspired or appalled—we’ve all been pulled into orbit.

Parental WhatsApp groups, while mostly a lost-uniform SwapShop, can occasionally be a hotbed of gossip and speculation. A couple of years ago, I assumed the chat around an Employability Skills questionnaire issued only to the year 12 girls was exactly that. When I later saw the questionnaire, which asked girls to mark themselves out of ten for points such as, “Is my blouse buttoned up and my cleavage hidden?” “Do I have on clean and unholy underwear?” “Am I wearing a nice smile?” I assumed instead the document wasn’t hearsay but parody. This was 2023. Surely the only guidance all students needed about dressing for an interview was: have a wash and wear something industry-appropriate.

It turns out that the questionnaire was not a parody. Nor was it, as I’d naively hoped, an ancient document retrieved from the archives to spark conversation about how attitudes towards women in the workplace have changed. What it was, the Head of the time insisted, was advice that “may have appeared sexist.” Italics my own.

I appreciate a leap from questionnaires that may appear sexist to the extremely violent side of misogyny depicted in the Netflix drama Adolescence could be considered a stretch, but, for me, the everyday sexism of the former creates a society in which the latter becomes more possible. My point is, none of these is an isolated incident, rather they all sit on a sliding scale of misogyny that’s increasingly — and scarily — rife in schools.

As a writer, my instinct is to eke out the drama. Stick a gaggle of authors in a room with some wine and poetic license and the tone may verge on hyperbolic. I was hopeful, then, that if I dug a little deeper into the reality of what life’s like in senior school classrooms, it wouldn’t come close to the stories I’d concocted in my head. In a way, I was right; the two are wildly different. Sadly, though, the truth is more disturbing and depressing than fiction.

The thing is, in most fiction, there’s a notable arc. In my novel, Bad Manners, for example, I put 18-year-old Cass in dire situations — a men-only booze-fuelled dinner and a school steeped in misogynistic tradition — then have her discover the means to find her way out of the dark. In my recent conversations with teachers, however, it seems those means — assemblies, presentations, workshops for boys exhibiting misogynistic behaviour — are proving ineffective. One likened it to “swimming upstream hugely and, to a large extent, blindly,” due, in significant part, to adults’ inability to keep on top of what the students are frequently exposed to online. By the time staff are aware of Andrew Tate’s messaging, Tate’s likely no longer as relevant to the teens, and so the school’s counter-messaging is already, to a certain extent, outdated.

That those hours of online content are consumed outside of schools speaks to a bigger problem than in-class education. Teachers, though, have spoken of parental denial: a father who doesn’t believe his son is capable of misogynist language; a mother who cannot imagine her child threatening rape. As parents, we are willingly handing our children over to technology, thereby absenting ourselves from so much of their cultural life. How can we be surprised when our kids’ moral values don’t mirror our own?

Deny as we might, the female staff who, like the female students, are frequently subjected to inappropriate behaviour, noted a definite cultural shift. One told me of a class of boys who had historically respected her teaching which, while authoritative, modelled empathy and kindness. This allowed them a space in which they felt comfortable putting ego and ambition aside and risking being “wrong” in front of their peers. Now, she says, she is “frequently belittled, physically intimidated and literally ignored because [she is] a woman, and this,” she told me, “is by teenage boys and male staff members.”

Interestingly, when I asked a teacher if he felt female staff would consider him and his male colleagues allies, his answer was an immediate yes. But when he later put the same question to a female member of the senior leadership team, her response was somewhat different. I’ve heard of men openly ranking their colleagues according to looks, of head teachers having to insist on the removal of “girlie calendars” from staff workplaces, and of male teachers attempting to start sexualised online conversations with younger female staff.

Obviously, not all male teachers. One I talked with was quick to acknowledge how his privilege made him a “poor witness” and is keen to engage in any way he can. But, as he pointed out, “teaching can be quite isolated. Teachers’ time is utterly regimented… and there is potentially very little time for socialising with colleagues, allowing for lots of blind spots.”

It’s not only social time that’s limited. Teachers are constantly stretched. And yet, when we collectively gasped at Adolescence and our children’s increasing vulnerability to misogynist grooming, we sought a solution in showing the drama in schools. But as Jaimi Shrive and Dr Jessica Taylor of VictimFocus made clear in their open letter to the Government opposing the use of the drama in the classroom, “teachers are not specialists in male violence, trauma, radicalisation or abuse, and they would be expected to handle disclosures, emotional distress, defensive and triggered responses, and controversial discussions following this content.”

The dramatic impact of Adolescence is evident in the number of conversations it provoked. For me though, while excellent, it was missing at least one episode. Where was Katie’s narrative? The empathetic lens focused so astutely on Jamie and his family that the story of his victim was mostly unexplored.

This is perhaps indicative of girls’ experience generally. Even when they dare to speak out, their fears are often ignored. Dick pics, catcalling, cyberbullying, innuendo and threats of sexual assault are a common occurrence. And if, having been subjected to so-called “micro-aggressions” for weeks, months or years, even, a girl “blows”, it’s not unusual for her to be the one punished for loud, sweary and sometimes physically aggressive behaviour.

It's not only girls, though, who are afraid. I’ve heard of boys in lower years avoiding certain areas of schools because they too are fearful. A frequent form of survival is to emulate the older students. As one teacher so perceptively explained, “the bigger boys [are] accidental middlemen for the toxic manosphere.”

When we are scared for our children, we tend to ask more of schools when we perhaps need to ask more of ourselves. As parents and caregivers, yes, but across society more broadly too. It takes a village. But, right now, despite my writer’s penchant for happy endings, I’m afraid our village is screwed.

That said, I find hope in the incredible teachers I spoke with. Maybe it’s not only our children who need to learn from them. “In the thick of pushing and shoving at lunch,’ one told me, “I am very aware of how careless these boys are about my physical safety.” And yet she continues to support and nurture these very children. “I will not be diminished,” she said. And neither, I believe, should we.

Those of us who seek change must make ourselves bigger and more present in our kids’ lives. For many of us, a proposed ban on smartphones for children would come too late, but we can enforce our own restrictions. No smart devices in bedrooms could be a simple start. And let’s not leave the teaching of young people to teachers alone. Public male figures like Gareth Southgate and Jordan Stephens have spoken brilliantly on modern masculinity. More of that, please. More societal engagement with the problem. More listening to young people. And more willingness from parents and caregivers to have these thorny conversations with teens ourselves.

Trigger warning: this article contains themes of violence.

Netflix’s You has returned for its highly-anticipated fifth and final season, seeing Joe Goldberg “back to his old tricks”. And by “tricks”, I mean stalking and capturing women, and murdering anyone who gets in his way - talk about desensitisation!

At my count, from the show's beginning to the end of season four, Joe has killed a staggering 18 people, and of the six women he has compulsively stalked until now, four are dead.

Yes, reader, this is the gist of You. Joe’s an obsessive stalker and serial killer - I get it. And contrary to how it seems, I actually am a fan of the Netflix show. The problem I have is with Goldberg’s sexualisation - much of which is done by us viewers.

"Joe Goldberg is the sexiest man alive", reads one tweet about the Netflix show. While another states: "I need to date a Joe Goldberg in my life". 

This lust for the show's antagonist is a recurring theme when each season drops. In fact Penn Badgley himself has previously even weighed in, responding to one viewer’s post “Penn Badgley is breaking my heart once again as Joe. What is it about him?” with the statement: “He is a murderer.”

Concerningly, this doesn't seem to be a deterrent, with more posts focusing on Goldberg's "sexy voice" and "clean shave", than the fact that he has killed 18 people, and habitually keeps women captive in a large glass box in his basement.

And of the few posts that do mention his violent behaviour, many are actually sexualising it. "Joe Goldberg is so hot I'd let him kill me", reads one viewer's post. While another declares: "Wish Joe Goldberg would fixate on me and murder me in my sleep".

Of course this isn’t Badgley’s fault or even the show’s creators, when we the public seem to be obsessed with the idea of a 'sexy psychopath'. 

We've seen it time and again. From the thirst for Jamie Dornan as serial killer Paul Spector in The Fall, to Patrick Bateman (AKA Christian Bale) in American Psycho being named one of the sexiest characters in film. 

So where does this sexualisation of fictional killers come from, and why do educated, empowered and feminist women feel compelled to the Joe Goldbergs of the world, even if only in our fantasies? 

One theory is that we've been programmed by society to seek love and protectiveness - two qualities that Goldberg's obsession and control can be mistaken for. This is especially true for "those of us who have been brought up on Disney and rom-coms practically IV-dripped into our consciousness" according to psychologist Perpetua Neo, DClinPsy, via Mind Body Green Relationships. "Joe love bombs his victims, and he makes himself your world."

As a result, viewers “focus on the actions Joe displays that make him seem loving and as if he truly cares about the women he’s dating”, explained Berman Center clinician, Amira Johnson, LMSW, via Indy100. “Actions such as killing his love interest, Beck, his partner in season one in order to eliminate any obstacles that keep him from being able to have her to himself.”

Another theory relates to empathy, with psychologist Perpetua Neo, DClinPsy, via Mind Body Green Relationships, explaining how viewers are compelled to root for the tortured character of Goldberg. 

"When we have empathy for someone, it hooks us in,” Neo explained to Mind Body Green Relationships. “The thing about Joe and the way he narrates it, it's really a story that triggers our love for redemption. He wants to change, he wants to do things better, and we root for a person who wants to change and transform."

According to Dr Melanie Haughton, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Derby, it could also have something to do with the layers and depth applied when portraying serial killers. 

“By depicting serial killers as complex, intelligent and interesting, and choosing attractive actors to play them, [it] gives them a sense of appeal,” Dr Haughton explained in an interview with Dazed.

This has certainly been true in the past, from the buzz around Zac Efron's portrayal of US serial killer Ted Bundy in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, to the sexualisation of Evan Peters as serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer in Dahmer - Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer story.

Netflix even had to step in to address the wave of posts lusting after the very real footage of Ted Bundy in its documentary about the serial killer, Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes.

“[We've] seen a lot of talk about Ted Bundy’s alleged hotness and would like to gently remind everyone that there are literally THOUSANDS of hot men on the service - almost all of whom are not convicted serial murderers", read the statement.

“We’ve been born and raised into societies that desensitise inhumane treatment,” explained Berman Center clinician, Amira Johnson, LMSW, to Indy100. “From the acceptance of war and corporate greed to the illusion that men are superior to women, we’ve all accepted societal norms that subconsciously make us believe that such actions as those Joe Goldberg displays are enticing and derive from a place of power and love.”

This appears to be a theory that even Badgley backs, telling the New York Times: “In a more just society, we would all see Joe as problematic and not be interested in the show, but that’s not the society we live in.”

These theories certainly help to explain our generation's sexualisation of TV psychopaths, but to be honest, it still doesn’t sit right with me. And I can't help but feel that lusting after killers - even fictional ones - must be subliminally harming us on some level. Particularly in the current news cycle of missing women, femicides and systemic sexual misconduct.

I’m not suggesting anyone stop watching You - I for one will definitely be tuning in for season five. But at a time when violence against women is at an epidemic level, I do think we viewers need to separate love and romance from control and abuse. And we definitely need to stop tweeting, "Joe Goldberg could murder me any day".  

“Tits!” “Big tits!” “Show us your big tits!” Ah, the soundtrack of my youth. I woke up one morning in my thirteenth year and made a shocking discovery: seemingly overnight, puberty struck two mighty and devastating blows. My previously flat chest has erupted and I am suddenly in possession of a set of alarmingly hefty new boobs. My newly formed curves prompt an onslaught of catcalls from intimidating men in the streets. You know how society assumes we are all straight by default? Well, in my case, society takes one look at my knockers and assumes I’m not just straight, but “absolutely gagging for a fella”. How wrong they are.

Growing up in the 90s and 00s I am, like every other woman, used to being bombarded with unwanted commentary about my body, face and clothes, fuelled by patriarchal messages, sexist stereotypes and harmful media. I quickly learn that my looks are up for public debate and ridicule, ranging from casual yet stinging remarks to verbal abuse and physical harassment. Without having asked for anyone’s opinion on the matter, I am informed that I am too fat, not pretty enough, embarrassingly dressed, “asking for it” and much, much worse.

Due to my feminine appearance, during my teens and twenties, I was repeatedly told I must be a “maneater”. People brand me “slutty” because of my body shape, but also “frigid” when they find out I don’t actually want to sleep with guys. The one thing I am never labelled is the thing I know in my bones to be true but dare not say out loud. Despite everyone being so full of opinions about me, nobody ever guesses I’m a lesbian.

