"9am is too early for tits."

The New Statesman’s website chucked out an old 2010 Laurie Penny blog today, and it’s lost none of its relevance; it reminds us that every time a feminist, or a mother or father, or a sexual assault victim, or a woman who’s sick of feeling like society appraises her based on her sexual worth above all else, or merely a person who’s sick of having anonymous tits thrust at them – every time anyone says they don’t want to be confronted with sexually suggestive imagery in public every day, someone accuses them of taking it too seriously.

Here’s a few of the common responses:

- “You wouldn’t be so up in arms if it was men who’re being objectified”.
- “The female form is natural - it’s prudish and anti-feminist to be ashamed of it and want to hide it”
- “The women that work in this industry are empowered, not victims”

“You wouldn’t be so up in arms if it was men who’re being objectified.”
But that’s part of the point. It’s NOT. You get the odd male chest here and there, but people don’t walk into their newsagent with their children for a pint of milk and see a man bent double, airing his butt-cheeks at the world. Male genitalia does not pepper the inside of phoneboxes (and end up on the pavement – see Euston Road on any given morning) or the inside of a so-called “family paper”. Those who protest against constant female objectification are complaining about the landscape they live in, not some theoretical world.

That landscape is the surface of a society that has existed for hundreds and hundreds of years in this country. It’s a society in which women have been regarded first as chattel and the sexual property of men, then more recently as deserving of a political and literary voice as long as they accept the boundaries of such “freedom” and respect men’s ultimate superiority… and now as supposed equals, as long as they’re willing to put up with lower pay, economic disposability during recession and the task of ensuring that, from adolescence to late middle-age, they fit in the uncomfortably small acceptable domain between appearing sexually pliant and morally infallible.

Whether or not ordinary men (who’ve grown up with the idea of treating women as equals) really want them to fit in that paradoxical identity bracket is brushed aside; the mainstream media screams relentlessly that they should, from Page 3 and lads’ mags to the high-falutin’ morals of the Daily Mail vs its online column of shame, via the salivating, scandalous headlines announced on TV ads for tabloid mags and the music videos, shown on rotation, that show nearly-naked women catering to suited and booted men or washing their cars for them.

That’s what women in our society live with. It’s not the worst possible situation in the world right now for women but that doesn’t mean it’s okay. And every time we encounter another image that we didn’t go looking for, an identikit, plastic, willing image that tells men, women and children, “This is ideal womanhood – men, here is what you should desire and expect - women, here is your role model”, we are reminded of it. No fucking surprise we’re angry.


“The human body is natural and beautiful - it’s prudish and anti-feminist to be ashamed of it and want to hide it”
Yeah, it is natural and beautiful and interesting in all its variety. But there’s a difference between showing it as something other than a sexual receptacle, in all its varied and valid forms, and the same relentless image of tits and arse, tits and arse, always perfectly round, airbrushed or painted flawless, the same homogenous honey colour regardless of racial origin, the same sexual poses that say “don’t ask me what I think, just ask me what I can do for you”. If the prevailing thought is that it’s healthy for our culture to be populated with naked women, then little girls could in theory grow up seeing different images of the adult female body, flat breasts, pendulous ones, straight waists and flat ones and wobbly ones, androgynous shapes and bodies that are all hills and valleys, and think “I wonder what I’ll look like when I’m grown up – which of those many forms will my body tend towards?”

But they don’t. They see the same character, often surgically enhanced to the cost of thousands of pounds, which most mainstream glamour models strive to portray, and they worry when their emerging breasts don’t take that shape. Their favourite pop stars endorse that shape. They learn to treat their body hair as something disgusting, rather than something they have an equal choice over keeping, reducing or removing. They learn body dysmorphia, not feminine pride. Their natural sexual appetites are coloured by other people’s perceptions; what girls’ and women’s magazines tell them they should be thinking/feeling/doing (a general message of “only when you’re ready” undermined by constant examination of what everyone else is up to, devaluing the positive sex education they could be helping with), and what the teenage boys in their lives are learning about women, from the freely available imagery around them – from the implied notion that sex means getting to sleep with girls who look like that, who are put here for their pleasure.

