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The Guardian
11 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘A marker of luxury and arrogance': why gravity-defying boobs are back – and what they say about the state of the world
It was, almost, a proud feminist moment. On inauguration day in January, the unthinkable happened. President Trump, the biggest ego on the planet, was upstaged by a woman in a white trouser suit – the proud uniform of Washington feminists, worn by Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in solidarity with the traditional colour of the suffragettes. In the event, the white trouser suit barely got a mention. The show was stolen by what was underneath: Lauren Sánchez's cleavage, cantilevered under a wisp of white lace. The breasts of the soon-to-be Mrs Jeff Bezos were the ceremony's breakout stars. The only talking point that came close was Mark Zuckerberg's inability to keep his eyes off them. Call it a curtain raiser for a year in which breasts have been – how to put this? – in your face. Sydney Sweeney's pair have upstaged her acting career to the point that she wears a sweatshirt that says 'Sorry for Having Great Tits and Correct Opinions'. Bullet bras are making a sudden comeback, in sugar-pink silk on Dua Lipa on the cover of British Vogue and nosing keen as shark fins under fine cashmere sweaters at the Miu Miu show at Paris fashion week. Perhaps most tellingly, Kim Kardashian, whose body is her business empire, has made a 180-degree pivot from monetising her famous backside to selling, in her Skims lingerie brand, push-up bras featuring a pert latex nipple – with or without a fake piercing – that make an unmissable point under your T-shirt. Not since Eva Herzigova was in her Wonderbra in 1994 – Hello Boys – have boobs been so, well, big. It is oddly tricky to discuss boobs without sounding as if you are in a doctor's surgery or a fraternity house. The word breasts is rather formal. Boobs is fond and familiar, which feels right, but sniggery, which doesn't. Bosoms are what you see in period dramas. Knockers, jugs, melons, hooters, fun bags? Whatever we call them, they are full of contradictions. Men see them and think of sex; babies see them and think of food. They contain a liquid without which the human race could not until recently have survived, but they are also one of the most tumour-prone parts of the body. You can admire them in the Uffizi, the Louvre and the National Gallery, but they are banned on Instagram (Free the nipple!). They are nursing Madonnas, and they are Madonna in a conical bra. They are topless goddesses and top shelf; entirely natural yet extremely rude; and they are, right now, absolutely everywhere. There is a whole lot going on here. In America, the impact of the Trump administration is going way beyond policy, reshaping culture at a granular level. The Maga ruling class has a thirst for busty women in tight clothes, which fuses something new – what Zuckerberg has called 'masculine energy' – with nostalgia for 1950s America. (The 'again' in Make America Great Again may not have a date stamp, but it comes with a white picket fence.) As a symbol of fertility, full breasts are catnip to a regime obsessed with breeding and keen to limit reproductive freedoms. Boobs are in the eye of the storm of the current gender fluidity rollback, too. Nothing says boys will be boys and women should look like women more than Bezos's Popeye biceps next to Sánchez's lace-edged curves. They used to say that a picture was worth a thousand words; in today's ultra-visual culture, that rate of exchange has steepened. The fact that a culture that was, until a few years ago, sensitively exploring gender as a complex issue has now regressed to the level of teenage boys watching American Pie for the first time says everything about how things have changed. Since 1962, when Timmie Jean Lindsey, a mother of six from Texas, became the first woman in the world to have silicone implants, breasts have been a lightning rod for the battleground between what is real and what is fake. The debate that catapulted Pamela Anderson to fame in the 1990s has become one of the defining issues of our time. It turns out that breasts, and beauty, were just the start. Artificial intelligence has jumped the conversation on. From Mountainhead to Black Mirror, we are now talking not just about real boobs v fake ones but about real brains v fake ones. In the battle between old-school flesh and blood and the prospect of a new, possibly improved, version of the human race, breasts have been leading the culture for 63 years. In a nutshell, the world is losing its mind over the girls. 'The State of the Union is … boobs' was the New York Post's succinct verdict on the charms of Sweeney, while Amy Hamm wrote in the National Post that they were 'double-D harbingers of the death of woke'. On inauguration day, onlookers were divided between outrage at an inappropriate level of nudity and admiration for how Sánchez's 'Latina auntie' energy showed her, um, balls. All of which makes it a weird time to have breasts. When writer Emma Forrest saw the author portrait taken for the jacket of her new novel, Father Figure, her first thought was, 'Oh wow, my boobs look huge.' She is wearing a plain black T-shirt, 'so that must be OK, right? It's not like I'm wearing a corset. I feel I should be allowed to have people review my books without having an issue with my boobs. But who knows.' Breasts have always had the power to undermine women. After a double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery, Sarah Thornton found herself with much bigger breasts than she had wanted – having asked for 'lesbian yoga boobs', she woke up with D cups – and wrote her book, Tits Up, to make peace with her 'silicone impostors' by investigating their cultural history. Breasts, she writes, are 'visible obstacles