At the beginning of the year, a scandal erupted over a TikTok trend of young women in tight clothes posting videos shaming men for hitting on them at the gym. As recently as 2018, the story would have been one …
The vengeful ex-girlfriends of TikTok
The girl in the TikTok video is wearing joggers, a lime green bra, and — for some reason — a pink ski mask. Her hair is blonde and stringy. She climbs atop the kitchen counter, attempting a yoga arm balance …
The trouble with online safetyism
Epileptics being maliciously exposed to flashing images. Children being bullied via social media. Adults being misled by material about medical interventions. Since it was conceived by academics in 2018, the Online Safety Bill — which returns to Parliament this week …
Who will rule Twitter next?
It is often declared that Twitter is not real life; too rarely does anyone add, because it’s far more important. As the primary vector for the construction and dissemination of political narratives, social media has become the central battleground where …
How manifesting was corrupted
Mindlessly scrolling through football transfer rumours on Twitter recently, I noticed some Liverpool fans trying something a little different. The club’s owners weren’t doing the business they wanted, so it was time, one fan suggested, to gather their mental forces …
Selfies have made you ugly
Modern man, wrote the social psychologist Erich Fromm in 1956, “has been transformed into a commodity”. Scroll through social media, and you will see this transformation is absolute. On one side, we are asked to rate glamorous, increasingly similar-looking people …
Hollywood needs nepotism babies
During the summer holiday, one week of family viewing was devoted to the Hunger Games series. It reminded me what a vintage star-is-born story it was when Jennifer Lawrence went from the indie hit to Winter’s Bone to making The …
The dawn of the New Puritans
It looks like some upsetting combination of a homecoming dance and a wedding. The teenage girls are dressed in polyester facsimiles of the big white poofy gowns they’ve fantasised about wearing since childhood, arm in arm with older men in …
Mental illness doesn’t make you special
Marianne Eloise wants the world to know that she does not “have a regular brain at all”. That’s her declaration, on the very first page of her new memoir, Obsessive, Intrusive, Magical Thinking. The book catalogues her experience of a …
Women can’t be beautiful
I don’t care that much about my appearance. I don’t waste time chasing after arbitrary beauty standards. I get my hair done, though, and I’ve started to have it coloured since I turned 40, but that’s very low maintenance: four …
Why I stopped being a good girl
I was always a good girl, by which I mean a people pleaser, because that is what being a good girl is. I enjoyed the benefits that such a personality brings (straight As at school, a close relationship with my …
Witchcraft isn’t subversive
Once the bankers have gone home for the night, the City of London becomes a mysterious place. It evinces secrecy and subversion; you can feel the presence of something arcane beneath the day-to-day custom and commerce of the City.
It …