The first time I come out to anyone, after a shame-drenched decade languishing deep in the closet, I deliberately keep the stakes low. I tell someone I’ll never see again, a random woman I meet while waiting to be served on a night out. We’re both extremely bored and mildly inebriated, her enough to strike up a conversation with a stranger, me enough to confess my most closely guarded secret. Nervous adrenaline pumping through my veins, I mention — ever so casual, ever so matter-of-fact —that I have a girlfriend. I’m trying to act like this is no big deal, but the truth is for me, it’s huge. I have never said these words before.

I brace myself for her reaction. How will she respond to my life-changing revelation? She sniggers: “No, you don’t.” This is the first time someone cannot fathom the facts of my identity, but it won’t be the last. To many, the idea that a woman who looks like me could be gay is preposterous and, in this instance, literally laughable.

This is femme invisibility in action. An infuriating motif of my life, femme invisibility describes the sexist and homophobic assumption that all women who look feminine must be straight. In reality, my loving lipstick and pink dresses in no way diminishes my loving women.

Femme invisibility can, at times, be almost farcical. It’s a ridiculous merry-go-round of me trying frantically to conceal my sexuality, then finally plucking up the courage to reveal it, only to be told I’m mistaken, so I then have to double down and try extra hard to convince them of the exact thing I was previously trying so desperately to hide.

I can’t help wondering why I bothered being so discreet for all those years. Why did I sneak about for secret sapphic rendezvous and manufacture “crushes” on Peter Andre? My long hair provided the ultimate decoy all along. I could have been merrily snogging women, front and centre at every Pride parade, and onlookers would have assumed we were just gals being pals. Is it so big a leap to consider that a girl who is really into girly stuff might also be into girls?

I am not alone. As women, whatever our sexuality, we know how it feels when other people make unwanted comments about our looks. Femme invisibility is a feminist issue, as is butchphobia (prejudice against butch people). It all stems from the same set of limiting beliefs about what a woman can and should be. It’s the same old sexism, just with added homophobia. These misogynistic stereotypes are hurting all women.

Flash forward to the present day and I know from firsthand experience, and many years spent trying to persuade sceptics of my homosexuality, that these outdated attitudes live on. I still find myself having to justify the validity of my existence as a femme lesbian, despite the fact that I am now the editor-in-chief of DIVA, the world’s leading sapphic magazine, and the author of a queer coming-of-age memoir, What A Girl Wants: A (True) Story Of Sexuality And Self-discovery.

Through my work and in my friendships, I often speak to other women who are grappling with these issues today, whether it’s femme invisibility, damaging messages in the media or being harassed because of how they look. So why, in 2025, are women of all sexualities still being subjected to this crap? I’ve endured a lifetime of it and it needs to stop now. Young women must be allowed to grow up without the constant commentary and harmful assumptions. It’s time for all of us, no matter how we identify, who we fancy or what we look like, to be allowed to be our full selves. All women deserve to feel safe, seen and celebrated. At the very least, we should be able to walk down the street in peace.

Children from as young as five have submitted anonymous testimonies on the charity website Everyone’s Invited, revealing primary school experiences of sexual harassment, groping, inappropriate touching and even rape.

Rape culture is not a term commonly associated with five-11-year olds and yet it exists in at least as many as 1,664 British primary schools. The Everyone’s Invited Primary School List cites the names of almost 2,000 primary schools where sexual abuse or harassment has taken place.

“I was sexually assaulted multiple times and raped by my friend as a child when we were both aged 7,” reads one harrowing anonymous testimony: “I always thought I shouldn’t be upset about it because it wasn’t done by an adult. I thought I didn’t have any right to carry it with me because I didn’t say no enough times; so I blamed myself.”

The Everyone’s Invited initiative aims to highlight “the urgent need to address rape culture in these early educational settings” and is calling for systemic change in how we educate and protect young children. It comes weeks after the nation was shaken by the powerful Netflix drama Adolescence, which shows the aftermath of the murder of 13-year-old Katie by her classmate Jamie Miller who had been groomed by online misogynistic influencers and incel culture.

The organisation is calling for relationships and sex education to be taught before the age of nine, which opponents argue is too young to start teaching children about sex and consent. But the sad reality is that the roots of rape culture have already infiltrated the educational environment at a far younger age than many of us would like to believe. “This happened [in] primary school, aged 5. A boy of the same age sat next to me at story time and pushed his hand down the back of my skirt and tried to push his hand between my butt cheeks,” reads one testimony; another: “When I was 7, I was sexually abused along with 3 other students every day by a student who was 2 years older than us. He’d threaten us, beat us, and told us if we told anyone he’d do worse, the school eventually found out after about a year, however no action was taken.”

Another campaign, helmed by Make It Mandatory in collaboration with the Sex Education Forum, Brook, and EVAW, is also proposing important changes to sex education in schools. They have put forward an amendment to the Children and Wellbeing Bill, tabled by Zarah Sultana MP, that advises Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) be extended to 18-year-olds. So far their petition, supported by Marie Claire UK, has garnered over 100,000 of the necessary 150,000 signatures.

1 child is raped in school every school day (Women and Equalities Select Committee report)

Rape culture refers to an environment in which sexual violence is normalised, excused, or trivialised and it is infecting every corner of society, including the classrooms of children as young as 4. “At 4 years old, an 11-year-old boy took me into the school toilet and touched my privates with his.”

Even before Adolescence sparked fervent online debate around incel culture and the endemic level of young male loneliness driving boys towards the Manosphere, there had been growing concerns about toxic behaviours, attitudes, and worrying ideas around gender and consent among British primary school children.

In primary schools 3 sexual assaults are reported to the police every school day (Women and Equalities Select Committee report)

Rape culture is not an entirely new phenomenon, but it is affecting younger and younger children. Growing up in quiet North Devon in the early 2000s, I didn’t have a name for rape culture, but it was definitely felt. Reading through the online testimonies of countless children (there are currently 52,384 submissions), I remembered with piercing clarity being targeted by a group of 15/16-year-olds shortly after starting secondary school.

One lunchtime, I decided to go and find my new locker and—following the paper map my new tutor had given me—I ended up in a quiet corridor near the Geography block. A group of about five boys encircled me, the leader yanked the sleeves of my school jumper and started hauling me towards the boys’ toilets, calling me names like ‘sexy’ and ‘baby’, which his friends made clear was ironic: I wore round-framed glasses with my hair in a sensible plait and a pair of practical, clompy shoes my mum had bought me from Clarks. Keeping a firm grip on one of my wrists, he ran a hand down my leg before—what felt like hours of struggling—he let go and I fell backwards onto the waxed lino floor and hurried away. For the next year, I avoided that corridor, and I never used the locker during the five years I studied there.

In Year 10, a boy in my year pushed me onto the ground, winding me, in full view of a patrolling lunchtime teacher who simply shrugged as I made pleading eye contact while struggling to get my breath. Neither incidents were considered particularly noteworthy in my over-populated, under-resourced state school and they pale in comparison to some of Everyone’s Invited’s more harrowing testimonies, but my memories prove how entrenched sexism and misogyny are. What’s becoming increasingly clear though is how younger and younger children are being exposed to inappropriate language, harmful stereotypes, and distorted views of consent at an alarming rate. “In schools, homes, families and peer groups, children and young people are exposed to extreme ideologies, normalisation of violence and cultures of silence that allow radicalisation and violence to flourish,” agrees Katherine Gilmour, Senior Regional Director of Global Fund for Children and UK Healthy Masculinities Lead.

Child-on-child abuse

A recent report by the National Police Chiefs’ Council revealed that child sexual abuse and exploitation had increased by 400% from 2013 to 2024. In instances of sexual violence, more than half of the alleged offenders were children themselves.

“In my primary school there were two corners of the school playground were [sic] boys would push the girls in and say “your [sic] in the sex corner” and pretend to hump you. The other corner was called the “kissy corner” where boys would push you in then try to kiss you. At the time it was uncomfortable and felt wrong but also the norm as teachers never bat an eyelid and it seemed to be a ‘game’ that got passed down the years.”

From playground jokes that trivialise assault to media portrayals that reinforce harmful gender norms and the rapid-fire growth of the Manosphere and toxic alpha-male influencers, young children are being shaped by an environment that too often normalises disrespect toward others—especially girls. “Misogyny, violence and abuse are learned behaviours, not innate ones,” adds Gilmour. She says that developmentally appropriate comprehensive sexual education is vital in tackling—and understanding—abuse and gender inequality.

The generation divide

Echoing one of the rawest scenes in Adolescence, in which a broken Eddie Miller, played by show co-creator Stephen Graham, says to his wife Manda,“…He was in his room we thought he was safe, we thought we were doing the right thing…” Everyone's Invited founder Soma Sara says that parents are unaware of how easy it is for children to access violent pornography and toxic Manosphere influencers. “It has transformed their idea of intimacy and relationships, insidiously positioning men as dominant and women as submissive,” Sara told The Times.

This tracks with data that shows 60% of teachers reported that children under nine had been exposed to pornography. Another shocking revelation is that almost half of schoolchildren under seven are showing signs of misogynistic behaviour, and that “misogynistic rhetoric and harmful gender norms” are ingrained from as early as nursery.

Campaigners say that education around relationships, emotional literacy, consent, boundaries, personal space, interaction, and respect need to be taught at nursery. As adults, one of the tasks we must face is understanding that rape culture doesn’t just manifest through explicit acts of violence or harassment—it is embedded in the subtle messages children receive daily.

Sexual abuse online and harassment ‘normalised’ (Ofsted report, June 2021)

In too many British primary schools—and institutions at large—casual sexism prevails and damaging gender stereotypes influence interactions. Dr Marcus Maloney, Assistant Professor in Sociology at Coventry University’s Research Centre for Postdigital Cultures, explains that youth transitions to adulthood today are increasingly marked by uncertainty and precarity around careers, intimate relationships and general life chances. “For boys and young men, this is compounded by the pressure to achieve traditional masculine ideals that are both unattainable and often unhealthy. However horrifying to us in the mainstream, figures like Andrew Tate offer boys and young men a seductively simple set of answers to their problems, and a worldview that frames feminism, and the gains made by women in society, as the source of their problems.”

What’s more, over the last generation there has been a narrowing of education to more singularly focus on just academics, says Dr Tara Porter, adding: “For those who don’t fit that path, we risk disenfranchising them from society before they even fully join it. We risk them turning to violence, crime or incel culture to gain a sense of identity.” Porter, who is the author of the upcoming book Good Enough: A Framework for Modern Parents, examines how education disenfranchises young boys and men and delves into the realities of parenting against extremes when raising boys in the age of social media, video games, porn, and Andrew Tate.

Porter understands that exposure to sexualised content—whether through social media, movies, or peer influence (debunking the idea that not giving children a phone will combat this epidemic)—skew children’s understanding of what constitutes healthy relationships. This problem is compounded by the fact that so many schools lack sufficient education on consent, healthy relationships, and gender equality. The report found that 80% of surveyed primary school teachers felt ill-equipped to address these issues.

Experts agree that in the current climate, boys are often growing up thinking that their worth is tied to their ability to dominate or assert control, while girls are being taught to stay silent, comply, or even blame themselves when their boundaries are violated. It’s precisely these damaging narratives that perpetuate rape culture and lay the groundwork for unhealthy dynamics in relationships, both in adolescence and adulthood.

Left unchallenged, these ideas will sow the seeds of a society that continues to downplay and ignore the boundaries of consent and mutual respect. Comments like “she was asking for it” or “you’re not a real man if you don’t get a girl to like you” have no place in society, least of all, the school playground.

Last month, I bought myself a car. Not an expensive one, not even new(ish); just a little runaround to fill the space left when my old one died just before the pandemic and which we never replaced. The whole process was incredibly straightforward: I found a nearby dealership with excellent reviews on Trust Pilot, saw a couple online that looked good, test-drove them both and plumped for the cherry-red Corsa, which turned out to have a fantastic stereo (if slightly eccentric seatbelts) and which I already love to bits.

Up until a few years ago, I’d have dithered endlessly, pointlessly combing Auto Trader and badgering my husband (who knows less about cars than I do), fretting about whether whatever I bought might seem small, or uncool, or turn out to be a huge mistake. But cutting through all that – if you’ll excuse me – crap, is one of the things that’s great about being older: the sense that, after some, if not all, of the following; marriage, divorce, childbirth, redundancy, bereavement, peri, post or just full-on menopause, you’re just about ready for anything.