to equality, associated with nature and nurture rather than reason and power'. Since she was a teenager, Forrest has lived with 'the assumption that having big breasts means being messy, being sexually wild, having no emotional volume control. I have had to learn to separate my own identity from what other people read on to my body.' It's Messy: On Boys, Boobs and Badass Women is the title of Amanda de Cadenet's memoir, in which she writes about developing into 'the teenage girl whose body made grown women uncomfortable and men salivate', recalling the destabilising experience of having a body that brought her overnight success – she was a presenter on The Word at 18 – while simultaneously somehow making her the butt of every joke. If the length of our skirts speaks to the stock market – short hemlines in boom times, long when things are bad – breasts are political. Thirty years after the French Revolution, Eugène Delacroix painted Liberty Leading the People with a lifesize, bare-breasted Liberty hoisting the French flag, leading her people to freedom. A century and a half later, women burning their bras at the 1968 protest against the Miss America pageant became one of the defining images of the feminist movement – never mind the fact that it never happened. (Protesters threw copies of Playboy, and some bras, in a trash can, but starting a fire on a sidewalk was illegal.) Intriguingly, decades when big breasts are in fashion seem to coincide with times of regression for women. Think about it. The 1920s: flat-chested flapper dresses and emancipation. The 1950s: Jayne Mansfield and women being pushed away from the workplace and back into the home. The 1970s: lean torsos under T-shirts, and the women's liberation movement. Sarah Shotton started out as an assistant in Agent Provocateur's raunchy flagship store in Soho, London, in 1999, when she was 24, and rose to become creative director of the lingerie brand in 2010. Her 15 years in charge have seen Agent Provocateur rocked by the changing tides of sexual politics. In 2017, the year #MeToo hit the headlines, the company went into administration, before finding a new distributor. Shotton says, 'I have always loved sexy bras, and it's what we are known for. But there was a time when it felt like that wasn't OK. Soon after #MeToo, we had a campaign lined up to shoot and the phone started ringing with all the agents of the women who were supposed to be in it, pulling their clients out, saying they didn't want to be seen in that way.' But the brand's revenues have doubled in the past three years. 'Last year we shot a film with Abbey Clancy and Peter Crouch, where she's in really sexy lingerie and he's playing pool. I remember saying, 'This is either going to go down like a ton of bricks or people are going to love it.'' It seems as if they loved it: the company's sales are expected to hit £50m this year. 'I think a younger generation now want what we had in the 1990s and 2000s,' Shotton says, 'because it looks like we had more fun. My generation of women had childhood on our BMX bikes, then when we were in our 20s, your job finished when you left the office and you could go out drinking all night if you wanted to. I think we really did have more fun. Life just didn't feel as complicated as it does now.' The bestselling bras, she says, are currently 'anything plunging and push-up. Racy stuff. Our Nikita satin bra, which is like a shelf for your boobs and only just covers your nipples.' Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion The legacy of the 1990s, when feminism and raunch became bedfellows, has left the world confused about breasts. Before that, the lines were pretty simple – the flappers throwing off their corsets, the feminists protesting over Page 3. But Liz Goldwyn, film-maker and sociologist (and granddaughter of Samuel Goldwyn Jr), whose first job was in a Planned Parenthood clinic and who collects vintage lingerie, doesn't fit neatly into any of the old categories. 'Third-wave feminists like myself grew up in the riot grrrl and burlesque days, where we embraced corsets and kink along with liberation and protest,' she says. Goldwyn collects, loves and wears vintage lingerie, while abhorring Spanx. 'I would rather go to the dentist than wear shapewear, but I find nothing more satisfying than to colour-coordinate my lingerie drawers.' Wearing a corset, she says, 'makes me breathe with more presence'. Breasts have always been about money and class as well as sex and gender. The Tudor gentlewomen who wore dresses cut to expose their small, pert breasts were proudly indicating they had the means to afford a wet nurse. Sánchez's inauguration outfit – tiny white Alexander McQueen trouser suit, lots of gravity-defying cleavage – 'taps into the fact that people who are that wealthy can have the impossible,' Forrest says. 'It is pretty difficult to have a super-slim body and big breasts. Her body is a physical manifestation of something much bigger, which is the hyper-wealthy living in a different reality to the rest of us. The planet might be doomed, but they can go to space. It's a 'fuck you' marker of luxury and arrogance.' The vibe, Goldwyn agrees, 'is very dystopian 1980s Dynasty meets 'let them eat cake'. I would never disparage another woman's body, but I have no problem disparaging her principles … in claiming to stand for women's empowerment, yet attending an inauguration for an administration that has rolled back reproductive freedoms.' Surgery – the blunt fact of boobs being a thing you can buy – has crystallised the idea of breasts as femininity's biggest commercial hit. (They are at times referred to, after all, as prize assets.) The primitive – survival of the fittest, in the thirsty sense of the word – is now turbocharged by enlargement is the most popular cosmetic surgery in the UK, with 5,202 procedures carried out in 2024, according to the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons. When Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor interviewed women in 2010 about their experiences of breast augmentation for her research into the sociology of cosmetic surgery, 'a lot of young women told me they were doing it for status'. Not to show off, but to show 'they had made it. They felt they were being good citizens: going out there and making money, but also wanting to play the part of being feminine.' Breasts, Sanchez Taylor says, 'say everything about who a woman is: about femininity and fertility, class and age.' They are at the centre of the industrial complex that has grown up around female beauty. 