Category: podcast

Kate’s off sunning herself in Spain, so this week Gemma’s joined by Laurie from the Female Childfree Collective for a one-topic special. We’re talking about a very modern pressure: the idea that if you’re childfree, you should be visibly, impressively productive about it. Five businesses, six holidays a year, a new hobby every fortnight. When…

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This week we ask why new research has named UK women the angriest, saddest and most worried in Europe, and whether medical misogyny, the pay gap and invisible labour might have something to do with it. Then we get into romantasy and the moral panic over Bad Girl Books, Britain’s first romantasy bookshop. Why is…

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This week, the Hannah Spencer “Gucci” shirt that wasn’t. A patterned blouse in Parliament got branded a £2,000 designer piece online, when it was really a £15 charity-shop find, so we get into why women’s clothes draw scrutiny men’s never do, and how one post hardens into “fact”. Then to China’s so-called “leftover women”, the…

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New research says films are more likely to star a talking animal, or a leading man called Chris, than a woman over 60. This week we get into ageism in film and TV and the midlife women who vanish from our screens around 40, only to reappear as somebody’s grandmother or a witchy old hag.…

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It’s Pride Month, so naturally everyone’s arguing about toilets. This week we get into the new EHRC guidance on single-sex spaces, what it actually says about the trans toilet debate, and why we don’t think this was ever the crisis it’s been sold as. We also dig out the quiet bits nobody covered: the protections…

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This week on Friday I’m In Bed we get into nonnamaxxing, the TikTok trend telling twenty-somethings to live like an Italian grandmother, and ask whether it’s lost wisdom or just wellness culture with a tomato plant. We also unpack the backlash to the Department for Education’s post-16 campaign fronted by Gemma Collins, and why parents…

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Content note: the first topic discusses sexual assault. There is a warning at the top of that section and chapter markers if you would like to skip ahead.Married at First Sight UK has been pulled from Channel 4 after three former brides made allegations against their on-screen husbands. We use it as a way into…

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At what point does commenting on women’s bodies stop being something we all just do, and start being the actual problem? This week we look at how school PE shaped a generation of women’s relationships with their own bodies — and why 4.1 million British women in their 50s and 60s are still avoiding exercise…

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This week on Friday I’m in Bed; we’re looking at two ends of the spectrum- young people who aren’t going out, and older women working out who they actually want to live the rest of their lives with. Different demographics, same quiet rewriting of the script. Kate kicks us off with the slow death of…

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It’s Friday I’m an Angry Young Woman (Apparently) This week we’re unpacking the New Statesman‘s “Angry Young Women” cover story, the right-wing press meltdown that followed, and the very tired playbook of describing women’s politics by their hair colour. Plus: is the manosphere really equivalent to the so-called “femosphere”? Then Stella McCartney has done another…

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