There are so many factors in how boys and girls grow up relating to each other that it’d be naive and unhelpful to pin the blame for negative attitudes on one source. But Page 3 and “lads” mags, with their constant reminders that girls are for sex, not conversation or human relationships, sure as shit ain’t helping.


“The women that work in this industry are empowered, not victims”
Some of them are. Some of them have proper workplaces with fair rules and pay, or they freelance with legitimate companies and get paid properly for it, and they make a living doing something that, at worst, they are willing to do, and at best, they enjoy and take pride in. That’s fine. Anyone trying to shut down the sex industry is facing a futile and Sisyphian task – as long as there have been sexual appetites, there have been ways of commoditising them, from the suggestive to the actual; and if one consenting adult wants to give another one their pants’ desires in exchange for cash, I’ve personally no problem with that. I don’t object to porn (though it’d be nice to see the playing field levelled a bit), or safely run brothels, or strip clubs where the employees are treated respectfully, or sex chat lines. But when people sell something which is for adult consumption only, its availability should be restricted to exclusively adult spaces.

And some of them aren’t empowered, but exploited, abused, frightened and hurt. What about the sexual slave trade, which is alive and well? What about women forced to have sex for money they don’t even get to keep, whether it’s girls brought in from other countries (let’s not forget dear, cuddly old Roberto Berlusconi’s comments about cracking down on the Romanian/Italian sex trade – except for the pretty girls) or vulnerable British teenagers preyed on by adults in their own communities? What about those that blur the lines, expecting the girls they know to take part in the rituals of an industry they are NOT a part of? For a slice of this, see the ongoing discussion about domestic violence and sexual exploitation in teen relationships, about girls who end up on YouTube against their consent, because some boy they were going out with decided to film them and humiliate them on the internet? “Media” is not just men in suits who own newspapers now. We all make it, we all contribute, and we are all responsible for what we consume.

Either way, this isn’t just about the girls in the pictures. They’re only half the story. What about everyone that sees the pictures? The point is we don’t have a choice. Unless you decide not to turn on your TV, walk into a newsagent or get on public transport where you might encounter a reader of Britain’s most prevalent newspaper, you can’t avoid the imagery. The problem is not the nakedness, the problem is the constant pushing of the sexual agenda behind it, in the least sexual environments and situations. Is it prudish to want a choice in whether you see a random woman bent over in nothing but a g-string or squeezing her tits together solicitously? What if you’re 11? Is it prudish then? Kids that age should be getting some understanding of how their bodies are starting to change from child to adult; let them process that first, without having to deal at the same time with what kind of sexual identity the commercial media will offer them and what they'll do with it. And the rest of us? Most of us past puberty like thinking about, and having, sex some of the time. Not ALL of the time. Not when we’re busy focusing on non-sexy things, like the whole of the rest of our lives, and, frankly, are not in the fucking mood. We’re not all slaves to a 24 hour libido.

And still, in this culture of ever-present boobs, I hear people make disgusted sounds in public when they see a woman raise part of her shirt to feed her child. Because breasts and their natural function are shocking and repugnant unless wrapped safely in the sanitising, now-familiar cloak of sexual availability.