'I remember sitting in a consultation with a woman and her surgeon, and him saying cheerfully, 'Oh yes, you've got fried egg breasts. But we can fix that.'' Fake is no longer scandalous or transgressive. The vocabulary of plastic surgery has been gentled and mainstreamed to become the more palatable cosmetic surgery. The older women of the Kardashian family have been coy about having had work, but 27-year-old Kylie Jenner recently shared on social media the details of her breast surgery – down to the implant size, placement and name of surgeon. Unreal is here to stay, and the new battle line is between perfection and imperfection. The generation growing up now, who have never seen a celebrity portrait that wasn't retouched, have never used a camera that doesn't have filters, take 20 selfies and delete 19 of them, have an intolerance of imperfection. To put it bluntly: normal looks weird to them. So it seems natural – even if it isn't really natural – that celebrity boobs are getting bigger even as celebrity bodies are getting smaller. 'We are in a really weird place with the body, particularly in America,' says Emma McClendon, assistant professor of fashion studies at St John's University in New York, who in 2017 curated the New York exhibition The Body: Fashion and Physique. 'What we are seeing now is definitely not about the bigger body. It is a very controlled mode of curviness, which emphasises a tiny waist.' (Very 1950s coded, again.) 'GLP-1 weight-loss drugs are having a cultural impact on all of us, whether or not you or people you know are on them,' McClendon says. 'The incredible shrinking of the celebrity body that is happening in America is creating this idea that your body is endlessly fixable and tweakable.' Hairlines can be regrown, fat melted, wrinkles erased. For most of the past half-century, fashion has held out against boobs. With a few notable exceptions – Vivienne Westwood, rest her soul, adored a corset-hoisted embonpoint – modern designers have mostly ignored them. Karl Lagerfeld insisted his models should glissade, ballerina style, and disliked any curves that veered from his clean, elongated lines. And yet in the past 12 months, the bullet bra has come back. A star turn on the Miu Miu catwalk was presaged last year by a cameo in the video for Charli xcx's 360, worn by photographer and model Richie Shazam, and by influencer and singer Addison Rae, whose lilac velvet corset creamed into two striking Mr Whippy peaks at a Young Hollywood party last summer. To seal the revival, none other than the queen of fashion – Kate Moss – wore a bullet bra under her Donna Karan dress in a viral fashion shoot with Ray Winstone for a recent issue of Perfect magazine. Perhaps the bullet bra, which can be seen as weaponising the breast, is perfect for now. 'Fashion is the body, and clothes turn the body into a language,' McClendon says. The bullet bra is steeped in a time when 'domestic femininity was repackaged as glamour', Forrest says. 'A postwar era, coming back from scarcity and lack and hunger, when Sophia Loren was sold as a kind of delicious luxury truffle.' Goldwyn is a fan. 'A perfectly seamed bullet bra lifts my spirits (and my breasts) if I am in a foul mood,' she says. 'I hope we can reclaim it as symbolic of resistance, defiance and armour.' In the backstage scrum with reporters after she had made bullet bras the centrepiece of her Miu Miu catwalk show, Miuccia Prada said the collection was about 'femininity', then she corrected herself: 'No – femininities.' Prada has been using her clothes to articulate the complexities of living and performing femininity for decades, and this season it led her to the bullet bra. 'What do we need, in this difficult moment for women – to lift us up?' she laughed, gesturing upwards with her hands, surrounded by pointy-chested models. 'It's like a new fashion. I think the girls are excited.' Half a millennium after Leonardo da Vinci painted the Madonna Litta, his 1490 painting of the Virgin Mary baring her right breast to feed Christ, which now hangs in the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, Russia, another Madonna found her breasts in the spotlight. In the late 1980s, Jean Paul Gaultier was experimenting with conical bras in his Paris shows. 'He took inspiration from his grandmother's structured undergarments,' says fashion historian Amber Butchart, 'and used them to herald self-liberation. I don't generally like the word empowering – it doesn't tend to mean much – but that was very much the idea.' In 1989, while Madonna was preparing for her 1990 Blond Ambition world tour, she phoned Gaultier and asked him to design the wardrobe. On the opening night, in Japan, Madonna tore off her black blazer to reveal that iconic baby-pink satin corset with conical cups. 'Do you believe in love? Well, I've got something to say about it,' she declared, before launching into Express Yourself. The silhouette, which could be seen all the way from the cheap seats, would end up scandalising the pope and costing the world's biggest female pop star a lucrative Pepsi deal. Boobs have always been good at capturing our attention, and they have it right now. Hello again, boys.
