They were aware that how they look matters but by either instinct or good sense knew

They were aware that how they look matters but, by either instinct or good sense, knew that “in your face” dressing up can look slightly ridiculous to real-world inhabitants (cf fashionland).But then the other personality, clever Elvira, takes over and produces some perfectly sensible observations. We said that our successful women told us that young women now tend to be too intense and ambitious for its own sake. Ambitious? Of course they’re ambitious – to achieve and contribute and get rewards – not just to have “drama, excitement and the acclaim of millions”, as we used to say at school.The idea that Peter York would outlaw dressing up is mad. Peter York’s preferred dress code for women is formal, produced and done up to the nines.

Again, we simply observed that power dressing wasn’t what these women did. But we didn’t and they don’t – they just don’t spend a lot of time agonising about it – they’ve been too busy doing something very well.She also attributes to us the notion that miracle women have learnt not to be too intense and ambitious We didn’t say that. The social critic responds to a piece by Anne McElvoy on his research

into career women
ANNE MCELVOY is clearly two people – Anne Sploggs and Elvira McElvoy. Anne Sploggs read the article about our research among senior women and chose to misunderstand it and generate some funny copy.She says that we concluded that women pass through the glass ceiling in a mystical way. What are we to do? The sexual and feminism revolutions of the last 40 years have been based on a fallacy – that women have gained control over their bodies and their fertility and that men don’t need to fret any more We haven’t, and you do It is about time we all faced this simple fact..

Since health scares about the pill reached their peak in 1995, abortion rates among middle-aged women have soared. It isn’t just youngsters who fail to grasp that sex means babies. Actually swallowing one every day, or enquiring as to whether one’s partner is doing so, seems like an unimportant detail.Worse, this abdication of sexual responsibility has by no means increased women’s sexual power. It is as if the very existence of the pill protects us from pregnancy. Despite the best efforts of feminism, despite the health scares which have driven women off the pill in droves, despite even the threat of Aids, male and female attitudes to contraception don’t appear to have changed since the moment the pill arrived, bringing with it the implicit assertion that contraception was now simple, and that no one need worry no more. Er, wouldn’t it help to rope them into sharing responsibility for the results of unprotected sex? Maybe we could do it by telling them what kind of toll bringing up a family alone can really extract from a woman and her children, instead of making out that single motherhood is a great leap forward in human evolution.It may seem far-fetched to lay all of this sexual and procreative confusion at the door of the oral contraceptive, but that overlooks the psycho- sexual impact of this 40-year-old wonderdrug.