“The feminist movement never did and never will run smoothly” observed Hadley Freeman in the Guardian yesterday, having mentioned the troublesome Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique and it's 50th anniversary. Friedan's homophobia and desire to be top feminist dog hampered the Friedan era brand of feminism. Fortunately we're over all that as we ride the 3rd wave, aren't we?

HAH! Fooled you. We're still arguing, or exploring our feminism as I like to call it. Freeman has a problem with how gazillionaire Beyoncé presented herself on a GQ shoot. In tiny pants and fast unravelling top! Now, considering what's happened in the past week in feminism thanks to the same media group concerning transgender issues and transphobia, doesn't the question of hotpants or what side of your boobs you air in a magazine (and you can't not air your boobs in a magazine) seem a tad nitpicky? 

According to a recent survey women are suspicious of chivalrous acts. This has been interpreted as indicative of the decline in good manners. The Daily Mail agrees: “Traditional acts of chivalry once thought to be polite and noble are frowned upon in the 21st century because they are so rare.” But are good manners, chivalry, respect and etiquette interchangeable words or actions? I don't think so.

The survey reports that 82% of women prefer to pay for their own dinner on the first date and 52% would pay to bill. Of the women surveyed 89% would turn down any offer to help carry their heavy shopping bags and 78% of women would not accept the husband or boyfriend's coat on a cold day.

If you hang around the same bits of the internet as me you can't help but have heard that Dark Horse have rebooted their Star Wars comic book and begun a new series starting right after the first Star Wars film (that's A New Hope, not any of those prequel nonsense).

Star Wars #1, as they've somewhat uninspiringly called it, has caused somewhat of a meltdown on the internet and not for the usual reasons - you know, someone having the wrong colour light saber or contradicting a minor plot point from a largely forgotten Expanded Universe book. No, this is far far worse. They've made Leia an X-wing pilot. Not just that – a crack-shot ace who leads her own squadron of fighters during undercover missions.

How dare they! A woman flying a space ship? What a ridiculous concept! I mean WW2 era dog fights in space (complete with sound in the vacuum of space) is perfectly believable; but a woman flying? Never! And anyway how would she fit a helmet over those hair buns?

In this modern life there are two things we just can't decide on. They unite us and divide us and we just can't make it clear whether we love them or hate them. Is this Marmite based? No, friend, it is adverts and celebrities. There are some celebrities we like and there are some we do not. There are some adverts we like and some we do not. Since the dawn of time/advertising celebrities have been happy to shill products, to be bedfellows with the advertising business. Sometimes in spite of the big fat cheque (or, come on, it's 2013! PayPal payment transfer) you know has seduced the celebrity in to this advert, you can't help but wonder if they aren't getting rather a raw deal. Poor Scarlett Johansson for example, unflatteringly trussed up with the hair of Rich Old Lady #2 in a CSI plot in a misguided bid to echo Anita Ekberg (one assumes) in La Dolce Vita in a D&G ad. Admit it, you had no idea how hard it was to wear black lace until you saw that advert. Plenty of other celebrities have fallen foul of the ad treatment too, here are our picks of celebrity adverts...

Sex sex sex. It's everywhere isn't it? It's all we can talk about. Whether it's office workers reading 50 Shades of Grey on their commute or teenagers getting banged in foreign climes while smashed out of their brains on cheap alcopops. Everyone's either doing it or, more to the point, talking about it.

This definitely didn't happen in the good old days. Say 20 years ago. Or 90 years ago. Or 2,000 years ago. Nah, people used to hate talking about sex.  

Look. I'm not saying that we shouldn't talk about sex. Or think about the messages we send out when we do it. Or the ways in which we socialise young people to see, talk about and perform sexual roles. I'm just saying maybe it would be a good idea to just... relax a bit. 

Can we talk about babies, for a second please? Baby, baby, baby, baby. Queen Victoria didn't think much of them. In fact she didn't always like them at all – her own or other people's. She thought they looked like frogs and it wasn't until they reached toddlerhood she found them palatable. Which is not to say she ate her young. Necessarily. But it is to say not all women are baby crazy. Or baby enamoured. Or baby bothered. And that's just fine. Especially if, unlike Queen Victoria, they choose contraception and a baby free life. Or a baby free life once they've popped out and heir and a spare. We all have our duties to our country.

The point is it shouldn't be of interest to anybody but a woman and her fast shrivelling ovaries. If she has a partner then it also becomes their business. A woman, whether in the public eye or not, does not owe the general public or media any kind of womb-watch or fertility status updates. 

Sindy is due to celebrate her 50th birthday this year, and her creators are staging a comeback. Like many icons who reach their twilight years, she wants to look her best and so she’s had some work done. No biggie. Barbie’s been doing it for years.

But we’ve always felt that Sindy was more sensible. She had too much dignity to go under the knife. At 50 I assumed she’d look like my GCSE Art teacher, not Sharon Stone. Is the nice girl image that Sindy’s been lugging around in her matronly pockets all these years a fair one? Is she really any more feminist than Barbie?

In 1963, Pedigree Toys introduced Sindy, a clean, girl-next-door doll with a round face and a thick waist and outfits that would make Jan Brady reach for the scissors. She was designed to capture the hearts of British girls in the same way that Barbie had strutted into every home in America.

Sindy’s prudish charms were a hit, and for the next twenty years she dominated the doll industry throughout Europe, knocking up a grand total of 150 million sales in her lifetime.

Sylvia Plath's only novel The Bell Jar turns 50 this year and it's still overshadowed by the links – real or inferred – to her own life, and suicide shortly after it was published in the UK.

It's an intense, personal book and so it seems fitting that I vividly remember not only when I first read it, but what I brought to it in terms of expectations and background knowledge.

My GCSE English teacher was obsessed with Ted Hughes, who was Plath's husband at the time of The Bell Jar and her suicide. Hughes was on our syllabus, but she probably managed to spend a lot more classroom time on him and his work than was strictly intended. And she talked a lot about his personal life – his marriage to Plath and the fact that some people (unfairly, in her view) blamed him for her suicide.

HEY GUYS IT'S FRIDAY AND YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS...#FF! #FF for ALL! That's hash-tag Friday Five, obviously. Why what did you think it stood for? Twitter has now been around so long that it has its own slang that people no longer save just for the social networking site. It's acceptable (or believed to be acceptable – in some circles) to say 'hash-tag' OUT LOUD when discussing awkward subjects. Chats have become a lot more staccato now people restrict themselves to 140 characters and subjects are restricted to which member of One Direction is trending (Harry, it's always Harry).

Enough time has gone by for most people convinced to open a Twitter account a few years ago not only to work out what micro-blogging is all about but to fall into certain Twitter types. Are you a lurker? An Compulsive Tweeter or self-congratulatory Rter? As long as you don't fall into the David Cameron Twitter trap  we're sure you're fine. Here are our Twitter Types...

Because she's famous and because she has a film coming out Anne Hathaway has been carted out a lot in the press lately. I have been aware of Hathaway but other than seeing The Devil Wears Prada and her hilarious Sisters song on Saturday Night Live I can't say I have ever really paid much attention to her. I was made very aware of her extreme diet in order to play the emaciated Fantine in Les Miserables thanks to various media outlets and I was given no reason to believe (post Vati-Con scandal) that was not the most interesting thing about her.  

Hathaway didn't really talk about her weight loss because it was done in order to emulate a starving woman driven to sex work in revolutionary France. YAWN. There were only so many articles to squeeze out regarding her cropped hair (her character sells her hair and teeth), what to do, what to do?