There’s a term for being a ‘woman of a certain age’, as Gregg Wallace so charmingly put it: the ‘Queenager’, a phrase coined by the journalist Eleanor Mills. For me, it sums up perfectly that moment of still feeling like the young, excitable, enthusiastic girl I was thirty years ago, but then catching sight of myself in the mirror and seeing my Mum looking back, those three decades clearly etched on my face.

It’s a club I’m happily a member of, although it has taken me a little time to get comfortable with it. What no one tells you is that your fifties bear little relation to your forties; an age equivalent of the leap between GCSEs and A levels. Suddenly you’re getting SAGA brochures in the post, friends have older partners who are talking about retiring and it dawns on you that your next decade will be your seventieth, with all that may bring.

The irony is that while so much of society – and often the media – focuses on the difficulties of ageing, for many women striking out into their fifties is a time of rediscovery and adventure. For many, the kids have flown, and menopause frees us up from monthly mood swings and painful cramps. We’ve been doing our jobs for long enough to either be at the top of our game or have opted for a less demanding role that gives us time to concentrate on other things. Financially stable, with time to start a whole new career if we want to, our fifties might just be our most powerful decade.

Where, then, are we? When was the last time you saw a no-nonsense, high-achieving, happy women in her fifties? TV and film might have embraced the ‘older woman’, with Judi Dench, Helen Mirren and Meryl Streep flying the flag for septuagenarians and older, but where are the feisty, funny fiftysomethings? So often, in dramas, women of my age are shown as struggling with health issues, ageing parents or challenging offspring that won’t leave home.

And of course, all these issues do affect us – but that doesn’t mean that’s all our lives are about. It’s almost as if there’s no role for us until we get to be acerbic pensioners, like the characters in Richard Osman’s hugely popular Thursday Murder Club books (starring, yes, Helen Mirren). Thank goodness for the glorious Hannah Waddingham (50) in Ted Lasso, Nicola Walker (54) – who was the embodiment of the Queenager in The Split and Sarah Lancashire (60), superb in everything she does (even the Yorkshire tea ads).

For me, at least, being a Queenager is probably the most liberating era of my life, set free from the tyranny of what should be. You’ll never catch me in a carrot-leg jean, I’m more than happy to admit that I find Michelin-starred restaurants fussy and pretentious and I’ve allowed myself the luxury of deciding that I never have to watch a Shakespeare play again. Cooking on a Saturday afternoon takes place to a soundtrack of loud 90’s music (mostly Primal Scream, the Stereo MCs and Madonna).

But it’s about less frivolous things too. Recently, I had dinner with my four close girlfriends from uni – all of them look better than we did then, not because of Botox or surgery, but simply because we fully own the women we’ve become. One of us is taking early retirement, two are adjusting to empty nests, and all of us are working out what the next stage of our life will be. For me, my fifties have brought the most rewarding work of my career; my third and fourth novels and currently a foray into non-fiction, which has given me the opportunity to interview some truly fascinating people up and down the country.

The story I most want to tell is of how this era – our Queenager days – is when women can be at their most empowered and independent, when we burn most brightly. Perhaps it’s because we realise how quickly life is slipping past, or perhaps it’s because we know that youth doesn’t offer as much depth as experience. My next protagonist will be a kick-ass Queenager, with all that that entails. I can’t wait to write her.

The Moonlit Piazza by Annabelle Thorpe is published by Head of Zeus and is available now.

It’s every parent’s worst nightmare — a teenage child doesn’t come home, and their body is found hours later. These are the harrowing but all too familiar circumstances that set up Adolescence, Netflix’s new four-part miniseries. The story, however, begins elsewhere with a scene plucked straight from another parental panic — riot police take a battering ram to the door of an everyday family home to arrest the owner’s 13-year-old son.

Adolescence immediately plunges into the harrowing events following the arrest of teenage Jamie Miller who is accused of murdering his classmate, Katie Leonard. The series, which is streaming now, has been lauded for its use of single-shot episodes that unfurl in real time, hurling the audience into the events with at-times uncomfortable intimacy.

Jamie sits frozen in his single bed as a SIG MCX rifle is pointed at him, when he stands up, we see he has wet himself — here is a child, being arrested for the most heinous of acts against another child, can this really be the world we are living in? Is the question viewers up and down the country have been asking, and the answer is yes. Just last week, Hassan Sentamu, 18, was sentenced to life imprisonment for stabbing Croydon schoolgirl Elianne Andam to death after she innocently attempted to help her friend rebuff his advances. That same week, Kyle Clifford was sentenced for the brutal murder of his ex-girlfriend Louise Hunt, her sister Hannah and their mother Carol. Though harrowing, these are not isolated instances: in the UK, a woman is killed by a man every 2.7 days.

As the investigation progresses, the story explores the impact on Jamie’s family, particularly his father, Eddie Miller, portrayed by show creator and co-writer Stephen Graham, and his mother, Manda Miller, played by Christine Tremarco. The series also introduces Detective Inspector Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters) and Detective Sergeant Misha Frank (Faye Marsay), who are pivotal in unravelling the circumstances that led up to the crime.

The show explores how platforms like Meta, TikTok, Snap, X, and Discord have become breeding grounds for extremism and radicalisation. Young and impressionable minds are being exposed to harmful content that can alter their perceptions of the world: research by the Online Safety Data Initiative revealed that 80% of children (aged 12-15) have had potentially harmful experiences online. As these digital spaces become more entrenched in our daily lives, it’s crucial to understand how and why this radicalisation is happening — and what can be done to protect the next generation from falling prey to dangerous ideologies.

Walters, a father of eight, told The Independent that the experience of filming the show left him in tears, “Every day I was going home, crying in my script. Rocking, you know,” he told reporter Jacob Stolworthy. The actor recently spoke about the need for young men to have positive male role models who are unafraid of their feelings and willing to show their emotions: “A lot of the problems that we’re facing is because young men are not willing to talk about how they feel because they feel it isn’t masculine,” said Walters in Joe Bloom’s Instagram art project, A View, from a bridge, in which passersby—and increasingly, activists and thought leaders—are asked to share their worldview into an old-school red telephone on a London bridge.

Adolescence explores the parental horror of what happens when you lose touch with your child’s world. In one scene, Walters’ Inspector Luke Bascombe has his theory about the relationship between Jamie Miller and the victim Katie Leonard completely debunked by his own teenage son, who explains that, for his Gen Z classmates, heart emojis mean different things depending on their colour. This revelation upends the detective’s understanding of the supposed friendship between the victim and the accused, but more than that, it highlights the gaping chasm between the generations.

In another heartbreaking scene, the Miller parents, grappling with the weight and horror of what their child stands accused of, try to console one another, reassuring each other that they did the best they could. Graham’s Eddie Miller recalls how they wrongly assumed that their son spending so much time in his room at home meant he was safe from the outside world. It hints, even if only slightly, at the isolation of today’s young boys and how toxic male influencers, like Andrew Tate—a looming presence in the show even if never mentioned by name—come in to fill the void left vacant by positive male role models.

“Men are suffering from loneliness and one of the big things that comes out of this online world is that the narratives are so confusing and so contradictory,” says Ben Hurst, a male ally and campaigner against toxic masculinity. Similar to Walters’ Instagram monologue, Hurst explains that young men are being taught that they shouldn’t rely on anyone, that seeking help is a sign of weakness, and that their struggles are caused by women. “I think all of that stuff leads to a real sense of loneliness and a real sense of isolation,” he adds.

This tracks with recent statistics that reveal the scale and severity of male loneliness: a 2019 YouGov poll found that one in five men have no close friends. More recently, a 2023 study from Equimundo: Center for Masculinities and Social Justice found that the majority of men agreed with the statement, “No one really knows me well” and young men (18-23) were the likeliest to agree.

It’s a statement we hear Jamie echo to psychologist Briony Ariston, played by Erin Doherty, who is brought in to assess Jamie’s mental state, offering insights into his troubled psyche. In this episode, the male rage that has been alluded to comes out in full force as we hear Jamie parrot some of the violent ideologies he’s been exposed to.

It becomes clear how Jamie’s adolescent insecurities have been manipulated by Manosphere influencers and weaponised into a violent hatred towards women. Jamie’s teenage turmoil and confusion of modern boyhood have left him vulnerable to Andrew Tate-style characters, the type his dad, Eddie Miller, says he stumbled upon while looking for a workout video: “Look at that fella that popped up on my phone going on about how to treat women and how men should be men and all that shit, I was only looking for something for the gym”.

Though fictional, it chimes with Hurst’s insights about the wide reach of the Manosphere: “We can safely assume that most young people, to varying extents, have come into contact with it—whether that’s through TikTok, a Reddit forum or something deeper like Andrew Tate’s War Room.” The uncertainty of gender roles is often cited as a key factor behind Tate’s immense social reach. In a Kings College report that revealed that Gen Z boys view feminism more negatively than any other generation, Gideon Skinner, Head of Political Research at Ipsos UK, noted that while both men and women express some level of pessimism, younger boys and men “are more worried that life will be harder for them, and are more uncertain over male gender roles.”

Skinner’s colleague, Professor Bobby Duffy, Director of the Policy Institute at King’s College London, voiced his concern about the dangers the youngest generation faces if this is “a new and unusual generational pattern” isn’t addressed, “We risk that void being filled by celebrities and influencers, and this nascent divide being exacerbated.”

Manda and Eddie belong to a generation that believes that if a child is at home they are safe, but as the story unfolds, they realise—all too late—that in today’s social climate the biggest danger to both young boys and girls can begin in the bedroom.

PrettyLittleThing, the fast-fashion brand best known for ‘BBL fashion’ and bodycon dresses, has undergone an old money makeover—it’s just the latest in a widespread move to conservatism. How worried should we be?

If you were planning on a Love Island-style shopping haul this weekend, you won’t find it at PrettyLittleThing. The highlighter brights have been banished in favour of a sea of safe neutrals. Gone, too, are those slashed-to-the-thigh minis, skimpy silhouettes and strategically placed cutouts. In their place is ‘Margaret Thatcher’ tailoring—as Geli Kanu said in a viral TikTok—and notably longer hemlines, all under the umbrella term “elevated fashion essentials”. There’s also a majestic-looking unicorn crest vaguely reminiscent of the Burberry Equestrian Knight logo and the confusing tagline “A Legacy is in Progress…”.

All this chimes with broader social shifts, namely a looming recession and return-to-office mandates. The souped-up office siren aesthetic that PLT 2.0 is peddling plays directly into power brokers’ hands in that it simultaneously glamourises the eight-hour workday while championing a new (although actually old) version of ultra-femininity that's in line with the trad wife movement.

PLT’s rebrand is symptomatic of a bigger social shift still: the rise in conservatism and traditionalism, especially when it comes to gender roles. As content creator, Sophie Milner, says in another viral TikTok video that’s racked up 1259 comments and 46.5k likes, “I’m seeing girls who are 25 dressing in the most conservative way ever, it’s like we’re going back to an era of Stepford Wives”. She adds: “We’re seeing this huge shift online of women talking about how they want to be stay-at-home wives…I think it’s concerning that women are going to start to lose their power”.

Many of these trad wife-adjacent TikTok trends, like the ‘clean girl’ aesthetic and bucolic ‘milkmaid’ and ‘cottage-core’ lifestyles get chalked down to harmless escapism. However, the urge to quit the rat race and retreat to a ‘soft life’ punctuated with home baking and crafting shouldn’t be viewed in isolation when it’s very much linked to the economic climate. Analysts suggest it will take 257 years to close the gender pay gap globally. No wonder some women aspire to ditch the hustle in favour of being a stay-at-home wife supported by a #providerhusband—it’s hard for women, we know the cards are stacked against us, there’s widespread activism fatigue from a second Trump presidency and growing misogyny and many women are understandably exhausted. But, as Milner says; “I don’t think it’s because people don’t enjoy working, I think that in the current climate, people don’t enjoy working...it feels like we’re hustling more than ever...to be able to afford the things we’re seeing posted online”. What underpins this growing desire to escape employment instability, the cost of living crisis and stagnating wages is a return to traditional gender roles and female obsequiousness. This is what PLT and brands like it are capitalising on.

It’s easy to shake off the rebrand and discredit PLT as not a ‘real’ fashion label, but one thing the brand has always done—and to roaring success—is follow trends. The fact that PrettyLittleThing is a ferocious trend follower, not a trendsetter might be the most worrying thing about this rebrand because it is symptomatic of broader social shifts and we’re about to see a whole lot more of it.