“Trying to ban page 3 and lads’ magazines is censorship.”
Well, yes and no. I don’t personally think lads’ magazines should be banned. I do think that any form of media that insists on showing naked imagery for the purpose of sexual titillation or arousal, male or female (okay, fine, we’ll pretend for the sake of argument that there’s much in the non-adult mainstream on the male side), should be treated as adult media. If you want to call The Sun a family paper and sell it on the same shelf as the Daily Mail or the Guardian or the Times or the Mirror, it’s got to lose the naked offerings, as should any paper that wants to share that shelf space, and I hope the #nomorepage3 campaign succeeds in its goal. Supermarkets have taken the step of putting lads' mags on the top shelf – but their top shelves are not quite the same as the porn shelf in a newsagent so that’s a little disingenuous (last I checked, you don’t usually get Hustler in Sainsburys). If “lads”(never teenage boys or young men, always “lads”, again with the stereotypical demographic that young men are encouraged to identify with - see UniLAD for more of this) want to buy a magazine whose chief attraction is the pictures of hot girls with not much on, they can pick them up from the same place as they’d pick up Playboy. There’s no shame in it, right? You’re a grown man, you want to look at some grown women who’ve taken their clothes off. So why do the rest of us have to cushion your infantile and outdated embarrassment by nestling the naked chicks safely among the car magazines?

We who oppose this phenomenon want a choice about how, and when, and where, we consume sexual content in the media. It’s time to grow up; allow people to satisfy adult appetites in adult spaces and let children and teenagers grow up without the constant presence of unrealistic body ideals and loaded sexual imagery that tells them what they're meant to be before they've even worked out who they are.

Title quote: Josie Long

Paint me evil, paint me cruel

A woman boarded the Northern Line at Balham one evening, and settled into her seat. As the train rumbled toward central London, she pulled out her makeup bag and, peering into a small mirror, began to pat foundation onto her skin. One by one, as her skin absorbed the colour she applied, the men around her began to convulse, arrest and drop down dead beneath their seats. The woman stepped off the train at Camden Town, radiant, leaving a pile of dead bodies in her wake.

A friend of a friend opined on Facebook today that few things offend him more than women putting on their make-up on the train. I've heard this before (and it seems to be men that it annoys, rather than other women) and so this morning I canvassed some opinions on it. What is it about it that winds people up so much though? Unless it's something pongy like nail polish, surely it doesn't actually affect anyone other than the cosmetic-wearer herself? Yet it seems to provoke such ire, and it confuses the hell out of me.

Some put it down to an old-fashioned sense that one should just do one's grooming at home; that there's something inherently vulgar and indiscreet about making one's preparations in public. To that, I'd retort that if that's the most vulgar thing people are likely to see all day, they're doing bloody well; I can't see how it even compares to men (or women!) weeing in doorways or people getting fuckeyed and hurling across the street or the tube platform. I see those things every week in London, and I rarely hear many folks actually complaining about it - yet there seems to be something about the public application of concealer that really needles people. If someone's plucking their eyebrows (or nose hair...!) or clipping their nails in public, they'll be leaving residue about the place, and that's just not cricket - no-one wants to park their arse in a pile of fingernail clippings. But unless she has the hand-eye co-ordination of a toddler on a trampoline, make-up leaves no trace except on the wearer.

Another popular whinge is 'she should have gotten up earlier and done it before she left the house' - this hot indignation that someone has chosen to manage their time in such a way that they can sneak 15 minutes extra in bed, and do their final prep on the train before appearing at work looking fresh and composed. Jealousy, is it? It seems to me absolutely no-one else's business how anyone manages their time, unless it actually affects the people around them. I'll react sharply to anyone impertinent enough to suggest that I should have left more time at home to do it; maybe I'm coming straight from work. Maybe the electricity failed at home and there's no light. Maybe a giant panda ate my house before starting on next door. Maybe......it's none of your business and I don't owe anyone else excuses.

Or perhaps it has more to do with the notion that a woman should ensure she's presentable before she leaves the house and inflicts herself on the world. Why? Will men turn to stone or projectile vomit at the sight of a woman without a protective layer of slap hiding her pores? Or is there something unsettling for some folks, seeing women apply that layer in front of them?

