Goodwill to All Women

The Blackheath Bugle has helpfully brought to my attention the nauseating KitKat Senses billboard that has been all over the country recently. I hadn't actually seen it as I have been in Germany for the last few weeks merrily stuffing my face with stollen and not-so-merrily going round history museums and concentration camps, but it really is totally eurgh.

This isn't exactly an original campaign - this sort of thing has been happening for years, from Flake through Galaxy to Mars Delight. Yep, us women are all slavering chocaholics.

Indulge yourself, go on, you deserve it. Mmmm, creamy and delicious, mmmmm, MMMMMMMM, indulge yourself, fellate it in a bubble bath surrounded by candles because you deserve it, you goddess, you! Go on, indulge yourself, be NAUGHTY, you know you need it because your sex life is shite and you've been eschewing carbs for God knows how long, so what you really need is a quick hit of refined carbs that will cause you to moan in ecstasy. Mmmmmmmmmmmm......

Creamy chocolate, delicious chocolate, indulgent chocolate, naughty chocolate, sinful chocolate, ONLY 165 CALORIES, yes, yes, YES, YES, YES!!!!

Take me now, big boy! You know I can't get enough of your raging hazelnuts, fill me up with your hot, throbbing rod of sugary goodness!

[The rest of this post has been censored. This is a family blog.]

'Tis the season to be hungry

It's that time of year again! Christmas is over, and if you're a walking stereotype you'll have stuffed yourself silly and - horror of horrors! - gone up to a size 12.

Obviously ads for discounted gym memberships are all the rage on the Tube at the moment, and women's magazines are chock full of the latest miracle diets (personally I was always rather a fan of Bridget Jones' patented weight loss method - "Simply replace food with sex"). 'Tis the season to be hungry, not to mention squeezing yourself into a little lycra number and punishing your wayward physique on a treadmill. But that's just advertising n stuff, and there's nothing wrong with it really, especially since a lot of people really could benefit from eating better and getting more exercise.

However, the mania that women seem to get into for losing weight around this time of year seems pretty extreme. I wonder what the average Christmas weight gain actually is. It doesn't seem to justify the dieting hell.

It's pretty difficult to get away from. I work in an office full of boys, but at lunchtime today I went to visit a friend in a girl-dominated department and found that all the talk down there was about diets. They were all on diets, and my friend is determined to drop two dress sizes, a change which I personally think will leave her far too thin, not to mention grumpy from chocolate withdrawal, and I told her as much. I certainly felt rather awkward sitting in there eating two desserts (look, I couldn't decide between them, ok?) whilst everybody else in the room was presumably getting through the day on Ryvita - I don't know, I didn't see anyone eat a thing.

I actually did gain a bit of weight whilst I was on holiday - for someone accustomed to a high level of exercise it's inevitable. But I really don't believe in restricting what I eat. I don't know how girls do it. I just couldn't. When I'm hungry, my concentration goes. I can't focus on my work because I'm too busy daydreaming about sushi, or pasta, or pecan pie, or whatever scrumptious dish I am most craving. I feel light-headed and dizzy. I have to eat. And apart from the risk of passing out, I just refuse on principle to do anything to myself that stops me from functioning properly. I will be strong, alert, quick-witted and good at my job thank you very much, even if it does mean that I am a few pounds heavier.

Dieting at this time of year is almost a girl bonding ritual. You feel left out if you don't join in. You feel awkward for eating anything except salad. You start to wonder if you could stand to lose a few pounds yourself. And, if you're me, you start to feel pretty pissed off about it and say, goddammit, I reserve the right to eat bread. In fact, because I'm just so naughty I'll have butter on it too.

All I can say is, thank goodness for boys. I love my female friends but they drive me bats at this time of year.

Men like women with curves

I cringe every time I hear this. It usually assaults me from the pages of some trashy publication, the latest being the news pages of Cosmopolitan, which advised me that, since nine out of ten men would rather shag a size 10 glamour model than a size 0 supermodel, it was now okay to eat doughnuts.* Thanks for letting me know - I will now allow myself several of those yummy custardy ones with a side order of deep-fried mars bars without feeling guilty. Goodness knows why I still read women's magazines - perhaps I just enjoy defacing them with my red pen. But what really annoys me is when this statement comes from men themselves. Nice, thoughtful men who think they're being really helpful.

"Men like women with curves, so why should you diet to achieve a size zero? Hey, don't worry, eat that chip butty if you want it, because I don't mind if you have a lardy arse. Men like something to grab hold of."

