What is Glamour
There is no greater wash of serenity that comes over me quite like the sight of glamour. Whether itâs Grace Kelly in beachwear or Marilyn Monroe smoking cigarettes. Whether itâs Diane Keaton in tailoring or Lady Gaga in meat. Whether itâs Shirley Eaton covered head-to-toe in gold paint, or Pamela Anderson _sans_ make-up. The mere sight of glamorous women offers both escape and that shrieking alarm clock that reminds every one of us to level up wherever weâre at. Thereâs no ceiling to glamour. Glamour is constantly polishing its edges. Keep up! She waits for no one.
I live for it. I live for being a woman. Women are shy to say that these days. Docile people-pleasing women who donât want to make those who havenât decided what they are feel uncomfortable. Itâs always been an attack to the weak when a woman loves being a woman. So lean in and piss them off. I love waking up in the morning and choosing. Do I want to wear a skirt and pumps or do I want to wear menâs trousers and a wife beater? I can do both. I can do things women 100 years ago wouldnât dream of doing. Thatâs progress. Thatâs living beyond the stereotypes and constrictions of the feminine. Thatâs defying gender expectations. Thatâs what we fought for. Glamour. Madonna once asked: _Do you know what it feels like for a girl?_ The only people who know are born women. We know what it feels like, and we know that this isnât it:
This is _not_ what we fought for. This feels like hell. It feels like gaslighting. For those who donât know: âdollsâ is a term used for transwomen, rooted in ballroom culture. This feels like women are being replaced by men playing dress-up and cheapening femininity to trashy stereotypes most commonly sold by prostitutes for the pleasure of men. It has NOTHING to do with women, or female glamour, or empowerment. Itâs the opposite of freedom. Itâs the chains of plastic surgery, of augmented tits, of perfect symmetrical facial features, of over-plumped lips, of accentuated hips. Weâre supposed to be past an idea of the female prototype promoted by unimaginative men. The year is no longer 2025, but 1925. Everything women have done to build our own magazines, advocate for our own diversity, critique our own impossible beauty standards, and celebrate our own beauty beyond the Barbie box is being incinerated via the unhinged ego trips of trans activists. These born biological males want not just to take Barbie out of her box, but to be photographed as her on the cover of our magazines. Apparently plastic is evil and pollutes, unless itâs this.
The trans activists pictured here have the most reductive ideas about what it means to be a woman - because no matter how much surgery, or how many drugs they take, they are not biological women. They are men aspiring to be women in the most extreme ways. âItâs someone who identifies as being a woman!â they scream. No, honey. Thatâs not what a woman is. A woman is a human being born with a vagina, who will grow a pair of breasts but not before experiencing a finite window of opportunity for blissful ignorance ahead of being struck down with periods, potential eating disorders and misogyny. Donât you miss the days when womenâs magazines suggested some mild anorexia? If you donât bleed like us then you are not us. You are an imitation. Sometimes a very successful one. I respect it, but the respect has to go both ways.
_Glamour UK_ hasnât been a bastion of progress for us girls, to be fair. It has engaged for decades in selling a rakish thinness and a disappearing brow to women that is unobtainable for most. And yet, at least these ideals were being sold by women. Now they have given up on women altogether and decided that nine people who were born as biological men can do femininity better than we can. I have had it up to the top of Amy Winehouseâs beehive (may she â and it â rest in peace) of this too often selfish, too regularly violent, too _de rigeur_ bullying, too consequentially power-hungry, too by proxy women-hating movement that is trans activism. Iâd have preferred if _Glamour UK_ had put Harry Styles dressed as Dorothy in the Wizard Of Oz on the cover, because that would have been more honest.
If trans activism was primarily about guaranteeing people with body dysphoria visibility to gain access to medical care and fair and equal policy etc, and if trans activists were truly in thrall to their female icons, then there would be no _Glamour UK_ cover. _Glamour UK_ was a womenâs magazine. It was not a trans magazine. It was not a queer magazine. It was for girls. There should be a sense of ceremony, and a sense of place. Serena Williams was never trying to appear on the cover of _Men âs Health_. We have _Women âs Health_ for that. There are plenty magazines that can host this cover: _Them_ being the prime choice. Trans activism should not be about taking up space that biological women have fought tooth and nail for. Yet, trans activism seems preoccupied with that above all else.
When I was 14, buying _Mizz_ or _Just Seventeen,_ I wanted to see Kate Mossâs clavicle competing with her cheek bones on the cover. I wanted to see Erin OâConnorâs anti-smile in pipe jeans. I wanted to see Naomi Campbellâs skin. I wanted to see every kind of femininity dripping off the glossy pages. I wanted to see something untouchable but aspirational. I wanted to see the Amazons of today, warriors of the millennial era, defining the style and attitude of the moment for W O M E N. I cannot imagine being a teenage girl, picking up a copy of _Glamour UK_ âs âWomen of the Yearâ, and seeing that. That is nothing for teenage me to hope for - to grow up to be. Teenage me would have run for the fucking hills. I didnât want to dress like that, talk like that, or think like that, because that had nothing to do with me. What are womenâs magazines if not for women? Or are we going to bargain our visibility away for the sake of the demands of those who claim that nobody can see or hear their overt and very loud displays? Itâs a nonsense performance that nobody is buying.