I think this latter suggestion is closer to the truth. The kind of men that are honestly offended by it don't want to see women demystified before their eyes. We are, apparently to some, still meant to be pretty, flawless (blow-up) dolls. But it has no basis in logic. Chaps! Have you ever had a girlfriend? Have you ever sat and enjoyed a cup of tea while, beside you, she puts on her make-up for the day? So...you know what she looks like without make-up then? Here's a secret: lots of women look like that without make-up. Women don't have a duty to be beautiful in the first place; in this here century we don't have to preserve our reputations by winching in our real figures with girdles and corsets any longer, unless we want to, and nor do we have to wear make-up at all (funny how it's gone from the being regarded as whores' facepaint to something the media pushes us to wear for dignity's sake) - we get the choice to present ourselves however we wish, much to the noisy chagrin of misogynists, magazine editors and pre-feminist dinosaurs everywhere. Many do choose to wear it, and the world keeps turning. Love and romance and attraction and all the hokey shit that makes people have babies and carry on this argumentative species won't grind to a halt if men see how women make themselves prettier. We aren't goddesses, and this isn't illusive Oz; a woman darkening her eyelashes on a train is just that, no more or less.

There's a lot of talk at the moment about the fetishisation of women's looks (from the ugly furore that surrounded Mary Beard recently, to the Onion's razor-tongued skit on the objectification of women - Teenage Girl Blossoming Into Beautiful Object) and frankly we can't win; we're either wild-haired, unpresentable toads or stupid sluts who'll get what's coming to them. This bitter logic forgets that, actually, we can look however we goddamn want to - and we'll go about our business regardless of the hateful comments of small-minded mouth-breathers who let down awesome men everywhere. Dudes who loudly demand that women sport the "natural look" are plying a special brand of bullshit, because they don't really want to see a girl's spots, they want a perfect girl-next-door cliché. You don't want a woman to stop wasting her time wearing make-up, you just don't want her to apply it on your time. Tough tits - your time and our time have nothing to do with each other, because if you're whinging about a woman on a train she's probably someone you have nothing to do with. We aren't illusions or Athena poster girls, we're people who sometimes run out of time getting ready to go out, and if we can manage to apply a well-practised straight line across our eyelids on a moving train, I don't see what business it is of anyone else's. When was the last time a woman spilled a full bottle of foundation across your lap on the 38 bus?

There's nothing disgusting or offensive about a woman applying make up in public. If it offends you that much, divert your attention elsewhere - she'd probably rather you weren't staring at her in the first place.

Who's afraid of Mary Beard?

One thing strikes me amongst all of this arguing about the misogyny directed towards Professor Mary Beard and her strident and composed response to it; everyone's got so het up about the internet abuse that followed her QT appearance, that no-one's talking about what she actually said on Question Time.

Which is exactly what the bullies want.

Isn't the whole point of shouting someone down, abusing their looks or character and trying to hurt them, to shut them up? To shut down a discussion they don't like? You beat someone back into their corner in the hope that they won't be pert or strong enough to spring back up and continue to assert their thoughts. You see it in the playground as a child, and across Twitter on a daily basis, and in extreme scenarios like women who are subjected to physical violence to keep them in their place, be they wives in any country in the world with abusive husbands, or Malala Yousefzai, whose bullies were so scared of a child defending her beliefs that they thought shooting her in the head was a proportionate way to deal with the situation.

This week's trolls didn't like what Mary Beard had to say. But instead of combating it with fair argument and reasoned responses, they opted for "Well, NER, you're ugly, so there" sophistication and sexual threats (baffling, considering their stance on her looks, but let's remember, rape [real or threatened] is about power, not attraction - moreover, these people are idiots). In the wake of that, some have praised her for standing up to them, while others (women, no less!) have, missing the point somewhat, suggested that she's letting herself down by whinging about it something as insignificant as violent verbal misogny.

I'm immensely pleased that Mary has had the grace and guts to defend herself in the manner that she has. Her combination of personal unflappability and a frank refusal to accept that women should face such misogyny is exactly what the situation merited. I refuse to accept that the kind of verbal abuse she has faced should be the inevitable consequence of an intelligent woman expressing her views on a television show, and the fastest way to stop it is for women to stand up for themselves when they encounter misogyny, and for the men in their lives to support them in doing so.

