Sometimes I wonder if I’ve learned anything since I was at school, when I used to fall madly in love with any guy who showed a vague interest, before desperately wishing I knew how to act on it.

Then I remember how it was, and that being young was difficult, stressful, and quite, quite absurd.

I haven’t arranged a guest blog for this week – sorry about that. In lieu, please enjoy this extract from my own diary, circa 1998. In it, I am trying to explain the complex emotional dynamic in my group of slightly nerdy, oh-so-romantic friends.

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“Every woman should have a ‘Fuck off’ fund!” the article says. Save a sum of money that you can live on for a few months, in case you’re ever in financial hardship, and your lack of funds means you end up stuck in a shit situation.

I’m sure many of us have been there – you accept things you’d otherwise reject because you don’t have the cash to tell people to fuck off. A job with a skeezy boss. A partner who hurts you. Things which, by all rights, you should never have to put up with. But you look at your bank balance and go ‘huh, I do not have the resources to get by if I leave my job right now.’ Or you want to leave your partner because they’ve done something unforgivable, but you know you can’t make the rent on your own.

Sometimes you put up with staying because you don’t have the money to leave.

Financial independence is an incredibly valuable thing. I learned this lesson fairly early in life. Financial independence, as well as being a ticket into somewhere good, is also a handy ticket out of a bad situation.

But.

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My tits are sort-of-round-ish, perhaps not as firm as they were when I was nineteen, and they have nipples that sit a little bit lower on the breast than I believe is currently fashionable. They’re probably a bit bigger than they were when I was young, which I think makes them a bit more fashionable, and because I am a white girl who barely gets out in the sun, I never have tit tan-lines. Which is great because as far as I understand it, tan lines are less acceptable than no tan lines, in this year of our Lord 2016.

Does that paragraph sound a bit weird to you? Like I am rambling drunkenly on a subject which should by no rights even exist? Of course. Yet all you need to do is look at some old-school porn to realise that there are distinct fashions in what we expect people’s bodies to look like.

I’m not talking here about hair – beards, bushes and fantastic 80s perms all seem to pop in and out of porn fashion depending on the country and the year. Things like body hair can be changed, so although naturally it’s shit that anyone’s expected to either grow or shave their hair, to a certain extent fashions are inevitable. I’m about as fashion-conscious as a dead rat in Marks and Spencer, but I do understand that for many people fashion is fun. You can play around with your clothes, hair, make up etc: making yourself look scary-executive-badass one minute and rainbow-coloured-punk-prince the next. Ace. Likewise when you’re picking your sexy look, you can have all-over body hair one minute, and the next decide you want to wax half of it off leaving just a hairy heart shape in the middle.

But there are also fashions for what breasts should look like. And that is WEIRD, people. Really fucking weird.

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Sometimes Twitter’s hashtag games are total genius, and sometimes they fuck me off. Today’s was a combination of the two, so here are two things from the game – one annoying and one delightful.

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