Last night, Hollywoodâs most talked-about actress Sydney Sweeney was recognized at a _Variety_ Women Of Power event, in which she is promoting her movie about the life of boxing champion and domestic violence survivor, Christy Martin. She gave a powerful and respectful speech onstage about the importance of the storytelling. She was capital-G Glamour in a sheer silver dress. And yet, her appearance was overshadowed by criticism for wearing said dress due to the⌠Well what exactly? The woman part. Her dress was wrong because sheâs hot, and women are no longer allowed to be hot.
Sweeney is a bombshell. Itâs threatening because itâs proof that half the population are still born as women, and many thrive as such. Forever it has been a threat to men. Itâs just that the men who are now threatened are arguing that theyâre not men, but women. The real women. No - the best women. _Glamour UK_ puts nine trans activists on the cover for âWomen of the Yearâ but Sydney Sweeney is hated for being drop dead gorgeous. The mainstream is peak sexism once again. The only people not allowed to look good as women are women. Trans activism holds more blame than the old-fashioned men right now. I almost miss them.
Last time I wrote for _Glamour UK_ I was invited to pen an op-ed about the lack of female representation at music festivals. In my piece I wrote the following about headlining slots, but now it appears to apply to the front cover of the magazine itself only two and a half years laterâŚ
> Sexism is the oldest prejudice in the world, and its tentacles are institutionalized at every level. And while booking men may be considered a safer commercial choice, attitudes will not change until women are booked in equal measure, and audiences become as accustomed to seeing them on the same stages at the same times as their male counterparts. Had Glastonbury elected Lizzo over Axl Rose and his grizzly friends, I highly doubt they would be looking at a depletion in ticket sales. But thatâs not really the problem. The problem is that the music industry is more comfortable with men and misogyny. It doesnât just value women less, it robs women of their value, and that hasnât changed just because of the Me Too movement. Did the Me Too movement even scratch the paint in the music world? No. Because rockânâroll is predicated on victimizing, sexualizing and minimizing the power of women.
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> Ten years ago I was working at _NME_. Itâs hard for me to believe that it was as little as a decade ago that the norm at a British music institution would be for daily battles about why more women should headline festivals. If we protested too much that we wanted to see ourselves represented in female acts on the cover of the magazine we were making it would be standard to be accused of having a âfeminist agendaâ (as though that were a bad thing!). And yet, here we are, back there, and maybe worse for having had a conversation time and again that the industry is now squarely deciding to do nothing about. It should say a lot about the culture in-house at _NME_ that justifying a female-led cover was such a war at the time that in 2014 we only had one cover of a weekly magazine owned entirely by a woman, and that was St Vincent for an Album of the Year issue (one that was always a commercial shoe-in because you could guarantee an audience for _NME_ âs end-of-year list issue).
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> We are still talking about this because the risks are still not being taken, and the men are still saying no, still limiting our opportunities, still keeping a ceiling over our aspirations. As women, weâve proven ourselves. Weâve proven that we can write music, produce music, perform music, write about music. But we will continue to face this problem so long as the attitudes of the institutions arenât challenged by emboldened decision-making by those in positions of influence. Women arenât a flash in the pan, weâre not a fad to be placated, weâre not playing guitar well considering weâre girls, and weâre not here for brief reparations and consolation prizes after we enjoyed a ripple of a moment in 2018 when the New York Times broke the Harvey Weinstein story. For several millennia weâve been treated as second class citizens.
What we are witnessing here is a return backwards. It is not progress if we are left asking whether womenâs magazines are no longer able to put women on the cover.
In the _Wall Street Journal_ yesterday, it was reported that new evidence has emerged to prove that the trans surge we have seen in the last decade is a result of âsocial contagionâ, and not a reflection of an uptick in medically defined body dysphoria.
âThe surge in transgender identification in recent years wasnât the revelation of a hidden biological truth,â says the report. âIt was a social phenomenon shaped by imitation, ideology and institutional reinforcement.â Magazines like _Glamour UK_ are responsible for the reinforcement of a delusion that is actively erasing everything feminists have battled for. I would like everyone to be free and happy in their choices, but this is not that. This is not equal. This is daylight robbery.
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If you have yet to stream it, _PragerU_ featured me in their âStories Of Usâ series this Tuesday, and the link to view that is here. Iâm bowled over that over half a million people have already watched it. Maybe the world isnât going totally mad after all.
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31.10.2025 05:35 â đ 0 đ 0 đŹ 0 đ 0