This isn't exactly breaking news, much as it is treated as such every time some dodgy survey corroborates it. We all know that most men have a preference for women with rather more flesh on them than the average Hollywood actress. If women were motivated by wanting to please men, nobody below a size 12 would ever think about dieting. But they do. And it pains me to hear well-meaning men try to solve the problem by telling their female friends that hey, a few extra pounds don't matter to the average bloke.

By suggesting that women should have curves, you are not making an enlightened pro-feminist statement - you are simply perpetuating the idea that women have an ideal to which to conform in order to please men, whatever the nature of that ideal may be. Women's bodies do not exist for male gratification. Women do not shun cake in favour of low-fat low-carb no-taste diet food in order to impress men with their jutting collarbones. The female obsession with weight loss will not be solved by men giving us permission to eat. It's such an arrogant attitude and it really, really annoys me.

An unnaturally (for most women) slim figure is associated with wealth, status, social mobility, stylishness, femininity... There are even crazier factors than that at play - like the fact that skinniness is a trump card for female competitiveness, and that moaning about the size of one's hips facilitates female bonding:

- My hips are so huge!
- Noooo, they're tiny! Mine are enormous!
- Noooo, you're so skinny! I have a jelly belly!
- No you don't! You're tiny! Look at my muffin top!
- Pssshh - if you've got a muffin top I've got an entire wedding cake!

This is repeated ad nauseam, with the slimmer party becoming gradually more and more smug, and the porkier party becoming more and more distressed. But crucially, it gives them something to talk about. There are of course two clear-cut rules: 1 - One must not admit to being happy with any part of one's anatomy; and 2 - One must violently disagree with anything the other party says. Then there's the fact that, since breasts are supposed to be at least medium-sized, any woman who does have a skinny physique can moan about her lack of boobage. See - nobody's left out. It's rather clever really. Of course, there's always the chance that the slimmer woman will attack her peer by saying, "But you've got such a lovely figure! So curvy!" which is as backhanded as compliments get.

Believe me, the body image issue is a frickin' minefield. And if you go in armed only with, "But men like women with curves," don't expect to get out of there alive.

*By the way, this was BLATANTLY an advertorial for Krispy Kremes

Carbs are the new fat

Virtually any women's magazine you will ever read will have a feature or two on diets. Something that's really interesting is how the content of these features and the advice given has changed over time.

Ten years ago, fat was the antichrist. Women were advised to eat a diet rich in complex carbohydrates, lean protein, fruit and vegetables, but no fat! Don't eat fat - fat will make you fat. Fat must be banished from your diet. Fat is bad and evil and wrong. Men are allowed to eat fat, but any woman who eats fat will be punished by her hips expanding to grotesque proportions so that the whole world can see that she's eaten FAT.

Ooooh, I'm scared.

These days, carbs are the new fat. Now we're supposed to be eating lots of fruit and vegetables, lots of protein, and fat is allowed but no carbs at all. Pasta is evil. Bread is the antichrist. Potatoes? You've got to be kidding! They'll make you FAT.

I blame Dr Fatkins, sorry, Atkins. Ever since his bonkers diet came back into fashion and loads of Hollywood celebrities attributed their lean figures to it, the media has taken up the no-carbs mantle, trying to persuade us that eating even a small portion of the best wholegrain organic bread will turn you into the 400lb Angry Mom on Ricki Lake.

These magazines always manage to get quotes from "respected nutritionists" backing up what they have to say. Funny that the whole of nutritional science seemed to turn on its head as soon as Jennifer Aniston went on the Atkins. What's also interesting is that dieting is always linked with health. A "healthy" meal is one that won't make you fat. Even articles that have no specific weight-loss angle bang on about it. I read something in Cosmopolitan a couple of years ago that made me absolutely seethe. It was an article in which three women tried out different "healthy" diets without the explicit goal of weight loss at all. One of the women was very sporty and had previously eaten a carbohydrate-rich diet. The nutritionist put her on a low carb diet, chiding her that, "If Lucy didn't eat a carb-based snack after going to the gym, she wouldn't undo all her hard work." Right. So the only reason Lucy goes to the gym is to lose weight.

At least this U-turn from low-fat to low-carb a few years ago demonstrated just how fickle the media is when it comes to this sort of thing. What we're supposed to eat goes in and out of fashion almost with the same frequency as what we're supposed to wear. Low carb is in fashion just as skinny jeans are in fashion. Being on an 80s style, low fat, high carb diet is as unthinkable as being seen in shoulder pads with a frizzy perm.