Irish Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
No Straight Road Takes You There by Rebecca Solnit: A writer who gives us hope for today, and tomorrow
No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain Author : Rebecca Solnit ISBN-13 : 978-1803511641 Publisher : Granta Guideline Price : £16.99 'At this point of my life, I have lived through social, political, and scientific changes that would have been not just unbelievable but in many cases inconceivable in my youth,' writes Rebecca Solnit in yet another book of hope-engineering, almost hypnotic essays, crafted with her usual atypical sentences which are like soft waves of power crashing upon the barriers of imbecility. In No Straight Road Takes You There, Solnit looks at the long view of humanity's faltering lurch towards some sense of responsibility in who we are and of our responsibilities to the world surrounding us (and what we should be doing to be around a little longer than currently predicted in order to further refine that concept). Change for the better might come slowly, such as in areas Solnit has dedicated her life to as a writer and activist – the environment, feminism, democracy and human rights etc – but come it will, as history has shown us; what begins on the periphery eventually moves into the centre. Solnit considers the circuitous routes some of these important changes have travelled: be it the Biden administration taking credit for student loan relief as though it were an imperious gift to impart, rather than a long campaign of struggle that was an offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement, or the International Energy Agency finally accepting an end to new fossil fuel exploration and extraction, something climate activists have long been arguing for. READ MORE The pieces dander with a desire for knowledge under Solnit's unhurried pen (one essay's title, In Praise of the Meander, could be shorthand for her style) and are rich with all kinds of references, from Toni Morrison, Hokusai, George Orwell and Li Po to Ted Lasso. There are changes in gear, too, with honourable takedowns of Harvey Weinstein , and how Silicon Valley has hollowed out her home city San Francisco. One particular essay has the most merciless tone I think I have ever read in Solnit's voice: the appropriately titled On Not Meeting Nazis Halfway. It sparkles as an empowered ethical stand in a volume full of enriching trails of thoughts and deliberations. If you have followed the path Solnit has made by walking with her books thus far, then you'll want to take that journey onwards with this latest volume. A writer who gives us hope for today, and tomorrow.
Arab News
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Arab News
You've heard about NYC Democratic Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani, but what about his Syrian-born wife, Rama Duwaji?
As the United States turns its attention to New York City's first Muslim mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, many are eager to learn more about his wife, Rama Duwaji. For the latest updates, follow us on Instagram @ Duwaji is a Syrian-born artist from Damascus whose work has been featured by acclaimed outlets such as The New Yorker, The Washington Post, BBC, Apple, Spotify, VICE, and the Tate Modern in London. Now based in Brooklyn, Duwaji creates art that centers on pro-Palestinian and feminist themes. Her digital illustrations—prominently showcased on Instagram—often reflect her political beliefs. Among her recent work, Duwaji criticized the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University protester detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on March 8, 2025. She has also spoken out against police violence toward pro-Palestinian demonstrators and spotlighted human interest stories, including intimate portraits of bakers in Gaza. The couple made headlines six weeks ago when Mamdani shared their wedding photos from earlier this year, displaying them across New York City, including in the subway system, as a public stand against online harassment. 'Rama isn't just my wife,' Mamdani said. 'She's an incredible artist who deserves to be known on her own terms. You can critique my views, but not my family.' The pair met on a dating app in New York City and later married in December at Dubai Creek Harbour. Following Mamdani's victory in the Democratic primary yesterday, Duwaji posted a black-and-white photo strip of the couple with a simple caption: 'Couldn't possibly be prouder.'