For context: ‘Old money clothing inspo’ is in Google’s ‘Top trending fashion inspo’ breakout search terms. Unlike ‘quiet luxury’ which was a little more ambiguous, ‘old money’ is overtly classist as well as being rooted in whiteness, thinness and generational wealth. The fact that a brand that made its name ‘championing’—or profiting off, depending on your outlook—a demographic far removed from old money has moved so sharply in this direction has been jarring for many shoppers.

As social commentator @madamejoyce says: “I'm finding it very annoying when a certain demographic of women invest into a shop, for example, us thicker girlies...and you just completely revamped forgetting about who your core audience is. Because to me, it’s giving ‘forget the fat girls...thank you for making us a million-pound empire, but now, we go with the demure chicks’”. As if to evidence how divisive we’re becoming as a society, one user commented on Joyce’s video saying: “I like it ngl…it’s giving classy and demure clean girl aesthetic. I’m 22 but I’m ready to be a housewife and mother.”

Ellie Macieira-Fielding, writing in The New Feminist says, “TikToks showcasing ‘old-money looks’ rarely include Black or brown women because systemic inequality has historically meant that Black wealth is new wealth, and new wealth is viewed as ‘tacky.’” Macieira-Fielding goes on to cite the correlation between dwindling DEI initiatives and PLT’s withdrawal from diverse casting.

There was a lot that PLT got wrong—this is a brand that flogged 99p bikinis—but one thing that defenders of the fast fashion giant could always use to bolster their argument was the e-commerce platform’s body diversity. Sure, most of their models looked like surplus members of the Kardashian-Jenner family, but in a sea of size 6 models—as was true in 2012, when PLT launched—curvier models were a welcome reprieve.

It’s further evidence of shifting body—and political—ideals that the Kardashians themselves have undergone notable aesthetic changes. Gone are the Brazilian Butt Lifts (though the family has always denied having this procedure) as are the deep fake tans and lip fillers. They might still often be in *capital letters* full glam, but there’s a visible shift towards the demure trend and away from the bold make-up, something Geli Kanu says is now viewed societally as “ghetto”.

In an interview with trade paper Drapers, PrettyLittleThing founder Umar Kamani addressed the rebrand and admitted that the brand’s focus had shifted away from "having a dress on site at £4” and towards “a dress that’s thicker, not see-through and a better fit”, this is perhaps the most definitive proof, aside from the clothes themselves, of a strategic move towards conservative dressing that is reflective of a changing political landscape.

The PrettyLittleThing rebrand serves not only as a bellwether for the economic landscape, but it’s a mirror reflecting the world we live in—what we’re looking at right now is a return to elitism, conservatism and outdated gender roles.

This article contains distressing details of physical and sexual violence

Kyle Clifford watched Andrew Tate videos before murdering Louise, Hannah and Carol Hunt - further proof that online misogyny can be linked to offline violence.

Kyle Clifford, 26, murdered three women on 9 July 2024 - his ex girlfriend Louise Hunt, 25, her sister Hannah Hunt, 28, and their mother Carol Hunt, 61.

Clifford pleaded guilty to the three murders in January 2025, and was found guilty this week of raping his former girlfriend before murdering her with a crossbow.

Following Thursday's verdict, new information was released to the court that Clifford had searched for Andrew Tate's podcast and watched up to 10 of his videos the day before executing his premeditated attack.

This information, the court heard, was only reported after Clifford's guilty verdict over concerns that it could be "prejudicial", with Tate considered "a poster boy for misogynists". Not to mention, the defence's belief that there was too vague of a link between the content watched by Clifford and his planned attack.

However, prosecutors at Cambridge Crown Court have argued that "the violent misogyny promoted by Tate is the same type of motivation" that "fuelled both the murders and the rape" by Clifford. And with a growing pattern between online misogyny and offline violence, women's rights activists have warned that its relevance cannot be understated.

Online misogyny is a growing threat in the UK, with a rise in misogynistic influencers like Tate glorifying physical and sexual violence. And with young men increasingly being radicalised, women and girls are being put in very real danger.

Women are now 27 times more likely to face online abuse than men, with 1 in 5 reporting to have experienced it in some form, from cyber flashing to violent threats. And with extremist hate speech against women linked to cases of offline violence, we are seeing the real-life repercussions of online misogyny.

Jake Davidson, who killed five people in an attack in Plymouth in August 2021 was reported to have strongly misogynistic views and a fascination with "violent heroes of 'incel' ideology."

The unnamed Toronto teenager who executed a machete terror attack against two women at a spa in 2020 was said to be "ideologically motivated" by violent gender-based cyber extremism.

And Alek Minassian who killed 10 people in a deadly attack in Toronto in 2018 told interrogators that he had been "radicalised" online, posting to Facebook minutes before the killings: "The Incel Rebellion has already begun!"

Tragically, the murders of Louise, Hannah and Carol Hunt appear to follow in this distressing pattern. And while Clifford is fully accountable, women's rights activists have stressed the importance of looking also at the wider culture of online misogyny that inspired it.

"The harmful content that people see online can absolutely transform and transfer to physical, offline harm," explained Baroness Morgan on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, following Clifford's trial.

"Hearing that Kyle Clifford watched videos of Andrew Tate in the lead up to his murders of his ex-girlfriend, her mother and sister, is deeply upsetting to us, but sadly not surprising," four alleged victims of Tate added via their legal representatives. "This should be a wake up call for all the social media companies who are continuing to platform Tate and his dangerous messages... Clifford's case should be a warning".

"How many more women have to die before we start recognising this for what it is?," posted feminist activist and writer Laura Bates to social media. "And this isn’t just about Tate. It is about an entire online ecosystem radicalising young men into hatred of women and actively inciting them to commit acts of mass violence against them.

"This isn’t going to stop or go away," she later continued. "It’s only going to get worse, unless we start to treat it as the terrorism it is ... At what point do we start to care more about women’s lives being decimated than about not wanting to offend men, or stand up to the tech companies making billions from pumping their toxic, hate fuelled content out to millions of teenage boys?"

Kyle Clifford will be sentenced at Cambridge Crown Court on Tuesday.

If you are experiencing domestic abuse or are worried about someone you know, contact the free 24-hour National Abuse Helpline on 0808 2000 247. If you are in an emergency situation, please call 999.

Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, has released her highly-anticipated lifestyle show With Love, Meghan, seeing the Californian mother of two share hosting and interiors tips from Montecito.

Think throwback Martha Stewart meets Alice Waters vibes, seeing Markle and friends bake cakes, arrange flowers, bee keep and make harvest baskets - all with an emphasis on showing love to those around you.

The series is sweet, calming and wildly inoffensive. And yet it somehow appears to have offended over half of the internet.

Yes, the hate levelled against Markle and her new show has been overwhelming, with viewers labelling it “cringe-worthy”, “self-centred” and “narcissistic”. And with internet users now claiming to be cancelling their Netflix subscriptions in protest, it’s all gone too far.

Most criticism of the show centres around it being “vacuous”, with viewers mocking the Duchess of Sussex for dedicating half hour episodes to making lavender towels, repackaging pretzels and labelling mason jars of cocktails.

“Meghan Markle showing the world how to place fruit on a plate in rows. She even tells us we can do a single row of fruit for our kids’ breakfast! This is ground breaking stuff, people!!!,” one viewer posted to Instagram. Another added: “Popcorn and balloon arches! Who does she think she is? We expected more from Meghan Markle than this brainless Stepford wife content.”

It’s true, With Love, Meghan isn’t going to make global change or earn a Nobel Peace Prize, but in fairness, it was never intended to. Markle advertised With Love, Meghan as an aspirational lifestyle show - offering a sense of comfort, calm and positivity. And in her defence, that’s exactly what it does.

“It was good for my nervous system,” one viewer aptly defended the show amid the sea of negativity. “Easy, sweet and calm.” “It’s perfectly pleasant,” another added. “I know how to dip a carrot into houmous and I’m still enjoying watching her show. Just be kind.”

Interiors, gardening and hosting trends have seen a huge rise in popularity in recent years, with people increasingly looking to homemaker content for a sense of escapism. And while Markle has been criticised for embracing the trend, other lifestyle influencers have been praised.

Take Lydia Millen (@lydiamillen) for instance, whose wholesome high-fashion gardening tutorials are rightly praised as "absolutely gorgeous" and "the dream". Or Lory Parson (@tohavetohost) whose hostessing and table-setting content is commended as "special", "inventive" and "beautiful".

These are just two popular accounts that I personally follow, but the positive engagement remains a constant across the domestic lifestyle influencer landscape. So, why then does this not extend to the Duchess of Sussex?

Meghan Markle isn’t doing anything different to other home influencers. Yet she for the most part has received vitriol - lambasted for prioritising flower sprinkles and fruit rainbows over meaningful content and conversation.

The difference in reception therefore appears to relate more to Markle herself, rather than her Netflix show.

Let’s not forget that her podcast, ‘Archetypes’, investigating and subverting the labels that hold women back, was similarly criticised - this time for being “self-centred”, “insincere” and “boring”. Even Markle's meaningful volunteer work has been criticised as “performative” by certain corners of the internet.

It all goes to show that Meghan Markle is in an impossible situation - one where she simply cannot win. And no matter what she does next, it will almost certainly be divisive.

For now, I just hope people remember that there are much bigger things to worry about than whether Markle makes too many crudité platters. And at a time when the world feels like a very scary place, it is counter productive to “hate watch” a show that is just trying to spread love.

Let us know your thoughts @marieclaireuk.

Campaigners at the charity Pregnant Then Screwed have published new data that shows more women than ever are being fired while pregnant or on maternity leave.

Despite maternity leave protections in the UK being enshrined in law, the data, conducted in partnership with Women In Data reveals that the motherhood penalty is getting worse, not better.

Every year, as many as 74,000 women lose their jobs after getting pregnant or taking maternity leave—a sharp rise from 54,000 women in 2016.

Maternity leave should be a time to recover from childbirth and for parents to bond with their baby and adjust to their new life. But increasingly, new mothers are finding that this time is marred by the fear of losing their jobs.

Of the 35,800 parents surveyed, the report found that 12.3% of women are sacked, constructively dismissed or made redundant whilst pregnant, on maternity leave or within a year of returning from maternity leave. If scaled up to the general population, this could mean as many as 74,000 women a year are forced to leave their jobs. All this at a time when women are increasingly being blamed for falling fertility rates.

This shameful statistic highlights a worrying trend in the UK workforce—one that exposes significant gaps in employment protection and challenges the government’s commitment to gender equality. It’s an experience Ann-Marie Kinlock knows all too well.

Kinlock—who is launching KindHaus, a co-working space and childcare service for new mothers—was made redundant when pregnant with her first child, here, she shares her experience of navigating new motherhood while facing unemployment and financial hardship.

As told to Mischa Anouk Smith

“I was working as Head of UX for a financial services company when I discovered I was pregnant with my first child. I was delighted and really looking forward to motherhood. I saw myself taking a full year to immerse myself in this new bountiful life, but I was anxious about what it might mean for my career. Little did I know the challenges that lay ahead.

At just two months pregnant, the company decided to close the London office and I was made redundant. I assumed I’d be at my job until the baby arrived and then go on maternity leave. Suddenly, instead of planning my new life I was polishing my CV and scrambling for job interviews. The stress was overwhelming and I worried constantly about how it might affect the baby.

Looking for a job knowing you are pregnant is nerve-wracking—I felt like a fraud. Like I was committing a crime, but I just needed to get back to work. I remember putting on an extra baggy shirt for interviews. I’d have these great conversations and then on the way home, I’d feel like a complete fake. It was horrible.

I managed to secure a new position at a lovely boutique agency within a month. The relief was short-lived though. I was so worried I couldn’t even celebrate. I spent the rest of my time there worrying if they’d hate me for taking the job.

I loved my job, but the sense of dread leading up to the 25th week of my pregnancy was awful. I wasn’t legally obliged to say anything before then, but more than anything, I was too scared to tell them. When the day finally came, I could see my manager was disappointed but seemed to take it well. No special arrangements were made, I just cracked on, grateful to still have a job and keen to prove I could still do good work. And work, I did, right until I was 8 months pregnant. I felt really healthy so I pushed my mat leave as far back as possible with the plan to take a year off after the baby arrived.

When my son was seven months old, an email came…

I went on maternity leave feeling relatively secure. A week after the baby arrived I sent the usual baby pic with a message to the team. Then, when my son was seven months old, an email came. The company was making an announcement and they wanted us all to come into the office to hear the news first-hand. The following week I received a redundancy letter with a 1-week notice period. I was devastated.

Surviving on Maternity Allowance was a struggle I never anticipated. Because I’d joined the company in May and my baby was due in October I’d missed the threshold to qualify for Maternity Pay. I would be thousands of pounds short every month.