But let's take a moment to recall the points she actually made; her opinion was as valid as anyone else's on that show, and for it to disappear under the mire of internet trolling and insults that had absolutely nothing to do with the televised discussion is wrong.

On the subject of a new ruling to allow Romanians and Bulgarians free movement within the EU, she spoke about a report by by Boston Borough Council on economic migration in the area, and said that it was a myth that the economic migrants in Boston, Lincolnshire, were overrunning the town. She suggested that they were actually benefiting the borough, and that local public services could cope with the incoming migrants.

And just so it's clear; in reposting what she said, I'm not registering my agreement or disagreement. My point is simply that, as an invited guest, she had as much right to contribute to the discussion, because unlike what her bullies loudly suggested, her looks have, again, absolutely nothing to do with the televised discussion.

Oh - and for what it's worth, I don't see anything wrong with Mary Beard's looks. Maybe it's irrelevant and even counter-productive to state that, but some of the defences I've seen for her have been, essentially, "she has the right to be ugly". That she does. But she isn't.

In postscript to my last post...

Some thought-provoking writing and responses here - NYR Blog - Our Moloch, by Garry Wills.

After a commenter drew parallels between those who seek gun regulation and those who seek freedom of choice for women on the abortion issue, accusing them of hypocrisy, another poster's response was so brilliant that I'd like to reproduce it here in full:

Interesting analogy you choose. Let's explore this further.

1) If given a choice between saving a refrigerator full of Petri dishes with frozen embryos or a 5-year-old, which would you choose? Remember -- if, as the anti-choicers say, life begins at conception, you cannot make any distinction between the two, so I hope you wouldn't let all the Petri babies die to save one other life that, by the very terms of the anti-choicers, is no more valuable than theirs.

2) Since pro-gun advocates always say that you cannot prevent anyone who really wants to get their hands on a weapon and therefore it is folly to regulate them, I presume we can apply this reasoning to the abortion debate (remember, abortion is still constitutionally protected under Roe v. Wade) and end the constant string of regulations that exist only to shame women, lie to them (i.e., bills that require telling women that they risk breast cancer or infertility through terminating pregnancies -- neither of which is true), etc. We definitely know that any woman who really wants to get an abortion will do it, so why make it illegal?

3) Since you say you respect life, may I assume you are working against the death penalty?"

On that note, I'd like to make a suggestion; while I know that in the US women are as free to buy and use guns as men are, and (I daresay) exercise that right, it seems to me that guns have historically been regarded as a typically male domain. Once, it was men that went to war and defended the homestead. Going out hunting (in the deerstalking, rather than the fox-hunting sense) still seems to be treated as a peculiarly male pastime (the rite of passage of a father taking his son hunting etc, or 'the guys' getting away for the weekend). And I can't help but feel part the defence for guns goes back to a sense of preserving an old-fashioned sense of masculinity - as though taking away a man's gun unmans him somehow. Do NRA members all imagine they're John Wayne?

Abortion and contraception, as we know, are treated as a women's issue, though they have huge ramifications for relationships and entire families. If these facts were reversed, I wonder what the political responses would be, particularly from the right. Would the American constitutional right to an abortion be so vehemently attacked if it was seen more as a men's issue, rather than a loose and over-generous freedom for all those slutty women? What if gun-toting had traditionally been more associated with women - would the right to bear arms be treated so reverentially?

Maybe I'm way off the mark with this but the thought's bothered me all day and the responses to this article brought it up again.

The increasingly poor decisions of Chris Brown and the mainstream music industry

On Monday I saw a teenage girl get punched in the face.

I was waiting for a train, and a young girl and guy were having an argument. He was pissed off with her and followed her along the platform. I don’t know what the argument was about, though it seemed like she had been to his house.