All nutritionists always seem to have agreed on is the following:

Too much saturated fat is bad

Refined carbohydrates are bad

Vegetables are good (fruit is a bit controversial because is has - gasp! - CARBS in it)

If you want to lose weight, you need to get lots of exercise

Alli oops

From tapeworm eggs to heart failure, diet pills have always been a fairly controversial subject. But now a new over-the-counter drug has become available in the US, which works in part by punishing users for eating too much fat by making them lose control of their bowels. No, really.

Why is this a feminist issue? Well, because prescription-only diet pills are quite rightly only available to people who are medically overweight. Over-the-counter diet products are aimed at those attempting to lose weight from either a normal or only slightly overweight frame - i.e. women. It's only women who are under pressure to lose weight from an already-healthy physique, and so any over-the-counter or black-market weight loss aid is bound to be aimed mostly at women and to have more female consumers.

Perhaps it's just the fact that I've never actually been fat talking, but I find it incredible to think that any normal-sized person would be so desperate to lose weight. If the only thing standing between you and a chip butty is the prospect of soiling your trousers, then perhaps it's time to break your diet.

Less than 190 calories per pack!

I love Maltesers, but boy does that graphic on the bottom right hand corner of the packet piss me off. In case you can't read it, it says, "Less than 190 calories per pack" and there's a Malteser with a friggin' HALO above it.

Advertisers constantly encourage women to have an emotional relationship with food, or capitalise on their existing emotional relationship with food - it's difficult to tell which came first, but they feed (pun intended) on one another.

It can be misleading too. "Less than 190 calories per pack" isn't particularly saintly at all when you consider that for your 190 calories you're getting only about 10 of the things, and flipping the packet over reveals them to be 25% fat and 63% sugar with virtually no positive nutritional value. You could get something much more satisfying and nutritious for around the same number of calories - half a Snickers bar for example would be much more filling and provide you with lots of protein and monounsaturated fat. But you can't eat a Snickers bar because it's man food - "Snickers really satisfies" is a man slogan. Maltesers though - "The lighter way to enjoy chocolate" - give a woman permission to stuff her face with impunity.

Man adverts stress functionality. Food is there to satisfy hunger. Snickers really satisfies. Girl adverts equate chocolate with sex, validation of self-worth, "naughtiness" (this is so creamy and chocolatey and naughty, oh go on, be naughty) or "saintliness" (half the calories, so you can eat twice as much!)

Why on earth does chocolate advertising have to be so gender-specific anyway? I would have thought it a rather silly approach, only marketing to 50% of the population. Having sat here racking my brains for quite some time, I can only think of one truly gender-neutral chocolate bar and that's KitKat. I'd hazard a guess that it's not just the well-established nature of the brand that makes KitKat the UK's best-selling chocolate bar. It's the fact that they don't market themselves solely to sexually frustrated women in their early thirties suffering from hypoglycaemia brought on by the sodding Atkins diet.

Perhaps I ought to boycott "girl chocolate", but I like Maltesers and Kinder Buenos too much to do that. It's a terrible dilemma. Perhaps I ought to have some Maltesers whilst I think about it.

Are you allowed to eat?

A while ago, I was tucking into a particularly delicious slice of cheesecake at my desk. It was proper cheesecake, none of this low-fat, low-carb, no-taste malarky, caramel flavour with chocolate sprinkles on top. A colleague came up to me and swooned, "Ooooh, you're so lucky, you're so thin, you can eat anything."

On another occasion a couple of years ago, a friend came and sat with me whilst I happened to be making light work of a Snickers bar. I broke off a piece for her - as you do - and she looked at me in a knowing manner and said, "Ah, sharing the guilt, are we?" No, actually I was sharing my chocolate. If you ascribe guilt to food that's your problem - don't try and drag me into your way of thinking, or assume that I feel the same way.

Only thin women have permission to eat. If your clothes size is in double figures, you might be allowed to eat, but only if you feel very guilty about it before, during and after.

I don't eat what I want when I want because I have "permission". I would like to think that if I were - shock horror! - a size 12 rather than a size 8, I would still have been eating that cheesecake. I would like to think that whether or not to eat it would not have been a painful, emotionally charged decision, aided by other girls telling me that of course I was thin enough to eat cheesecake whilst secretly hoping that it might make me fatter than them. I would like to think that it wouldn't have caused me so much guilt that for the rest of the afternoon I was too busy imagining a plague of cellulite settling on my hips to concentrate on my work.