My husband's salary at the time was just about able to cover the rent, utilities and food. Everything else was on me. My savings soon disappeared, I missed bill payments and my credit score spiralled—as did my mental health. The constant worry about money cast a shadow over what should have been a joyous time with my new baby.

Nursery costs for a child under one were shocking. The lack of flexibility really threw me. Nurseries had their rules on minimum days and what those days could be. Their survival depended on these rules, but they left me isolated. I couldn’t survive any longer on Maternity Allowance. I needed to generate an income but I couldn’t afford the cost of childcare.

Re-entering the 9-5 felt impossible at the time with a young child. I was still breastfeeding. So I decided to prepare to set up my own business consolidating my experience in digital and design to help level the playing field for small businesses. I patched together a network of care using family and friends, but it regularly fell apart—people had their lives to live after all.

Eventually, I came to the sad conclusion that it was better to give up on my business dreams to focus on being a stay-at-home mum. Without reliable care, I couldn’t get through the work. Eventually, my financial situation got worse and I felt forced to return to full-time work.

I managed to secure a Lead UX role at a cool integrated agency. My manager had three kids and provided the much-needed moral and practical support navigating working life with kids. But I was leaving my baby at times for 10 hours a day in childcare. Everything in me told me that this was not for me. Grateful to even have a job I tried to push away the guilt.

On the flip side, going back to work gave me access to lots of other working mums. The more we spoke the more I realised we’d all felt we’d been given an ultimatum—work and survive financially or stay at home and lose our income. We chose to work. This deal meant spending up to 10 hours a day away from children we dearly loved.

This community of working mums was essential, especially when navigating breasts leaking while in client meetings, trying to pump milk discreetly in the toilets, and working out how to hide breast milk in the staff fridge. It also meant hiding tears on the run to catch the train, panic every time my mobile rang, and mental angst about having to leave exactly on time to catch the train that would make it to the nursery on time—bad mum guilt when I was late. As working mums, we were trying our very best to do more with less time to avoid looking like an "incompetent mum” or being accused of having “baby brain”. The list went on. We’d weigh up whether after-work drinks to bond with the team (and improve the chance of promotion) were worth losing time with our babies.

It was during an online course about baby brain development that the idea for KindHaus began to form. The science was clear. The first five years of life were critical and one of the best ways to support a baby is to support the mother. If a mother is continually stressed and worn out, it can impact her capacity to give extra attention.

Opening KindHaus was a leap of faith. We started small, renting a temporary space on a North London High Street offering coworking desks, a nanny service, and good coffee. We sometimes brought in experts to give talks on modern parenting.

I wanted to create a space that says to women “You can do this”. I don’t want to see another woman suffering financially just because she can’t find support while she gets work done to pay the bills. The financial struggles I faced surviving on Maternity Allowance still impact me. I’m very cautious with our business finances, planning for the worst while hoping for the best.

In hindsight, I wish I was more clued up on the policy around maternity leave and maternity allowance. It would have given me the chance to prepare better and reduce the impact on my financial and mental wellbeing. Getting a full understanding of these quite complex policies was hard. Then having to apply your unique scenario to this, understand the implications and then make critical life decisions based on this is no small feat. I wasn’t aware you could get paid for KIT days for instance.

The cocktail of mum guilt expertly blended with a fear of looking like you can’t cope at work was toxic. The UK Maternity Leave policy is dismal compared and needs a serious rethink. It’s time to support mothers through this critical life stage.”

Bianca Censori went completely nude on the red carpet at last night’s Grammys. There’s been a quiet chorus of concern for Censori for a while now, but it’s about to reach a fever pitch.

Red-carpet naked dressing is hardly a new phenomenon. Rose McGowan dared to bare back in 1998 and Cher had been doing it long before that. Rose later described her VMAs’ look as “A silent protest”—it was her first public outing since being sexually assaulted—and while fashion doesn’t always telegraph a social statement when someone turns up completely naked, save for a mesh slip, a message will be sent whether the wearer intends to or not.

The message Censori signalled was unease. It’s a feeling shared by onlookers, too.

Bianca Censori wasn’t the only attendee at last night’s Grammys to don a see-through body stocking—Julia Fox wore one over a thong and a tiny bandeau (with a pair of marigolds, naturally). And while Censori’s outfit was the most controversial, I don’t think it was a lack of rubber gloves that made the whole thing so uncomfortable and grotesquely sexual.

Perhaps it was because Censori seemed so reluctant to shed her oversized fur coat that made the whole thing so uneasy. Maybe it was the fact she appeared to undress at the prompting of her husband Kanye ‘Ye’ West (the internet is abuzz with calls for a lip reader to decipher the pair’s seemingly tense exchange), or the fact that she kept tugging at the flimsy mesh hemline, an act so redundant it was painful to watch. I suspect my discomfort—and the collective unease of the internet at large—was an amalgam of all these things.

Censori might very well be a willing and enthusiastic participant in these naked stunts—if you Google her name, ‘outfits’ and ‘before Kanye’ are among the top searches—but we’ll likely never know given her bid of silence. What we do know is that Ye is a provocateur and a man who seems to get off on degrading women.

Long before deep-faking had become part of the public lexicon, West’s 2016 ‘Famous’ video featured a naked Taylor Swift waxwork in bed with him and then-wife Kim Kardashian, and, admittedly a nude lifelike George Bush, amongst others. A legal battle over the song's lyrics—“I made that bitch famous”, in reference to Swift—ensued.

More recently, while Pamela Anderson is being lauded for her role in Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl, West posted a now-deleted video of a naked Anderson circa 2008 to ‘tease’ his new album “Bully”. The naked video was overlaid with West rapping the lyric “Hide yo bitch” over and over. These are just two examples in a long list of public controversies.

West also makes a habit of parading around his paramours and taking full creative control over their wardrobes, something campaigners have called out as a sign of coercive control. Both Kim Kardashian and Julia Fox have claimed that West instructed them on what to wear and how to act while wearing it. In an episode of The Kardashians, Kourtney remembers West saying her career was over and likening her to Marge Simpson because he disagreed with her outfit choice at the Wall Street Journal Magazine’s Innovator Awards. In the same episode, Kim spoke of being “so nervous” about wearing an outfit that wasn’t “pre-vetted first”.

West’s sartorial contributions to Censori have mainly involved her going out wearing very little and facing potential jail time because of it. She could also face legal repercussions for last night’s indecent exposure under the California Penal Code 314(1) and the pair was rumoured to have been escorted out. Perhaps this is the pair’s kink, but the visual juxtaposition of a fully dressed West and an exposed Censori is too stark to ignore. What began as quiet concern is reaching a crescendo.

West, for his part, has defended posting his wife in various states of undress on social media. To ‘celebrate’ Censori’s 30th birthday last month, he shared a naked video of her in the bath with the caption “Happy birthday to the most beautiful super bad iconic muse inspirational talented artist masters degree in architecture 140 IQ loving by my side everyday [sic] when half the world turned their backs on me…”

It would be easy to chalk this all down to artist-muse syndrome, as many have. The relationship between artist and inspiration has long been a complicated subject. And perhaps, Censori is one half of a performance duo; a twisted Gilbert and George if you will. She’d join a long line of female artists using their bodies as a medium. Marina Abramović, who West has compared himself to and collaborated with, has long used herself in performance pieces, notably 1974’s Rhythm 0 performance, in which she invited the public to use 69 objects, including chains, a hairbrush and knives, on her body. And yet, even if this theory—which ardent West fans swear by—is true, what exactly is the pair trying to say? And why is Ye the only one doing the talking while his muse stays mute?

At the Grammys, every crevice of Censori was on display, even her sandals were crafted from Perspex with see-through thonged straps. If this is a means of personal expression or an attempt to challenge societal norms around modesty, sexuality, or public boundaries, the message is being lost in the medium.

Sure, it’s statement-making and it’ll spark plenty of online chatter but without a clear artistic or social purpose, it’s little more than that and it diminishes the seriousness of the conversation around body autonomy.

The line between meaningful expression and exploiting shock value for fame has always been thin with West. Now that there’s nothing left of Censori to show, perhaps it’s time they speak up. The fact that everyone else is speaking for them does little to convince concerned parties that we shouldn’t be worried about a young woman who is increasingly known only in relation to her nude body and relationship with an older, famous man.

Questioning the motives of a woman’s fashion choices feels contradictory in a post-feminism era but until Censori says otherwise, all we can go on is what the pair show us—Censori is all we see, yet Ye is all we can hear.

I joined 1 million people worldwide to march against Donald Trump’s presidency in 2017. Eight years later, there were just 1,000 of us in London. Where has the energy gone?

On a frigid January afternoon in 2017, I joined 100,000 people outside the American Embassy to show solidarity with women in the States and join the #NotMyPresident rallying cry. The mood then felt defiant and galvanising, the charged energy fired us up despite the blistering cold.

“I had just come back from three months travelling around America in 2016, and I was there when Donald Trump won the election”, remembers Eliza Hatch, an activist and TEDx speaker who joined the march. Hatch was so fired up by the movement, that she began documenting experiences of sexual harassment in public places. The photo series, called Cheer Up Luv, turned into a feminist platform and today has 169k followers on Instagram alone.

Eight years on and Trump has again dashed any dreams of America swearing in its first-ever female president (first Hillary, now Kamala), yet unlike before, just 1,000 people showed up to Saturday’s Women’s March. Where did all the energy go?

“We couldn’t move due to the number of people there,” remembers Elainea Emmott of the 2017 protest, adding: “On the tubes, I could feel a palpable change and energy.” Emmott’s work as a protest photographer started at the 2017 Women’s March in London and she worked with the organisation for five years covering weekly marches.

Emmott, whose photographs have appeared in the Together We Rise book alongside essays by Ashley Judd, Roxane Gay, and Jia Tolentino, thinks that the earlier outpouring of feminist support was because “Trump represented an unknown, [he] felt like a bigger threat with all of his “grab them by the pussy” and “angry women” rhetoric.”

And yet, there’s still so much to be angry about: violence against women and girls is a national emergency, worldwide, a woman is intentionally killed by a partner or family member every 10 minutes, and there’s been a surge in misogynistic ideology circulating on social media which new changes to fact-checking will only heighten. So why aren’t more of us marching this time?

“I sense an overwhelming activism burnout in the violence against women sector and our wider community,” says Hatch. Like many others, Hatch is feeling the backlash to feminism and is concerned by the “return to “bro culture” and rise in strongman politics” from Trump, Musk and manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate. “After eight years working in this sector, I am feeling the fatigue and weight of the challenge ahead of us, when it feels like we have already been fighting for so long.”

It’s a sentiment that Deborah Frances-White of The Guilty Feminist shares: “We will have to do a lot of protesting in the next four years and beyond. It feels as if we are exhausted already”.

Frances-White turns to Gloria Steinem when her motivation wanes: “I think of Gloria Steinem who spent decades fighting for national abortion rights in the US. Imagine a large part of your legacy being overturned when you’re 88 years old.” Yet when Frances-White spoke to the feminist icon, Steinem was surprisingly tranquil, calm, even.

“Her answer floored me,” says Frances-White: “She told me that we had abortion before Roe, we had it during Roe (in places that restricted access) and we will continue to have it after Roe, because we have the sisterhood.” Steinhem told Frances-White that we don’t define our success through patriarchal structures, “We define it through our willingness to get up and fight another day, no matter what.”

Perhaps after years of angry protesting and painful setbacks, a quieter form of protest is on the rise. We can see it in Michelle Obama’s refusal to attend Trump’s inauguration and United States Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s absence, too. Although the latter did take to social media to declare her reasons for not attending: “I don’t celebrate rapists”.

We can’t ignore the bitter truth that Trump, along with several of his cabinet nominees, has been accused of a slew of sexual misconducts including harassment and assault. Moreover, he won’t face charges for any of the 34 felony charges he’s been convicted of or the fact that a judge found E Jean Carroll’s claim that he sexually assaulted her to be “substantially true”.

This is a huge slap in the face for women all over who universally are impacted by shamefully low prosecution rates. And yet, despite a growing normalisation of misogyny and gender-based violence, women and allies are still fighting for justice and equity.

“I marched because of my own personal history with sexual assault, rape, childhood sexual abuse, and childhood domestic violence as a witness and a victim,” Jade Wade, from Sheffield, tells me. Wade says she was failed by the police when she reported her assaults, which were all dropped before they reached The Crown Prosecution Service. Despite this, she has found support and solidarity from women engaged in the sector who she says have “advocated for me and held my hand through the process of reporting to the police”.

