TRIGGER WARNING
I am irked by any campaign or thoughtless Facebook group that informs me what qualifies a real woman. They are full of good intentions, real women eat cake, real women have curves. Yes, some real women do eat and some have curves. All women can prefer the cheese plate and some are just naturally lean, what are you going to do about it? Oh, expel them from the womanhood.

But it’s not just women who suffer from not being a ‘real woman’ if she can’t fill an A cup or face pudding after her tea. Survivors UK have created a campaign to draw attention to male rape and encourage those who have suffered to speak to someone. 

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the death of writer Angela Carter, who mixed feminism with a stunning use of language and a feel for magical realism to create some of the most beautiful pieces of literature in English.

 I first encountered Carter when I studied one of her collections of short stories – The Bloody Chamber – during my A Levels. A decade ago, so that must have been the tenth anniversary of her death, a fact I didn’t know then and never would have guessed; the language felt too raw and immediate to belong to the past, even the recent past.

I have been thinking about it a lot, and I have come to the only possible conclusion. PETA is a secret PR organisation for a conglomerate of factory farms, butchers and the dairy industry.

I haven’t eaten meat since I was 8, and their latest “go vegan” campaign made me want to buy a steak, take it to PETA’s offices and eat it. Raw. I‘m pretty sure the taste and texture would make me sick, but it would be worth it just to spite them.

I have no idea why PETA think that degrading women is the best possible way of highlighting and ending animal abuse. I can only assume they think that all publicity is good publicity. In their case, it’s really not; they get the name PETA talked about, but only attached to choice adjectives such as “deluded” “misogynistic” and “appalling”. What they DON’T do is drive down the amount of meat people eat. 

It happened rather suddenly. I was a teenager, my best friend had moved schools and invited me to visit a new school friend of hers. We met, the three of us, we got along fine, I pretended to know what they were talking about until it was time to leave. That’s when it happened. This girl, this person I had met but hours ago leant in for a hug.

Ok, so it’s not the kind of thing that requires a trigger warning or anything. I don’t come from some sort of cold military style family. It isn’t that I’d never hugged or been hugged before but that was reserved for family and that’s nuclear family.

Plus, we were teenagers, isn’t that a time for shrouding our under/overdeveloped bodies in baggy band T-shirts and hunching? Puberty is cruel to all people in some manner, some people get teenage acne, some wake up and their nether regions have gone all Teen Wolf on them. Hugging interrupts hunching. 

Self-awareness. The recent Unilad debacle in which the site is pretty sure it’s found a way to make rape funny (surprise! You can’t), Hester’s eventual refusal of his RBS bonus, might make you might think there’s not a lot of it around. This is not true, as proven by Zooey Deschanel’s Saturday Night Live sketch, Bein’ Quirky with Zooey Deschanel.

Maybe we haven’t been fair to Zooey Deschanel, she’s got bills to pay just like the rest of us and let’s just agree having to promote her show New Girl is punishment enough. Deschanel makes her money being The Manic Pixie Dream Girl and at least here she's able to laugh at herself. 

Finding new ways to remain the Manic Pixie Dream Girl princess cannot be easy, allowing magazines to attribute such quotes as this to you: “I would go shopping for vintage clothes, and I once bought this really pretty, but giant, 1950s pink prom dress. I was wearing this with a tiara in my bedroom, at my computer, dressed like a princess just to do my homework.” Well, it just can’t be easy being Head Manic Pixie Dream Girl; she’s screwed up on that quote because we all know MPDGs use typewriters not computers.

This year Valentine’s Day falls on a Tuesday. That’s a school night so we’re taking a wild guess and assuming that, like us, you are celebrating/commiserating/carrying on as usual because it’s just a DAY, it’s JUST a Hallmark holiday it’s not REAL and I couldn’t care less really this weekend instead of the 14th. If you don’t have any plans we, at Squeamish Bikini, have a tradition of marking Valentine’s Day in less conventional ways.

Squeamish Kate’s scared of flowers (they might come alive and eat her) so they’re out and Squeamish Louise and Gareth are just plain cursed when it comes to Valentine’s Day. In case you’re struggling for some inspiration here are some tips to either go with or avoid…

Today Nadine Dorries took a break from BBC bashing to speak out on the Today programme against the provision of contraception for girls as young as 13. This is not a case of matron chucking some condoms at young passers-by; this is fitting teenagers with the implant.

In a bid to drive down the number of teenage pregnancies a government initiative is being piloted in Southampton in 9 participating schools. Out of the 9 schools 33 teenage girls requested to be with the contraceptive implant.

Just in case you’re not au fait with the implant it is this. A tiny device that is inserted under the skin of the upper arm where it releases the hormone progesterone to prevent pregnancy. The implant can be removed at any time and fertility returns almost immediately to normal. Possible side effects include headaches, nausea, acne, breast tenderness and disrupted periods. But these are also side effects to teenagerdom so who would be able to tell?

I have to confess I tend not to watch Newsnight or Question Time (I’m an Any Questions? person, though NOT Any Answers because if I wanted to hear the general public’s opinion I would go outside) and when my Twitter Feed gets all het up about what some politician is saying on either one I feel well informed enough to continue to go without such viewing habits.

Yesterday Newsnight was on the Twitter agenda, because guess who was on… Katie Price! I know! Is she even allowed to vote? Because she’s certainly not allowed an opinion on breast implants, even though she owes her career to them and has undergone several procedures.

OK so the suggestion that an age limit of 21 be imposed on breast augmentation surgery was hardly ground breaking stuff but nor was it the stupidest thing I ever heard.

We covered the PIP implant scandal and the Squeamish policy is that your body is your business (I am always happy to interfere in a legal, nitpicky manner if that is what you’re after) so let’s move on from that to the irritation caused by Katie Price being on the show. 

Today is the date the BBC has been waiting ages for, documentaries and adaptations on TV and radio all so the nation can properly celebrate, nay, properly appreciate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens.

Charlie D, the writer who gave us A Christmas Carol, drew attention to children living in poverty and left his wife, Catherine Hogarth because she got a bit portly after over 10 pregnancies. I think I’d turn to a bit of cake if my new husband developed an uncomfortable passion for my younger sister too. Cake is uncomplicated and doesn’t force you to partake in annual performances of the play what it wrote.

But I fear we are full to the brim of Dickens trivia. Instead we at Squeamish Bikini would like to draw your attention to another anniversary today. On the 7th of February 1918 women over 30 who could be sensible won the right to vote.