Zoe Williams
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/ 29 January 2007

Chastity makes a comeback

It is very easy to persuade people that ”slag” is not an acceptable insult to level at a woman. ”You wouldn’t say that to a man,” you could point out. Even though it is pretty much a cross-gender term these days, and one might often hear a man described as a right slapper, that still seems to hold.

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/ 28 November 2006

Just fancy…

She lifts the spirits. In her role as Samantha in Sex And The City, Kim Cattrall has made her name as an actor at 42 and she’s presented a woman in pursuit of pleasure – solo, sexy and loving it. The thing is, Zoe Williams finds, in person she’s not quite like that.

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/ 17 November 2006

Sexism can’t be laughed off

He said, following a crushing defeat by rival soccer club Queen’s Park Rangers at the weekend (the result of — I believe the technical term is — being rubbish at his job and having a crappy team) that female officials should be banned from the game.

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/ 9 October 2006

Myth of the metrosexual

Mark Latham is the former leader of the Australian Labour Party. He once broke a cabbie’s arm in a fight over the fare. The British Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott once punched a guy who’d pelted him with an egg. They are both lovely big men. Latham has just written a book in which the key quote is: ”Australian mates and good blokes have been replaced by nervous wrecks, metrosexual knobs and toss bags.”

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/ 24 July 2006

The swaglash begins

In the middle of the World Cup, I was on BBC radio, arguing with Fiona McIntosh, a Grazia magazine columnist, about the Wags who, at the time, were the wives and girlfriends of the England football team. At the moment, the Wags have become the Swags (Summit Wives and Girlfriends, for G8).

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/ 3 July 2006

Bring on the c*** warriors

People who hate women, or find us disgusting or terrifying, do not use ”vagina” casually, as an insult. People who think of themselves as post-feminists, who delight in the shock of an apparently unsisterly sound emitting from them conversationally, do not say ”vagina”. But it’s not the v-word that needs reclaiming, it’s the c-word — the rudest one in the English language.

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/ 3 April 2006

Even models have rights

It’s nice, isn’t it, when someone’s in the public eye for so long, and so variously, that you start to look upon them as a friend. I feel like that about Kate Moss — I know when she splits up with Babyshambles bad boy Pete Doherty and when she gets back together with him again; and I know where she hides her cocaine when she goes abroad.

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/ 23 December 2005

Fuss does a fat lot of good

”Nobody wants to be fat. Nobody wants anybody else to be fat. Politicians and medical professionals would like to see everybody un-fat. And still we get fatter. On my Marxist days I like to think of this as a groundswell of subversive collective action”, writes Zoe Williams.

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/ 23 November 2005

Is feminism in regression?

In an article published in The New York Times recently, columnist Maureen Dowd has written the definitive precis of new-wave misogyny. The piece, taken from her new book Are Men Necessary?, appears to be addressing the fact that we’re all in ”a muddle in the boardroom, the bedroom and the situation room”.

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/ 3 August 2005

Blair the beauty queen

British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s annual make-up spend differs, it seems, according to what paper you look at. I read that since 2003 it was £1 000, plus £791,20 on make-up artists. My boyfriend came up with the rather more outlandish figure of two grand per press conference; he must have misunderstood.