He said ‘’D’you want me to bang you in the face? Don’t think I won’t bang you in the face.” And then he punched her in the face, his fist meeting the side of her head.

I was sat next to her as it happened – she half-landed on me. It looked like he was going to go for her again, while she shouted that she knew where he lived, held up her phone and somewhat incoherently threatened to call the police. The guy’s friend was hanging about behind them, and as the fucker was leaving on his bike, his pal tried to persuade her not to inflame him any further.

I asked her if she was okay, and she said no. Another woman from the platform came over and reported it to the police (she worked for one or another crime unit, I forget the name), and asked the girl lots of questions, while ordering the other boy to stay put.

I don’t know how old her attacker was but I'd guess late teens. She was 16, and tiny. She came across as a pretty, shy teenager. He came across as a thug. She didn’t know his real name, just his street name.

The woman who helped her did fantastically. I was furious with myself for not snapping a photo of the guy before he ran away. But mostly I’m furious that between teenage kids we have this situation where boys think it’s acceptable to use violence to express their frustration and control the girls they know. And where their friends won’t stand up and say ‘that’s not fucking acceptable’, but will just exhort the girl to keep schtum. There has been plenty of coverage of teen domestic violence in the media in recent years, and the tone has varied from investigative to hysterical. But this was the first time I witnessed it, and I can’t get it out of my mind. I don’t think the girl would have contacted the police if the woman that helped her hadn’t phoned them.

And meanwhile teen idol, Grammy winner and girlfriend abuser Chris Brown is living the high life in full view of his fans, surrounded by girls at parties and still refusing to take responsibility for what he did. What did he do, exactly? He beat up his girlfriend and threatened her with further violence later on. But more than that, he beat up his girlfriend knowing that he and she were both megastars, role-models (willing or otherwise) for teenage boys and girls, shining examples of the lives that their fans would like to lead.

When you see your super-rich, hyper-famous hero being subjected to, or committing, the same shit that you experience in your life, and there are hardly any consequences, is it not likely that you’ll think “Well then, that’s just life. That’s the status quo and if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.’?

Domestic violence is hard enough to combat, and when it’s starting at an ever more tender age, that’s really frightening. We risk allowing a pattern where teenage girls grow up into women who think that being hit is just one of the grim facts of life. Women who will have children that potentially witness this pattern. It has to stop, and it needs addressing from top to bottom.

It’s not acceptable – AT ALL – to attack someone, and domestic abuse – from physically strong men to smaller women – is a particularly cowardly form of control and abuse. I don’t need to rehash this – we know it. But why are Chris Brown’s records still being played? Why is he still getting paid? I know he’s not the only famous person who’s ever committed this crime before, and I don’t condone the actions of anyone who’s behaved like this. But the sheer brazenness that he wears, his ridiculous stance of ‘Fuck the haterz, you can’t keep me down’, as opposed to ‘Oh shit, maybe they hate me because they think I’m a violent bully, perhaps I should address what I did and try to make amends somehow’, is jawdropping. The industry has looked sternly on him for a year or two, and now it's back to business as usual, because people are still willing to spunk their cash on him, and he's willing to take it.

How novel it would be if he thought ‘Hey, I have a responsibility, not just towards the woman I hurt, but towards the millions of teenagers who buy my music and will, in some cases, try to be like me. Maybe I should consider what my actions and attitudes tell them about male/female relationships, and about taking responsibility for your wrongs.’ How novel, but how unlikely it looks.

Rihanna has a part to play here. She was 100% blameless for getting hit; that blame lies squarely with Brown. She has said in the past that she doesn’t want to be a role model. Sorry, Rihanna – at this point, tough. It comes with the megastar territory; girls dress like you, they want to sing like you, and they want to live and succeed like you. She could contribute positively by drawing a hard line where domestic violence is concerned, but she doesn’t seem willing to do that. I don't know if she identifies as a feminist, but in this respect she certainly doesn't behave like one. Her fans look at her and see a woman who seems strong and powerful in every other way, yet is happy to go back and record songs (I won’t comment on rumours re: her personal life because I don’t know what’s true or not) with the man who beat her up and never tried seriously or publicly to make amends, yet chose to publicly gloat about his victory over the ‘haterz’. (In light of that, the right to privacy doesn’t come into it.) That’s not fucking cool.