This is the sisterhood Gloria Steinhem was speaking of and it will take more than the Manosphere to erode that.

So while there’s no denying that Donald Trump is back (did he ever really leave?) the mood isn’t as defeatist as I first thought. “The crowd was smaller but the energy was much more focused and electric, helped by the banners and the wonderful SambaSistersCollective”, says Emmott. Adds Hatch: “There was joy, solidarity and resistance from all the women and allies attending the march on the weekend.”

The fight is far from over.

Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire tech giant and Meta CEO, wants to see a more aggressive corporate culture—should we be worried?

To round off an extraordinarily chaotic news week, Mark Zuckerberg appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast announcing that companies need more “masculine energy”.

Zuckerberg, who, lest we forget, created Facebook as a platform for voting on a woman’s attractiveness, has never shied away from controversial opinions, but this new approach feels cannily catered towards a growing movement of free speech absolutists. In other words, he’s following Elon Musk’s playbook.

In addition to calling the corporate world “culturally neutered” and proclaiming the benefits of a culture that “celebrates the aggression”, Zuckerberg spoke to Rogan about his plans to remove third-party fact-checking in favour of an X-model of community regulation.

The news, which has drawn the ire of many high-profile public figures such as Prince Harry and Meghan—who say the policy changes “should deeply concern us all”—has been defended by Meta. In a statement released by the newly appointed Joel Kaplan, who has taken over former UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg as Chief Global Affairs Officer, policy changes were described as: “a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing – and one that’s less prone to bias.”

Despite critics finding X’s crowdsourced Community Notes feature to be “mostly unhelpful” in tackling content moderation and misinformation, Zuckerberg said Meta will “phase in Community Notes in the US first over the next couple of months” according to an official press release. The same report, posted on the Meta Newsroom, goes on to cite X as the inspiration for this model of free speech and fact-checking, or lack thereof.

As one of the largest social media networks in the world, Meta has long been under scrutiny for its role in spreading false or misleading content. Fact-checking programs—once a key part of its strategy to combat this issue—provided a layer of scrutiny for posts that could potentially mislead or harm users.

Kaplan says that when Meta launched its independent fact-checking programme in 2016, they never intended to be “the arbiters of truth” and that in recent years, too much harmless content has been censored and “too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in ‘Facebook jail’”.

The worry here is that Meta relaxing its content moderation policies allows harmful rhetoric—namely misogyny and hate speech against women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and marginalised communities—to proliferate. Scrapping fact-checking and content bans—in much the same way Musk did when he bought Twitter (now X)—provides a space for extreme right-wing and misogynistic views to flourish.

Habiba Katsha, a reporter for People Of Color In Tech, says she’s worried about how the new Meta moves—which, like Amazon, also include scaling back its diversity initiatives—will lead to an increase of online abuse for people of colour. “As someone with over 18,000 followers on X, I’ve noticed a spike in online abuse since Elon Musk took over X and introduced the community notes feature.” says Katsha.

Despite both tech billionaires being criticised for contributing to the spread of misogyny and ultra-conservative ideologies, up until recently, neither explicitly aligned themselves with political parties or movements. Instead, they let their platforms and statements enable and amplify those narratives.

With Trump getting ready to return to the White House, the masks have officially fallen. Through their platforms and public personas, both are acting as willing enablers of a wider cultural shift that is amplifying conservative, often misogynistic voices. As one user on X put it: “Zuckerberg saying that workplaces have become too feminized is by far the craziest example of the vibe shift I’ve seen so far”.

The vibe shift critics are concerned about: Ultra-conservative, often anti-women and anti-minorities. Experts argue that Meta’s moves towards moderation—such as restoring accounts previously banned for spreading hate speech or misinformation—align with conservative movements that often propagate anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric.

We’ve already seen how women and people of colour are primed to be targets. Within hours of Trump’s election win, the slogan “Your body, my choice. Forever” began circulating online, racking up millions of views. Around that time, Black people were targeted with hideously racist messages, which the FBI is still investigating.

Furthermore, a report published by Onyx Impact found that Black people are more likely to encounter disinformation and fake news. The biggest-ever UK survey into online violence against women also found that women are often targeted by online harassment and face the brunt of the misogynistic and far-right ideologies circulating on these platforms.

Despite their proclamations to the contrary, both Zuckerberg and Musk are amplifying harmful rhetoric and eroding online safety by prioritising ‘free speech’ at the expense of safer online environments. It’s unlikely these ideologies will stay confined to online spaces.

Today is ‘Quitter’s Day’ — the point in January when New Year’s resolutions quietly (or not so quietly) fall apart. For the uninitiated, it’s the day that most of us abandon the ambitious promises we made to ourselves just weeks earlier when we thought we might conveniently wake up on January 1st as different people. People who not only have the wherewithal to wake up at 6 am to journal and do a quick round of calisthenics, but the zeal to boot.

The chippy ‘Quitter’s Day’ moniker comes from a study by Strava — which, again, for the uninitiated, is essentially Instagram for athletes — tracking when users were most likely to drop off their shiny new fitness goals. In a glimmer of good news, Strava data now puts ‘Quitter’s Day’ as the second Tuesday of January (yes, I’m afraid you might have to slog it out for a few more days yet), but the original Friday stuck and now there’s a second ‘New Year, New Me’ cohort cheering for the desertion of resolutions with much the same enthusiasm as was met with starting them such a short time ago.

According to Strava’s ongoing research into habit formation, a large majority of us will give up on our New Year’s resolutions by next Tuesday. This sounds bleak until you consider how unrealistic many of those goals are in the first place. After all, January is cold, dark, expensive, and emotionally fragile — hardly the ideal backdrop for total personal reinvention. So instead of berating ourselves for failing to become a “new you” overnight, maybe the problem isn’t our willpower, but the perfectionism baked into the whole idea.

It’s certainly an idea that Leena Norms subscribes to. The author of Half-Arse Human: How to Live Better Without Burning Out, Leena argues that quitting isn’t a moral failure; it’s often a form of self-knowledge. Rather than doubling down on all-or-nothing resolutions, she suggests putting perfectionism aside and embracing goals that are flexible, human, and sustainable. In other words: less “new year, new me”, more “same me, but with slightly kinder expectations”. Read on for Leena’s take...

By Leena Norms

There’s no polite way to say it. I am a half-arser.

I’m the person who promises you a cup of tea and wanders off halfway through brewing it. I own fifty fancy notebooks, all abandoned after filling in the first few pages. If I say “file attached” in an email, I can guarantee that the file is more likely to be partying in Vegas with a mojito in hand than attached to that email. I have been known to shave just ONE leg in the shower, shrug and get out. My washing machine is full of wet clothes, my browser is a breeding ground for open tabs, and the jumper I was going to knit you last Christmas still doesn’t have any sleeves.

You’d think, with such a natural inclination to shruggery, I wouldn’t be big on New Year’s Resolutions. You’d be wrong. Every January, I would have a saucy, scandalous fling with New Year’s Resolutions. We’d wink across the bar, smear lipstick everywhere, make beautiful vision board babies together and then toast to our future as the sun rose on what promised to be ‘my year’. The year I change it all; lose everything I want to lose, and gain what I’ve always wanted to gain. The year I get an overnight personality transplant, swing my spirit on an axis and become the opposite of a half-arser—the year I will become ‘the new me’.

Except, by the 10th of January I’m back to my damp-laundry, half-hairy, tab-jumping grizzly old self. Cinderella’s carriage is a pumpkin once more.

Am I a failure? Yes and no.

I realised that it wasn’t my ‘lazy, flaky, insincere’ self that needed fixing. It was my expectations. I’d failed at understanding myself and the way I change. The ‘how’ of goals turns out to be as important as the ‘what’ or the ‘why’.

I’m someone who needs gradual change, low bars, flexible schedules and small incentives. Tell me to run every day and I’ll run once and then hide my running gear. Tell me to jog five times in January, but I get to pick when and for how long and I get a sticker as a reward at the end? I’m in. I’ve slowly realised that my life isn’t a movie – I’m not one transformation montage away from becoming someone completely different. And thank goodness. The current ‘me’ is who my friends are fond of, the one my partner fell in love with, the person who built the job I adore and picked the favourite mug I dote on.

We know now, thanks to science, that our minds are capable of change on a structural level; the nerve circuits in our brain are much more malleable and willing to upgrade themselves than we previously guessed. We’re not stuck with the wiring we had as children, or even the ones we have now. Thanks to neuroplasticity, change does happen. But it doesn’t happen when the clock strikes midnight.

Habits are like muscles. You can’t just walk up to the bonnet of a car and expect to lift it in the air just because your New Year’s resolution was to be stronger.

Enter, my half-arse method. Got dreams? Halve them. Got a to-do list? Rip it in two and only keep the best bits. Want to try veganism? Start by eating a vegan breakfast. Want to get fit? Put your shopping at the other end of the house and walk each item to the kitchen individually. Want to improve your skincare routine? Just pledge to wear SPF every day, come rain or shine. Want to read twenty books this year? Dare yourself to read ten.

In my book, Half-Arse Human: how to live better without burning out, you’ll find a whole lot more ideas on how to halve your to-do list and double your wins — from housework to personal style, career choices to friendship maintenance. One of my favourite ideas I did last New Year was to create a ‘bingo card’ for my ambitions. I wanted to get better at sewing, so I created a grid with nine skills I thought would be useful to learn. That way, my resolution didn’t become a piece of homework that I could pass or fail; it became a ‘menu’ of different small wins I could pick from, depending on the resources future-me had to give.

Ultimately, I’ve found that whilst ‘half-arsing’ might seem unambitious to onlookers, you and I know the real truth: that you were never going to ‘whole-arse’ it anyway. It may be a new year, but you are the old you. And that’s okay. Just because you can’t commit 100% to something, doesn’t mean you can’t dip your toe in. Committing to half-arsing your goals this year can avoid two worse outcomes: burnout, from trying to be superhuman rather than just simply human – or remaining in freeze response, too scared to even begin.

When you think about it that way, a ‘half-arser’ is far from the worst thing you could be. In fact, it might be the key to keeping the resolve in your resolutions. It might mean a slow, slapdash revolution that creeps up on you while you’re busy playing bingo. A change that stays around, long after the discoballs and decorations have been packed away. After all: anything worth doing, is worth half-arsing.

Leena Norms is a poet, vlogger and presenter. She has amassed over 24 million views on her YouTube channel and was named Book Vlogger of the Year by London Book Fair in 2020. Half-Arse Human: how to live better without burning out is published by John Murray Press, available in hardback, eBook or Audio now.

There are a couple of reasons that people often exclaim that their favourite part about Christmas is the food. The first one is, obviously, because the food is so ace. Eating a tube of Pringles to yourself isn’t just common, but encouraged, there’s choccy galore, and don’t get me started on the glory that is bread sauce. The second—and in my eyes—the most probable reason is that most of the language about dieting, health and restrictions around food is thrown out of the window for the festive season. Having a lunch that is only cold pigs in blankets and leftover cheeses? Go for it! Want to start the day with a thimble of orange juice and a full glass of Prosecco? Let me join you!

At least, this was how my household held itself growing up, although it must be said, my mam was very strict about nobody eating a thing until the clock chimed on the 25th of December. To open a tub of Celebrations before Christmas Day had officially started was at one’s own risk. Still, even that was more a part of the fun of the season than anything related to shaming someone stuffing their face. I always cherished the precious days between Xmas and New Year’s Day as a safe haven from diet language and a time to do what I truly adore most in the world—indulge.

In the years since leaving home, I’ve noticed that this celebration of self-satisfaction isn’t always extended to me and my fellow fat people. I’ve left many a Crimbo party with a rumbling belly because I simply can’t be arsed with the embarrassment of fatphobic eyes watching me visiting the buffet more times than my thin peers. I’ve listened to colleagues say that they will live to regret eating more than a handful of Twiglets in one sitting, and felt like the literal elephant in the room while friends of friends discuss their January pilates plans to burn off the guilt of enjoying their food for the holiday season.

Being around people who feel obliged to offset their indulgences with an apology and an aspiration to do better serves as a boot camp for the worst time of year to ever be fat—January. Even while enjoying my dalliances with clotted cream, pâté and Malteser truffles through December, a dread seeps in from anticipating the unabashed fat shaming that will come in the month that follows. We all know what to expect from the first month of the year now—a slew of adverts telling us all the ways our bodies are wrong (read: fat) and selling us all the new diet plans, injectables and gym memberships that will help us get back on the “right” (read: thin) track.

