Editors letter
Hey you,
Welcome to the magazine of deeper analysis, of sociological deep dives and topics to get you thinking. This issue is all about gender politics and you’ve guessed it, feminist takes on various recent social trends.
First up, we’re talking about books. Specifically, why more men need to read fiction. Not just to up their Goodreads game but because stepping into someone else’s shoes is literally empathy 101. If the last book they read was in school, it’s time for a wake-up call.
Then, for the YouTube wormhole dwellers, we’ve rounded up our recent favourite video essays. Whether it’s pop culture breakdowns or deep dives into internet subcultures, these creators are doing sociological work, just with better lighting.
You’ll also find a feature on Strut Safe, the helpline changing how we think about getting home safely. Spoiler: safety shouldn’t be a luxury and the people behind Strut Safe are making sure it’s not.
Finally, we’re unpacking the ‘pick me’ label. Where it comes from, who it hurts and what’s really going on beneath the memes and callouts. It’s messier than it looks on TikTok.
So grab a brew, get comfy and deep it with us. Thanks for turning the page. We don’t take it for granted.
Until next time,
Leah Green
MENMEN IT’S TIME TO READ MORE FICTION IT’S TIME TO READ MORE FICTION
The fiction girlies know the thrill that comes with getting invested in a new fiction series, falling deep into a world that exists only in your mind and the mind of those that have read it too.
Bonding through storylines and debating over the characters heart aching love lives and the escape your own hustle and bustle for a while
The relaxation that comes with cradling your hot cup of tea whilst balancing that book in your lap and immersing yourself into someone else’s worries and dreams.
You get to live the inside workings of another brain with other problems that you may never truly experience and other perspectives that you would have been completely closed off from.
Fiction offers you those perspectives and offers you the opportunity to open your mind to risks that you would never take and outcomes you would never experience and emotions you may not have felt before.
So, let’s actually get to the point.
The point is that fiction is typically gender based. Shock.
And this could be generalising but most of the men I know have read maybe 10 pages of a fiction book in their whole life. Excluding high school! They had no choice.
The amount of men reading fiction has fell from 33% in 2017 to 27.7% in 2022 and the former was worrying enough.
There seems to be judgement or maybe more of a mental block for men when it comes to reading fiction books. They think it’s ‘girly’ and perhaps cringe and that ‘’The Diary of a CEO’ will provide them much more wisdom than Feyre in fantasy land. Fair enough?
But one thing men can lack, at times and generalising, is emotional intelligence. And you can’t blame them because they haven’t exactly been encouraged to revise their empathy skills and process their emotions. Research has shown that reading fiction can influence empathy, with experiments proving that over the course of one week, readers empathic skills significantly changed after reading a fictional story.
Fiction also offers insight into different ways to cope with stressful problems and also provides an escape from stress, helping you relax and emotionally process your own life.
Youtube essays we’ve been loving
It’s Friday night. The after-work drinks have steadily come to an end and the time to walk home looms over head. I could get a taxi. Or the bus. But that means spending money and being subjected to a man driving the vehicle. No thanks.
It’s only a 15-minute walk. 10 minutes down a main road and 5 minutes through a sketchy park and there lies my front door. Nothing I haven’t done before. I go to ring my friend for the third Friday in a row. She’s in work early in the morning. I feel too bad waking her as she’s probably past falling asleep. Then I’m reminded.
The poster I saw the other day whilst I was on the bus. A call line I’m pretty sure was for women specifically in this scenario. I click on safari and type in the letters. Strut Safe. A number I can ring to keep me company on my trek home in the dark. Perfect. The phone line rings twice and then a voice. A calm and lovely voice. She introduces herself as Caragh and asks for my name.
“How was your night lovely”
I tell her about my night, the drinks me and my colleagues had at our favourite spot just around the corner from the office, my boring day of spreadsheets and teams meetings with clients.
She asks if I like my job and I tell her it’s
STRUT SAFE
fulfilling some days and a drag the rest. She agrees and I ask about hers.
Caragh works a 9-5 just like me and volunteers for Strut Safe over the weekends. I tell her how admirable that is and how she’s a better woman than me. Most days I can’t even find motivation for my one job and she’s out here doing double shifts.
We continue to chat about work and relationships and future holidays until my front door suddenly reaches me. The time went by so quick as we chatted and i walked in auto pilot to my house. No sudden feelings of dread or mistaking my shadow in the pavement for a creep. No paranoid thoughts. No swift turns over my shoulder.
I thanked Caragh for keeping me company and asked how many other girls she will speak to tonight. She explains it’s unpredictable but Friday is their busiest. I asked if most phone calls go the way ours did. She tells me they are either very similar or just silent, as she sits on the end of the phone as a safety blanket for the less chatty girls.
It dawned on me. The sad reality of what this was. The reality of women seeking comfort and safety in a call line on their walk home whilst men dawdle on the streets without a care in the world. Yes, there are threats to all but this is not something that is in demand for them.
One in two women feel unsafe walking alone in the dark on a quiet street near their home, compared to one in seven men. New data from last year, compiled by Strut Safe in partnership with Clear Channel, revealed that almost a third of women (29%) would never walk alone at night.