I don’t know if that guy and girl on the train platform are Chris Brown and Rihanna fans. But I know millions are, and now I can bear witness to the hard and ugly fact that there are teenage boys who hit girls to control them. And I know that two of the biggest pop stars in the world are, right now, sending out the message that hey, that’s life, and there’s no good reason for it to change.

Teenage Girls Are Bringing Out My (not so) Inner Raging Feminist

My name's Gen and I'm a Made in Chelsea addict. Properly. I love it to bits.

This post isn't about my allegedly misguided viewing habits though. (Fuck alla y'all, to my mind it's the first really entertaining and likeable bit of whatever it is you call this mish-mash of soap and fly on the wall without using some horrible thickwitted portmanteau nonword I've seen - Essex, Jersey Shore, Geordie Shore et al can't touch this, so step away now. Maybe I'm just intrigued by the habits of rich people; Evelyn Waugh it ain't, but it's jolly good fun and compulsive viewing regardless. And anyway, if it's good enough for the ever-witty Daisy Buchanan of Sabotage Times it's good enough for me.)

If MIC brings you out in hate hives, by all means skip to the next blog; discussion about the characters will follow herein. But actually what I want to talk about is one disturbing and nasty side-effect of the show, and a perfect illustration of a larger problem we still don't seem to have gotten past yet - quite the opposite. It's all over Twitter, it comes from the show's fans, and by and large they're teenage girls who live in a world that you would hope had inherited a few established truths about feminism and sisterhood by now.

Nope.

If you dare, search for #MIC or #madeinchelsea. Or, let’s get to the heart of the matter. Look up the female stars of the show - they all have Twitter accounts. Brace yourself for a flood of vicious, spiteful commentary, mainly on their looks. There's blundering, unlucky-in-love Gabriella, who gets every insult from 'dog' to various observations re: the size of her chin, or scheming Rosie of the pale skin and flat hair (Rosie, I hate you but I feel your pain), or recent addition Kimberley; initially lambasted for seeming fake and concealing a shady love-life, it now seems to be all about the shape of her nose and the fact that she wears a lot of white. (Now, say what you want about Kimberley, but the fact remains that she is an uncommonly pretty girl. If we're going to be judgmental about it, comments on her looks are nonsense.)



The only one to completely escape the nastiness is Binky who, as the only girl whose love life the show barely seems to touch on, seems to command almost unanimous adoration. The rule seems to be, Chelsea girls whose love-lives are less than spotless (allegedly or otherwise, in Kimberley's case) get verbal abuse about their looks. Ironically, MIC fans are desperate for the producers to fix Binky up with present golden boy Jamie; if it happened, no doubt Binky too would be in for a tweet-lashing the minute the relationship faltered.

Non-Chelsea fans, if you've read this far your head may be reeling right now with the seeming irrelevance of these people and their love lives, but stay with me.

The men, often found behaving badly, don't seem to encounter this particular kind of abuse, being held up for their behaviour on the show rather than the lack of volume in their hair or badly placed creases in their trousers. They amass armies of willing devotees - even eccentric capitalist and professional diamond dude Francis, who's tried it on with nearly every girl in the show and reportedly made churlish remarks about Emma Watson, who he claims to have dumped. Spencer, the girlfriend-stealing villain of the last series, gets plenty of stick for his behaviour, but no-one ever slags off the shape of his nose.

There are two obvious retorts to this phenomenon.

• The teenage twitterati are catty because they're jealous of the girls that get to pardy™ with, and bed, the objects of their desire. The meanness stems as much from this as from a reaction to perceived behaviour.
• Anyone who signs up to a reality show is exposing themselves to a flood of reaction and potential abuse.