The spectre of ‘New Year, New Me’ rhetoric has gotten more invasive in recent Decembers. With the world turning its back on the body-positive language and mission statements of the 2010s by riding the Ozempic train back to the fatphobic pop culture pillars of the early 00s, advertisements, TikTok trends and comment sections are back to being blatant in their hatred of bigger bodies. It’s all the harder to let loose on the Quality Street tin when your algorithm isn’t leaning into the indulgences of the season with you.

It makes it all the worse when, alongside traditional media’s adoration of blatant body shaming, our phone screens start pushing similar ideologies on us. The internet is an open forum and as fatphobia has become more normalised, commenters and creators feel more comfortable sharing their vitriol too. Platforms like X hold space not just for fatphobia, but for eating disorder communities. It’s undoubtedly a rough time to be online as anyone who isn't interested in restricting their diets—Christmas or no—which is why I encourage us all to swap out our social media scrolling in favour of a safe boxset this season.

The point of indulging, especially at the time of year built around enjoying yourself, is to have fun. And part of the indulging process isn’t just filling your boots with everything you adore, but making sure to bog off all the parts of life that make you feel bad. If that’s putting the phone down for a bit so you don’t scroll across any trolls, investing in an ad blocker for your laptop or watching Elf on repeat so a new show doesn’t catch you off guard with a bit of body shaming, then go for it.

Indulging isn’t just about saying yes to everything you want; it’s about creating a safe space to enjoy yourself. It’s hard enough to block out the internalised self-hatred we’re fed by society, don’t let ignorant external sources like marketeers and misinformed influencers get in your way.

Greedy Guts by Gina Tonic is published on 6 March 2025 and available to pre-order now.

When my toddler is (finally!) In bed, I go downstairs, clean up the chaos of the living room, collapse onto the sofa, and do the worst thing any mother can do — I open up Instagram. Within a few minutes of scrolling, no matter how much I feel I’ve aced parenting that day, I feel terrible about myself. Especially when I compare myself to all the supposedly ‘perfect’ Mumfluencers or parenting advice accounts I follow (despite knowing better).

My new novel is all about the lies we tell about motherhood, and I really had to look at how the expectations given to new mums online differ from the actuality.

I know, intellectually, that social media is terrible for our collective mental health. I know it creates unhealthy expectations and a toxic comparison culture. I know that nobody is really their authentic selves on there, and yet I still find myself dwelling in the gap between the Insta-expectations, and the reality.

So, in an effort to put to bed the myths about motherhood, let me talk you through how social media has helped—and hindered—me in the early years of my daughter’s life.

Maternity Leave

Expectation: I imagined sitting in a café, eating cake, while my baby slept in a pram next to me. I thought I could even use the ‘break’ to set up a side hustle.

Reality: As a self-employed writer, I quickly realised I couldn’t actually afford to take maternity leave and ‘returned to work’ after three weeks, which was as deranged as it sounds. I spent most of the first year of my baby’s life, rage-crying from sleep deprivation, covered in milk and vomit stains, and I think she ‘napped in the pram’ once and only because she had a fever. I wrote my latest novel, an arson whodunnit set at a baby shower (spot the metaphor), in a pitch-black room while my baby slept fully attached to my nipple as that was the only way she’d sleep. Cake did get me through though, to be fair.

Sleep

Expectation: There are few parenting topics more divisive online than the issue of infant sleep, and exhausted parents will most likely find themselves down internet wormholes at 3 am after their sixth wake of the night, clicking on an advert for a robotic cot or organic lavender spray. Alongside this, there are many, many, accounts preaching the importance of totally-responsive, attachment-led approaches to sleep that involve letting the baby use your breast as a dummy throughout the night while you bedshare, reassuring you that ‘they will usually grow out of this by aged six’ – like that’s a nearby goal.

Reality: I was delirious with sleep deprivation. Depraved. Unreasonable. Hallucinating at some points, and crying almost every hour. Yes, my baby was being responded to, but she was being responded to by a totally unhinged parent. I eventually caved and hired a very expensive ‘holistic sleep consultant’ who then refunded me the money when she, too, couldn’t work out how to get my baby to sleep. Using the age-old Nora Ephron wisdom of “everything is copy” – I wrote a severely sleep-deprived mother into my book. Though the novel is a whodunnit and therefore involved intricate planning, I have no memory of writing it as I wasn’t sleeping in long enough bursts of sleep to get any REM. Eventually, thankfully, we found Sarah Carpenter, co-host of the Sleep Mums podcast, who taught us gentle and responsive sleep training techniques that actually worked for us. But I still have two unused tubes of organic lavender cot spray if anyone wants one?

Gentle Parenting

Expectation: We are the generation that is going to break the cycle. We are doing the work. We are going to re-parent ourselves and then become experts in self-regulation, and calmly name our child’s feelings, and validate those feelings all the while holding firm boundaries.

Reality: Naming a toddler’s feelings when you’ve just told them they can’t have any chocolate buttons is like bringing a knife to a gunfight. As for self-regulation: well, you might manage it on the first tantrum of the day, but, by the fifth, when you’re in Sainsbury’s and your kid is screaming so hard security starts worrying you might’ve kidnapped them…well the only obvious response is to get on the floor and start crying with them.

Bounceback Culture

Expectation: I am a feminist! Diet culture is horrific! Bounceback culture is toxic! I am going to love and appreciate my body for the miracle that it is and the life that it grew. I am also…looking at all these other pictures of other mothers who are posting pictures of themselves in their pre-baby jeans, days after their six-week check-up and hating myself.

Reality: Diet culture might be horrific, but it’s powerful, and I am one of those women who found pregnancy changed my body quite drastically, and permanently. And it’s embarrassing to admit how hard I’ve found that. Even after weaning my daughter, and upping my cardio and healthy eating, my body has determinedly stayed larger, and I have not found enough accounts talking about this. Also, feminism, yes, but nobody talks about the practical side of post-partum body changes. Buying an entirely new wardrobe from scratch is expensive. Learning how to dress an entirely different body type after thirty-seven years of knowing what suits you is discombobulating. Where is this content? I need it!

Christmas

Expectation: You gotta make those precious memories! Matching pyjamas. Homemade gingerbread that you ice together. Immersive light shows. Santa’s Grotto. A front porch that looks like it’s been staged for the Selling Sunset Christmas special. Taking them to an expensive show with a snow machine. Ditto Christmas markets. And, now, apparently, according to loads of people I follow, we’re supposed to take our kids to actual Lapland too?

Reality: I had a wake-up call the other day, when, after my toddler’s nap, I was trying to get her out of the house to some “Grotto train thing” I’d been told about, despite the fact she’d spent the morning at a festive craft fair. She refused to leave the house. Flat-out, no-negotiation-possible, call-that exorcist-in-again refused. And, through her tears, she stopped and said, heart-breakingly, “Mummy, I just want to stay in and play with you.” And I listened. I really listened, and said, “OK honey, let’s play.” Then, for two full hours, I gave her the present of totally child-led play that had nothing to do with Christmas, but, by the end of it, she was glowing like Baby Jesus in a manger. It was such an important reminder to me, that all our kids really want for Christmas is to be seen, heard, and loved by their parents. I have no photos of those two hours we spent playing together…but my memories of that afternoon will last forever, and hopefully hers will too.

The online advice that has actually been helpful

I saw a parenting Instagram post earlier this year about time travel that really stuck. It said, whenever you remember, take a moment to think about how much you’ll long to travel in a time machine back to this moment when you are older. I used to hate the people who told me I would ‘miss those baby snuggles’ when I had a newborn because I was finding things so difficult, but they were right. Now my child (mostly) sleeps, she rarely cuddles, and I yearn sometimes to return to those moments sitting in the dark, her gently suckling at my body. Listening to Slipping Through My Fingers by ABBA also does the trick. It’s not about pretending the hard bits aren’t hard, because they are. But, I can sometimes realise how magical every day is as a parent. Last week, I watched my daughter race ahead down a path, giddy with excitement, because we were going to feed the ducks, and I did the time-travel trick and felt so holy with gratitude that it was basically profound. And, yes, it was the same day that I later cried on the floor of Sainsbury’s, but that’s parenting—highs, lows, and learning how to let go of the noise and trust your instincts.

So Thrilled For You by Holly Bourne is published in hardback on 16 January 2025 by Hodder & Stoughton, and available to pre-order now.

Trigger warning: this story involves depictions of sexual assault

Dominique Pélicot—one of France’s worst sex offenders—has been found guilty of drugging his ex-wife, Gisèle Pélicot, raping her and inviting scores of strangers to their home to abuse her. In his closing statement, Dominique Pélicot apologised and asked for his family’s forgiveness. Can he really believe he’s worthy of it?

In keeping with the French judicial system, the final word of the trial went not to the brave Gisèle but to her husband, who has admitted to repeatedly drugging and raping his wife and inviting as many as 50 strangers—several of whom returned—to join in abusing Gisèle over a nine-year period from 2011 to 2020. Dominique, despite admitting to a horrifying catalogue of abuse, used his time on the stand to plead for his family’s forgiveness. Can anyone really be surprised that a man who has demonstrated a horrifying capacity to inflict physical and psychological damage would be so preoccupied with his own selfish needs?

His statement began oddly enough with him praising his wife’s courage. Gisèle’s irrefutable strength is not up for debate—she was named The New European’s Person of the Year and a mock cover of her on Time Magazine’s annual Person of The Year issue has been doing the rounds on social media. As if to provide a stark visual depiction of our polarised times, Donald Trump was the actual recipient of Time’s accolade. And yet, coming from Dominique Pélicot, this praise feels cruelly patronising and rooted in self-preservation. By writing himself into Gisèle’s powerful display of determination he is aligning himself with her bravery instead of her abuse.

“I’m looking for someone to abuse my wife asleep.” is just one example of the many messages Dominique Pélicot posted on online forums for other men, who, as he put it: “like rape mode.” Telling the court that he “regretted” what he had done, Dominique Pélicot then went on to say “I have been called many things, but I rather intend to be forgotten”. What an unworthy privilege that would be—to be forgotten and therefore never truly held accountable for his heinous crimes. How dare he praise Gisèle Pélicot’s courage. Gisèle waived her legal right to anonymity not only as an act of defiance but as a way to show other survivors that the shame in sexual assault belongs to the abuser, not the abused. Meanwhile, Dominique, like his co-defendants who turned up to court hidden behind face masks, caps, and snoods, wishes to slip silently into obscurity.

He seems willing to accept punishment in the form of prison but has evidenced his desire to evade justice elsewhere, Dominique Pélicot wants to be forgotten in the court of public opinion (he surely knows this is the best he could hope for), but forgiven at home. This, to me, shows a staggering lack of accountability and a worrying absence of awareness. Can anyone truly believe this is a crime that could be forgotten, let alone forgiven?

And yet, as I think about all the men who have been both forgotten and forgiven, I find my initial bewilderment that a man accused of violating his wife in the most violent and invasive way could ever hope for forgiveness settling into something altogether sadder: a realisation that in some circles, he may already be forgiven.

Ben Hurst on the importance of rethinking masculinities and why the patriarchy and traditional gender roles damage men as well as women.

There’s a growing gender divide, and the youngest generation is getting caught in the crossfire. Earlier this year, a UK study revealed a troubling trend—one in six men aged 16-29 believe feminism has done more harm than good, while one-fifth of respondents viewed Andrew Tate favourably, sparking debates about whether decades of feminism are being undone.

In America, Google searches for “4B”—a radical feminist movement which sees women swearing off men entirely—surged by 450% after young men decisively voted for Donald Trump. The 4B movement has gained traction in the UK, too, with women turning away from men in response to a growing sense of mistrust. It feels like men and women are more divided than ever, leaving many wondering what it will take to bridge the gnawing gap.

Empathy is one answer, suggests Ben Hurst, an activist, educator, and TEDx Talks speaker. Hurst is the Director of Facilitation at Beyond Equality, a UK-based organisation that engages men and boys in the gender equality conversation. He says we need to rethink masculinity and address the ways traditional gender roles harm men as well as women. “There are things we assume everyone should see the same way we do,” Hurst explains, “But based on positionality, everyone’s experiences and frameworks for understanding are different.” He believes that creating a space where men feel safe to explore these differences without fear of judgment is critical to beginning to bridge the gap.

A huge part of his work is about holding space for people to have differing opinions. Thanks to the internet, it’s never been easier—or more deliberately enticing—to live in our own echo chambers, but cancel culture can fuel divisions and force people further into their beliefs.

For young boys and men today, a lot of these beliefs are being shaped by the influence of the ‘manosphere’—an online subculture that promotes anti-feminism and hyper-masculine ideologies.