27% of UK women would go to gigs by themselves if they felt safer travelling home on their own. These sad realities are something we don’t even question as women anymore. Luckily we have organisations such as Strut safe that are making an effort to help safety concerns in any way they can.
“It can be paralysing to feel like you have to tackle patriarchy as a system all at once” says Katarina Slater in regard to Strut Safes criticism towards not providing any longterm solutions to gender based violence. She addressed how the criticism is definitely true in regard to their service addressing a symptom, rather than a root cause, of gendered violence.
“In an ideal world, Strut Safe would be obsolete, but for now, if we can help just one person on their way home feel they’re not alone, then we’ve done something to mitigate the harm that marginalised people face in this country”
Katarina wanted to highlight that Strut Safe is not just aimed at women, as they know that people of all genders, particularly marginalised genders, can feel at risk while out alone. According to a report by Stonewall, more than two in five trans people (44 per cent) avoid certain streets altogether because they don’t feel safe.
“It can be paralysing to feel like you have to tackle patriarchy as a system all at once ”
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Strut Safe have recently launched partnerships with transit providers, like Lothian Buses and First Bus which is great to see larger institutions taking an interest in the safety of their service users before and after they use the bus. However, this seems to be the only initiative made by a large institution when it comes to the streets feeling safer
She acknowledges there isn’t necessarily agreement on how best to tackle this issue, whether through legislation or protest. Strut Safe have a lot of admiration for organisations taking a more zoomed out approach, bit their service is very much limited to the small actions that can make just one person feel more secure on their journey home.
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Strut Safe was first launched in 2021 by Rho Chung and Alice Jackson, following the murder of Sarah Everard. It is a volunteer-operated charity and they currently have over 70 volunteers across the UK. The service is available between 7pm and 3am on Fridays and Saturdays, or between 7pm and 1am Sundays. Get this number in your contacts! 0333 335 0026. It will probably come in handy.
We all know the ‘pick me’ label by now. If you don’t, you are blessed and should remain under that tranquil rock. That’s because, what once was a simple and perhaps playful term has now transpired into something more evil and contradictory than ever before.
The ‘pick me’ girl as it goes is a one-dimensional being who simply thrives for male attention. ‘A woman that is willing to do anything for male approval and will throw other women under the bus to achieve this goal’ urban dictionary tells us. She is ‘not like the other girls’ because she doesn’t like wearing makeup or she thinks girls are too much drama or she prefers to drink pints at the pub. She places value on interests and hobbies that are traditionally championed by cis-gender, heterosexual men. She does this because she wants to be ‘picked’ by the boys, hence the ‘pick me’ title.
The idea is that ‘pick me’ girls have internalised misogyny. These women put other women down and bash ‘feminine’ intricacies to appear different and more attractive to men. Feminists seek to push back patriarchal structures and misogynistic attitudes, particularly addressing internalised misogyny that exists within women. So we can see why a ‘pick me’ girl is not favoured within the feminist community and labelling these women as something with very negative connotations can make these ‘pick me’ women reflect on their internalised misogyny.
Therefore, it is a positive movement, right? What started as a critique of gender and identity has quickly become a catch-all phrase for any woman or girl deemed too annoying, too attractive or too friendly. The Pick Me label on TikTok has evolved so far from its original intent that it’s given rise to a bizarre, meta version: the anti-Pick Me. She loudly distances herself from so-called Pick Mes, yet engages in the same kinds of digs at other women, only now its framed as feminist empowerment instead of a bid for male validation.
Well, some feminists assert that the pick-me label is as equally sexist as the behaviour it attempts to address.
THE PICK
feminist
PICK ME a dilemma
While the term was originally meant to highlight genuine instances of sexist and misogynistic behaviour in women, it has transpired into a tool of harassment and shame being thrown towards women.
What we’re witnessing is a new kind of performance, where even calling out a ‘pick me’ can become a pick-me moment in itself. It’s a loop of contradictions, where the desire to be seen as the ‘right kind of woman’ persists, just dressed in different clothes. The anti-pick-me girl might mock traditional femininity under the guise of empowerment but she too is performing for an audience, carefully curating her stance to win approval, only this time, from the online feminist crowd. It raises the question: who are we really performing for and can you ever really win?
It also plays into a larger issue with how women are policed in public spaces, particularly online. Every move is scrutinised, dissected and labelled. Whether it’s your outfit choice, your interests or the way you interact with men. The ‘pick me’ label becomes yet another stick to beat women with, another impossible standard to navigate. It doesn’t liberate us from patriarchy, it just repackages it. Men can get away with being all over the place but women are expected to stick to this super specific script. You mess up even a little and suddenly it’s your own side turning on you.
In that way, the pick-me discourse has stopped being about challenging internalised misogyny and started becoming just another weapon used against women. It creates a hierarchy of womanhood, in which some women are seen as more legitimate, more ‘woke’, more feminist, than others. Not based on meaningful action or beliefs but on how they present and what they say in the right social contexts.
Ultimately, if the goal is to dismantle internalised misogyny, we need to stop shaming women into change and start questioning the systems that taught us these roles in the first place. Women aren’t born wanting to be ‘pick me’s’, they’re taught that their value depends on how men perceive them. Dismissing or mocking those who haven’t unlearnt that conditioning yet doesn’t build a better world for women, it just reinforces the same hierarchy, dressed up in new TikTok terms.