You know that feeling when you just know someone is having a laugh at your expense?
Take fashion, for example. The fact that all the clothes seem to be cut for pre-pubescent boys; the see-through fabrics and impossible shapes; all those ugly shoes dressed up as the ultimate in style; the absurd price tags.
Sometimes it can feel like it’s all one giant joke engineered to humiliate any woman over the age of 17 or a size 6.
It’s just so toxic. The way it encourages and idolises a certain narrow aesthetic, despite all the hand-wringing and virtue-signalling about ‘inclusivity’ and ‘diversity’.
The way it fetishises the female form and treats women as little more than an assemblage of body parts. You know: one year boobs are in, the next it’s legs, the next it’s all about the midriff. Bottoms are the new cleavage and all that nonsense. It’s all so much gaslighting, at our expense.
The latest in this fashion gimcrackery is the Skims ‘Faux Hair Micro String Thong’, aka a merkin, as brought to you by Kim Kardashian.
This delightful garment can be yours for a mere £34 and is available in a variety of colours, sizes and textures, ranging from ‘ginger straight’ to ‘cocoa black curly’.
I use the term ‘garment’ loosely: it is essentially a piece of dental floss attached to what looks like a dead rat. If you found one on the bedroom floor, you would want to put in an urgent call to Rentokil.
The latest in this fashion gimcrackery is the Skims ‘Faux Hair Micro String Thong’, aka a merkin, as brought to you by Kim Kardashian, writes Sarah Vine
‘With this iconic new panty, your carpet can be whatever color [sic] you want it to be’, says the website. Worst of all, the damn things are all sold out. People are literally buying this nonsense. It’s madness.
Especially since the fashion and beauty industries have spent the past goodness knows how many years telling women we all need to be hairless.
So, what? Are we now living in a world where we’re expected to wax or laser it all off – and then rush to spend £34 on what is essentially a pubic prosthetic? Apparently so.
Honestly, sometimes I despair at the sheer stupidity of my own sex.
Merkins, of course, are nothing new. Historically, they were mostly used by prostitutes to either disguise the signs of venereal disease or after shaving to get rid of lice. In that respect, they don’t have the most salubrious of connotations.
Then again, neither does Ms Kardashian herself, even though we’re all expected to pretend she’s some king of fashion icon and not just a shameless self-publicist who has built herself an ‘influencer empire’ via scandal and surgical enhancements.
Since she first burst into our collective consciousness with a ‘leaked’ sex tape in 2007, she –together with the rest of the Kardashian clan – has done more to demean the female of the species than even the most unreconstructed male sexist.
Under the guise of ‘self-expression’ and ‘empowerment’ she has legitimised self-debasement as a ticket to fame and fortune.
She is arguably part of the reason why sites like OnlyFans thrive, and that women like Bonnie Blue, the ‘porn influencer’ who claims to have slept with more than 1,000 men, exist.
Kim Kardashian at the Nike SKIMS launch party in New York last month
The reality star, 44, launched her line of faux intimate hair thongs which cost a whopping £34 per pair
Indeed, Ms Kardashian is a central part of the ‘pornification’ of popular culture that has normalised the aesthetics and moral values of pornography, which in turn has led to all sorts of twisted, often dangerous, messages around women and sex – especially for vulnerable women who don’t have her money or fame.
Ever since she so infamously ‘broke the internet’ by posing naked with a champagne glass balanced on her bottom, successfully globalising her sexuality for profit, she has continued to inspire countless young girls and women to follow her lead – all the while lining her own pockets.
As Bette Midler once said of her, ‘If Kim wants us to see a part of her we’ve never seen, she’s gonna have to swallow the camera.’
This latest gimmick is a classic example. Accompanied by a marketing video of a cheesy 1970s game-show host asking a line-up of bikini-clad lovelies whether ‘the drapes match the carpet’, it’s cleverly pitched as tongue-in-cheek, just a little bit of fun for a spicy night out.
But it’s actually just really grubby, like most of her stunts over the years.
Of course, these days, in a bid for respectability, she styles herself more as a fashion influencer, aided and abetted by fawning endorsements by those in the industry, including Anna Wintour, who first put her on the cover of Vogue.
At the end of the day, though, she’s just a parody of the over-sexualised female, with her pneumatic breasts and exaggerated behind, her tiny waist, plumped up face and lips and blank expression. In other words, the face that launched a thousand Brazilian butt-lifts.
Her sister Kylie, a plain little thing enhanced by surgery and now the head of a global beauty empire, has made a fortune flogging cosmetics to girls who want to look like her – even though, in truth, even she doesn’t look like her.
But then it runs in the family: the mother, Kris, recently underwent such extreme facial surgery she now looks several decades younger than her own daughters.
None of these women represent anything remotely real or authentic. They are just shameless opportunists, the product of an internet influencer culture that has, over the past two decades, slowly but surely eroded all boundaries of taste and dignity in public life.
And yet, somehow, they have come to dictate and dominate the female aesthetic – to all our detriments.
That anyone falls for their schtick is a constant source of amazement to me. Perhaps I’m the only person in the world who feels this way. But I, for one, am just not buying it.
Too stressful!
Claudia Winkleman on the set of Celebrity Traitors
On the general theme of disagreeing with almost everyone else on the entire planet (see above), I just can’t bring myself to watch Celebrity Traitors with Claudia Winkleman. I watched the first episode of The Traitors in 2022, and while I could see it was going to be a hit, I found it so stressful to watch I couldn’t face it again. It reminds me of school, and being horribly bullied. Why would I see that as entertainment?
- I couldn’t help chuckling at the news that the National Trust has been stocking its men’s toilets with vegan tampons. Don’t they know you’re not meant to eat them?
Call these two mps?
Adnan Hussain, MP for Blackburn, and Iqbal Mohamed, MP for Dewsbury and Batley, are two independent MPs who support the ban on Jewish fans attending the Maccabi Tel Aviv game against Aston Villa in Birmingham next month. Both have, in the past, used highly offensive language against Jews, and both are supported by a sectarian base that is openly anti-Semitic. The fact that they remain elected members of Parliament shows the kind of trouble Britain is in.
We can’t dodge financial storm
These constant doom-laden warnings about impending financial disaster are all very well, but what are any of us supposed to do about it? Like most people, I have very little agency over the economic weather. All I know is that the masters of the universe who control all our lives will be well insulated from the coming storm – while the rest of us will be left swinging in the wind.