Both of these statements are true. But that doesn't justify dodging the issue; this body fascistic aggression is disturbing, especially when you see it at the deafening volume that Twitter enables. The lack of self-awareness is profound; look at the number of girls who slated and even threatened Louise for dating Jamie then sleeping with his best mate. Constant is the cry of 'forget that ugly slag, have me instead!', and just as prevalent is the ignorance of the fact that if they got what they wanted, they'd be next in the online firing line from the jealous masses.

Tina Fey did a smashing job of portraying this girl-on-girl hatefest in Mean Girls some years back, noting how girls use looks and sexually-themed name-calling to clamber over each other, thus condoning men using the same language to them in turn. The film was loved instantly and clutched to girls' hearts, yet it's changed nothing. Made in Chelsea is the easiest current example to use because, because of the uniquely modern mechanism of Twitter - conversation is instant, not just between fans, but also with the cast themselves, who all have well-used Twitter accounts. But I could just as easily be writing about average girls' conversations in nightclub bathrooms or at the back of the bus.

Any girl who falls short of the accepted, TV-friendly aesthetic standard - slim (but not, heaven forbid, flat-chested), fake-tanned (if white) with a head of hair that can only be achieved by extensions or fucking incredible genetics, and a total absence of hair anywhere else - is in line for a dose of vitriol. But it's all shit; for a start, the time and money that goes into looking like this lends itself to an entirely separate discussion about class and economic divide. All the time girls are directing their energy to what each other looks like, they're not doing the things that will really make them fitter, happier, more productive; reading, writing, singing, building, competing, debating, discovering, travelling, saving lives, learning and earning. Talk about doing yourselves down. Watching this or any other reality tv show is, in technical terms, no bigger a waste of time than watching the football or the latest BBC drama, but spending one's time on the internet, ripping apart the looks of women you've never met? Fucking hell.

Of course we all know that it's all Heat magazine's fault, and the Sun and the Mirror and Grazia and OK and Hello, for ingraining this culture of salacious gossiping about famous people's looks and shortcomings like their cellulite is a matter of public importance. And because it's their fault, we don't have to take any responsibility for proliferating it, do we?

When you see someone calling some girl a dog you should be hollering 'Shut your piehole, you sexist, misogynistic dickhead!', not LOLing and retweeting it.

In a world where girls are still sold into marriages with strange men - where you can be convicted and imprisoned for being a rape victim - where governments are trying to pass laws to criminalise the morning-after pill - where legislators want to make medical rape the price of an abortion - or kidnap and force unwanted abortions on women who can't afford the fine for being illegally pregnant - where women STILL don't earn as much as their male equivalents - where politicians pursue cuts and shady corporate deals that will disproportionally hit women up and down the scale - where it's ever more expensive to get an education - and where intern culture means future careers are increasingly, once again, determined by what sort of money you come from in the first place... where this shit is happening in every corner of the world including the UK, anger from women is as vital as ever. And while women are tearing each other apart, they're ignoring the forces that threaten to make all of their lives a lot harder.

But they're just teenage girls, why would they give a damn about politics and women's rights and all of that boring stuff, all they're interested in is TV and One Direction and clubbing and shopping...

Bollocks. I don't buy that. Teenagers are as capable - more so! undiluted by the creeping, wearying cynicism of age - as anyone at getting up in arms about perceived injustice - look back at the anti-tuition fees student marches for instance. If you enjoy MIC or any of the shows like it that invite online engaging with the storyline and characters, then go ahead and respond to what you see. Or alternatively, if the show's money-worshipping triviality offends you, then call to account the massive gulf it seems to endorse between the hyper-rich and everyone else. But please, enough of the misogynistic bullying and spite. Feminism isn't about doing whatever you want while hating on some girl for having spots around her mouth or limp hair. Read the Beauty Myth and then go and get pissed off at the people who really deserve it.