The phenomenon of fat people, particularly fat women, eating only salad in public and eating fattening food only in private where they are not open to ridicule, is well-documented. I often find myself doing the opposite - stuffing my face with chip butties to prove that I am naturally slim and not one of these stupid girls who diets. If I'm eating out, I'll have a tendency to pick lardy options and get my salad fix at home. This might seem silly, frankly it is extremely silly and now I've admitted to it in writing I'm rather ashamed of myself, but I no more want to be associated with Diet Coke Girls than a naturally fat girl would want to be associated with chunkmonsters who spend their evenings stuffing their faces with nachos in front of Ricki Lake whilst cultivating interesting fungi in their sweaty flab rolls. The point is, a woman's figure dictates what it is socially acceptable for her to eat.

Something I noticed when I started secondary school was the physical manner in which girls used to eat. If a boy was eating, say, a big phat chocolate muffin with big phat chocolate chips, he would take bites out of it, or break off large chunks. If you wanted some of his chocolate muffin, you'd have to ask, because he wouldn't automatically offer it to you. If a girl was consuming the same delicious oversized chocolate cake, she would daintily pick tiny bits off it at several second intervals, popping them into her mouth in a bored, vacant manner which suggested that she wasn't really interested in it at all. She would shove the muffin into her friends' faces, trying to share as much of it as possible. A cake that would take a boy approximately two minutes to devour would take a girl at least twenty minutes to dissect. As I pointed out at the time to anybody who would listen (which admittedly was very few people at my dodgy London comprehensive) it was as if by the physical manner in which girls ate cake they were simultaneously apologising for eating cake.

Where on earth did it come from, this idea that women are not supposed to eat? That picking at your food is somehow dainty and ladylike, and not just a symptom of a raging eating disorder? Has anybody ever read the diet pages of a magazine and wondered how on earth anybody could possibly live on such little food, and then realised that they were reading about what the "victim" purports to have lived on BEFORE they went on the diet?

Okay. In the absence of any rational female attitude towards food, any high-profile champion of food-slash-gender-based politics or indeed anybody who seems to talk any sense about it at all, I am hereby giving you permission to eat. Yes, you. Whether you're a size 6 or a size 36, you are allowed to eat. Eat what you feel like eating when you're hungry, stop eating when you're full. It's not love, or guilt, or your best friend or your worst enemy. It's just food.

Who gets cravings for choclit?

We all get cravings for choclit, don't we? No food is as emotionally loaded as choclit.



Who remembers these Flake ads? I mean, she's virtually fellating it.



Why have cotton when you can have silk? Why indeed.

IT'S JUST CHOCOLATE!

Okay, I'm the first to admit that I know bugger all about the history of chocolate advertising, but for as long as I can remember, chocolate has been marketed almost exclusively to women and almost exclusively with sexual imagery and undertones and/or the idea that it is a naughty/indulgent treat.

The best example I can think of to illustrate just how powerful marketing can be has little to do with feminism at all. Everybody remembers the Ferrero Rocher adverts - Mr Ambassador, with these Rochers you are really spoiling us! Ferrero also make this stuff called Nutella, which is marketed as a chocolate spread for kids. Now, I don't have any concrete proof of this, I have not sent samples off to the lab or anything, I only have my taste buds to guide me on this one, but after, erm, extensive research, I am damn sure that the soft centre of Ferrero Rocher is exactly the same as Nutella. Same stuff, different positioning.

Come to think of it, the chocolate and diet industries kind of feed off one another's advertising campaigns:

1- Chocolate manufacturers convince woman that she should be "naughty" and stuff her face with chocolate

2 - Diet companies (Special K, anyone?) make woman feel ugly and fat and in need of their services

3 - Woman feels guilty. She gives up chocolate and eats Special K bars instead.

4 - Woman feels emotionally deprived, not to mention bloody hungry. That family-sized bar of Dairy Milk has never looked so good.

5 - Repeat from Step 2

Why should a food make you feel emotionally deprived? It's just food. Chocolate will not make you happy, nor is eating it a terrible sin. You're not a chocoholic - you've just been duped into thinking that because you're a woman you need the stuff, particularly when you're on your period.

I love chocolate, I really do. And occasionally I do get cravings for it, which are usually satisfied by a small bar of Green & Blacks milk chocolate. Or Cadbury's Whole Nut. Mmmmmmm.....nuts...... Well, you are what you eat. I also have a particular fondness for Curly Wurlys, Chomps, Toblerone (especially those mammoth ones you get in airports!), Twirls (like Flakes but less messy) and Creme Eggs.

I have nothing against chocolate in itself, but I wish that women would stop seeing it as their friend, saviour, ultimate source of comfort, etc etc, because it's quite frankly pathetic.