“We can safely assume that most young people, to varying extents, have come into contact with it—whether that’s through TikTok, a Reddit forum or something deeper like Andrew Tate’s War Room,” explains Hurst. His work isn’t necessarily about countering the ideas being spouted online but giving young men and boys the tools to critically analyse these messages. “A lot of our work is about allowing young people to talk about what they’re experiencing, what’s coming up for them and what they’re seeing and then learning how to critique it and how to be more media literate.” It’s slow work, he says, but crucial for helping males untangle themselves from the contradictory and isolating messages about gender and relationships that they’re bombarded with.

“Men are suffering from loneliness and one of the big things that comes out of this online world is that the narratives are so confusing and so contradictory,” says Hurst. Young men are being told they shouldn’t need anyone, that asking for help is weak, and that their struggles are the fault of women. “I think all of that stuff leads to a real sense of loneliness and a real sense of isolation.”

Although men are often thought of as beneficiaries of patriarchal systems, Hurst points out that these systems harm men, too. “Men are the primary victims of men’s violence, and boys are falling behind in education.” Yet instead of examining the structural causes, many men just blame women when the reality is, that these systems were built to benefit a small subset of men—most men aren’t beneficiaries in the way they think they are. Before they can become allies, Hurst explains that men first have to understand how these rigid gender roles impact their own lives. “There’s a lot of work to be done to help guys understand without using the language of social justice and systemic oppression.”

Hurst’s work focuses on creating spaces where men feel safe, seen, and heard—it’s this, he argues, that helps them see that masculinity varies from person to person. Only then can they start to unpack the impact of patriarchal systems on people who fall outside of their experiences. This empathy-building is slow work, but he remains hopeful. “Every man that you have a conversation with who changes their perspective has a massive ripple effect throughout their life and their community.”

As Beyond Equality reaches its tenth anniversary, Hurst is looking towards the future of male allyship. He’s wary of the “false narrative being spread”, which is that if male emotional literacy is solved, everything else will be resolved. Male emotional literacy is the by-product of a broken system, he argues, “This means that at some point, it’s gonna have to be more than just teaching men that it’s OK to cry.”

For now, the big thing is getting more people to understand the work and what role it has in society. What Hurst wants is collaboration, it’s the only way he can see real lasting change happening. “I think if women and girls could solve gender-based violence, it would have been solved a long time ago. If they could do it by themselves, it would have been fixed.”

He aims to give men and boys the tools to critique systems and ultimately find healthier ways to relate to themselves and others. It’s a big task but even the smallest ripple can grow into a wave of change.

Undercover investigative reporter Ellie Flynn’s latest documentary exposes sexual harassment in Magaluf, but unlike her other investigations—such as revealing Temu’s toxic products—not everyone on social media is convinced. As part of our 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence campaign, Ellie Flynn tells us what she’s learned about victim-blaming and asks what it will take for women to finally be believed?

In investigative reporter Ellie Flynn’s latest Channel 4 Untold documentary—Magaluf Undercover – Predators & Parties—she lies slumped on a beach lounger seemingly drunk and alone. It’s a convincing portrayal and, as feared, a man soon approaches her: “You are my last chance” he says before asking if she wants to “kiss a little bit”.

The clip has been viewed 257k times on Instagram alone and has 284 comments at the time of writing. It’s these comments that I want to speak to Flynn about because amongst the shock, horror, and outrage there is also victim blaming: “Stop being victims by over drinking it puts people at risk”; unsolicited advice: “Moral of the story beware of your surroundings...”; and most odious of all, overt misogyny and denial: “she was recording and setting people up”.

In the clip, Flynn asks “What is it about these kinds of holidays that seem to put women at risk?” but the question I want to know when we sit across from each other is: What will it take for people to believe women about sexual harassment and assault?

Despite damning evidence captured on film—including the chilling soundbite, “She is completely wasted... Let’s go for it!”—there’s still widespread reluctance to hold perpetrators accountable. “She proved that shes [sic] not able to actually follow through with her research…” reads one comment about the fact that Flynn signalled security to get her out of what was visibly a worrying situation. Comments like this reveal a pervasive narrative—questioning the victim’s actions rather than condemning the offender's behaviour.

Flynn is all too familiar with these attitudes. With over a decade of reporting experience, she’s noticed firsthand a troubling trend—victim blaming has become more brazen. “There are people who are more openly victim blaming who are very quick to negate whatever reporting it is I’ve done because I think they feel like they can,” Flynn explains, citing the dangerous precedent set by powerful men accused of similar offences. “If you can make it to the presidency of the United States or to be one of the most powerful, richest men in the world by saying these things, with allegations stacked up against you, it does show young men that you can say and do whatever you want”.

Despite her work often focusing on the female experience and the dangers women face (often at the hands of men), Flynn is keenly aware of how difficult it is for young men and boys today. It’s something she thinks about a lot—as both a journalist and a mother of a two-year-old son. She makes a conscious effort to not group all men together, but she’s wise to the widening gap between the way that young women and young men think, feel, act and vote—something she sees as becoming really problematic.

Her work has started to unveil another troubling issue—conversations about sexual assault are often happening in silos. “You have young women saying; ‘Here are our experiences, we want things to change,’” says Flynn, and while some men engage with this conversation, others feel attacked by it. “There are a lot of men who I think feel triggered by those conversations and say, ‘Well, I’m not like that. I’m not violent. I’m not aggressive, why are you making me out to be a bad guy?’ Then there are powerful men who take that feeling of insecurity and turn it into something violent.” You only need to take a quick look at X following Trump’s win to see the jubilant misogyny on display and know that male defensiveness and insecurity are easily weaponised by voices like Andrew Tate.

This division fuels a dangerous cycle. Defensive reactions easily evolve into excuses for predatory behaviour—suggestions that the victim was too intoxicated, or even complicit. As Flynn puts it, “They make excuses for other men’s predatory behaviour because they don’t want to be painted with the same brush, but that just fuels this whole problem.” The underlying message? Women must bear the responsibility for preventing their own assaults.

This isn’t the only challenge Flynn faces in her reporting—the demand for “proof” is huge. She says that the responses sometimes make her question whether it would take something catastrophic happening to her for people to be “satisfied”.

“I think it would take me being actually sexually assaulted on camera for them to believe it,” says Flynn of the deniers. Even then, she questions whether people would find another excuse. “I am putting my personal safety at risk every time I do this. I do push it to a point where I’m feeling really afraid, but I let things go quite far because I think it’s important journalistically to prove that intent.” It’s frustrating that so many responses undermine her reporting and the very real danger she faces by exposing violence against women and girls. “It’s like, well, what do you want from me; what do you actually want to happen to me—what is gonna make you believe that this is real?”

This expectation underscores a chilling reality, our threshold for validating sexual assault allegations is disturbingly high. Victims are expected to deliver impossible levels of proof while their experiences are scrutinised more intensely than the perpetrator’s actions. We see this in the shamefully low prosecution rates for sexist crimes and the refusal to believe victims even when faced with seemingly irrefutable evidence or even a guilty conviction—a statistical rarity in sexual offences—as evidenced in the staunch defence of Conor McGregor.

“I think that they are people who want to blame women, who want to negate this issue and who don’t want to believe that it’s a problem,” Flynn adds.

She knows that there are good male allies, but she wants to start seeing a broader understanding and sympathy for the dangers women face and for men to be proactively involved in that conversation. She wants more men to think about the daily fear women have to live with—a theme that’s been playing out since Saoirse Ronan’s viral soundbite last month. “We talk about the really extreme cases, but there’s also this very real element of just fear. The fear of going out and walking alone is another huge issue.”

Ultimately, Magaluf Undercover exposes more than just predatory behaviour on a Spanish party island; it reveals how deeply entrenched rape culture remains. The reluctance to believe women, the knee-jerk defences of male behaviour, and the endless cycle of victim blaming all point to a grim truth—too many people are more invested in preserving their worldview than addressing systemic issues.

As Flynn concludes, I don’t get that [level of defensiveness] in other types of undercover reporting, and I think that that’s really telling.” Until as a society, we shift the focus from scrutinising victims to holding perpetrators accountable, the cycle will continue, leaving women like Flynn to ask, “What will it take for you to believe us?”

As part of Marie Claire UK’s 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence campaign, journalist, campaigner and TEDx Talks speaker Chloe Laws examines just how gendered gender-based violence is.

This article contains themes of sexual assault and violence

As of writing, I have thirty mutual friends following Conor McGregor on Instagram. Some are close friends, others are acquaintances, ex-colleagues, people I briefly knew at university or school. I checked again after seeing a viral post about why it’s important to unfollow McGregor — as a sign of solidarity, to weaken his brand, to hurt his pocket — and I wasn’t expecting to see more than a couple of names. McGregor, it seems, is still wildly popular despite being found guilty of rape.

On Friday November 22, Ireland’s High Court ruled that Conor McGregor assaulted Nikita Hand in December 2018, awarding her €248,604 (approximately £206,000) in damages.

McGregor, in a post on X (formerly Twitter) later that evening, announced plans to appeal the verdict and expressed gratitude to his supporters, stating, “I am with my family now, focused on my future.”

The court heard how the mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter pinned Hand to a bed and assaulted her, leaving her with extensive bruising and abrasions across her body, including her hands, wrists, and neck. She also sustained a bloodied scratch on her breast and tenderness from being placed in a “chokehold”. McGregor denied responsibility for the injuries, claiming they might have occurred after she “swan-dived” into the bath.

Hand was taken to the Rotunda Hospital’s Sexual Assault Treatment Unit the following day, where a paramedic described her injuries as some of the worst bruising she had seen in years. Dr. Daniel Kane, who assessed her, testified that a tampon was “wedged” at the top of her vagina, with possible internal tearing, and that she suffered multiple “moderate to severe” injuries, including bruising on all four limbs.

The court also heard that the assault had devastating effects on Hand’s life. She left her job as a hairdresser due to ongoing mental health struggles, her relationship ended months later, and she was forced to leave her home in Drimnagh, with her mortgage falling into arrears. She stopped attending counselling sessions because she could no longer afford them and had spent over €4,000 (£3,326) on GP, pharmacy, and psychotherapy costs.

It has also been reported that three masked men broke into Nikita Hand’s house just months before the hearing of her civil action. Her partner fought the men off but suffered non-life-threatening stab wounds. Nothing was stolen from her home during the incident, which occurred around 2.20 am on June 14 this year.

This guilty verdict has felt like a win for survivors of sexual assault everywhere. It is so rare that rapists are persecuted, especially when they are a white, successful, famous man with multiple levels of intersecting privilege. In the year ending December 2023, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) charged just 3,717 adult and child rape cases, which is only 5.4% of the 68,387 recorded rapes.

Calls to a rape helpline almost doubled over the weekend following the verdict of the civil rape case against Conor McGregor, the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre has said. Rachel Morrogh, chief executive of the crisis centre, told the BBC that the number of first-time callers increased by 50% over the weekend: “In the six hours immediately after the verdict was delivered on Friday afternoon the calls surged by 150%.”

There has been an outpouring of support for Nikita Hand — mostly from women — but, sadly, there has also been an equally loud, maybe larger, outpouring of support for McGregor. This case highlights just how gendered gendered-violence is. An estimated 91% of victims of rape & sexual assault are female compared to 9% male. Nearly 99% of perpetrators are male.

Since the news broke, McGregor has been defended by thousands online, including high-profile figures, many from far-right circles. Andrew Tate tweeted yesterday that he would vote for McGregor as “president of Ireland” before it’s “too late.”

The Tate brothers went further, victim-blaming Hand and claiming McGregor is innocent because she’s “a 3 out of 10 at best.” This has been a well-trodden rape myth that has been perpetrated throughout Hand’s case with supporters claiming that McGregor would not rape Hand, because she is not ‘attractive enough’. Lies like these are not only deeply misogynistic and objectifying, but they sustain rape culture and the idea that it is about sexual intimacy and attraction. Rape is not sex — it is not about sex, it is about power and abuse.

This case is a stark reminder that even a guilty verdict won’t silence rape apologists. Conor McGregor was found guilty in civil court, and Nikita Hand’s evidence was both gruesome and overwhelming, yet a quick search of her name on X reveals how many people are intent on not believing her in favour of supporting a man found guilty of rape. We have a long way to go in dismantling the patriarchal, violent, systemic structures that protect rapists and vilify victims. Nikita Hand has moved mountains in this fight.

For further help and support or to find a Rape Crisis Centre in your local area, please visit Rape Crisis