Irish Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Alanis Morissette: We thought that whole era of ‘size zero' was done. We dropped the ball
Alanis Morissette asks which version of her I wish to hear from: 'The hormonal bitch who has a lot to say? The people-pleasing, kind, amenable part? They're all here.' It's 9am in sunny Los Angeles and the Canadian-born singer-songwriter is wearing a slouchy top, her wavy hair loose. She's long been aware of these different 'parts', that her life is full of contradiction. 'I have 14 different opinions about one thing.' It's why, aged 19, she wrote Hand In My Pocket (lyrics include: I'm high, but I'm grounded / I'm sane, but I'm overwhelmed), one of several anthems on Jagged Little Pill , the album released 30 years ago this month. Back then, in the unenlightened 1990s, people found this sort of talk unnerving. 'They were like, 'Whoa, that's scary. What are you talking about?'' 'They called it my 'psychobabble'. I'm like, 'I'm going to stay the course with my psychobabble.'' It's what she sees as her 'karmic assignment' and feels not a little vindicated now that these ideas are welcomed by the mainstream. There's a whole seam of psychotherapy that views the mind as composed of distinct 'parts', called Internal Family Systems. Morissette speaks at the symposia, as well as summits on trauma, or wholeness verses wellness, career, art and feminism. She hosted a podcast devoted to this stuff. 'The healing arts,' she says, adding drily: 'I am from California, never forget that. California, because if I were in any other state my head might explode.' Morissette hair-whipped into our consciousness, a waif with a wide smile belting raw honesty in an outsioutsizeo-soprano, with You Oughta Know. It wasn't just the 'psychobabble' that caused consternation. It was the unsettling range of female emotion, the androgyny, the 'monstrous feminine'. 'I used to say, 'I'm on the frontlinesfront lines head chopped off.'' Jimmy Fallon compared her to a troll doll. Rolling Stone called her 'rage-filled', put her on the November 1995 cover with the headline Angry White Female. Purists cleared their throats over the use of 'ironic' in her track of that title. The New York Times declared the things she described – 'a black fly in your chardonnay', 'rain on your wedding day' – 'distinctly unironic'. Morissette said yes, she was sometimes 'the malapropism queen'. But her fans understood. And 33 million of them bought Jagged Little Pill, so. [ Alanis Morissette: 'Fans would take my underwear. It was invasive' Opens in new window ] Since then, she's sold 75 million records, released 10 albums, most recently The Storm Before the Calm, featuring 11 guided meditations. She's acted in films, led healing workshops, raised awareness on issues such as sex abuse, post-partum depression, disordered eating, addiction. We've met because this Friday evening she will step on to Glastonbury's Pyramid stage. She's never been to Glastonbury – which seems incredible; in so many ways she might have been hatched in a tent in the Healing Field – but as an artist, she says, 'It was bucket-listy.' READ MORE She's grateful to still be able to perform work from her 30-year oeuvre without compromising herself. It's because she still believes every lyric, she says, 'value systems-wise and in terms of passions'. There's only one she's iffy about. It's a song about partnerships called Not the Doctor, which says, essentially, 'I don't want to worry about your stuff. Your stuff is your stuff. My stuff's my stuff. Never the twain shall meet.' She pulls a face. 'Now I've been married 15 years, I'm like, Oh, the twain shall meet. The twain are very much meeting every day.' This morning she's at her desk in the home she shares with the rapper Souleye (whom she met at a meditation retreat in 2009) and their three children, sons Ever, 14, and Winter, five, and daughter Onyx, nine. Also in the house, 'so many dogs and animals, holy f**k'. The camera her end tips up from time to time creating a sensation for me of being capsized. I first met Morissette five years ago when she was in London for the launch of her album Such Pretty Forks in The Road. She was breastfeeding her youngest, then a few months old, and grappling with 'lacto-menopause' (What's that? 'It's a f**king shitshow'). My takeaway then: Morissette doesn't do half measures, but she does do gallows humour. She had been living in Berkeley, California, enjoying the community spirit, people dropping round with smoothies and hot soup. She found the microclimate calming on her nervous system when the energy in LA got too much. 'There's a lot of unfinished trauma in LA,' she told me then. Before moving to Berkeley, she'd been in the western suburbs of LA for 24 years. They then lived in Malibu, but were driven out by fires in 2019. She has occasionally tried to live outside the state, 'briefly' on Bowen Island, Vancouver. And she tried New York for a year. 'But that Pacific Ocean, it keeps pulling me back,' she says. Yup, she's 'a Californian girl through and through'. By January this year, they had been living in Pacific Palisades in LA for just a few months when the wildfires tore through their neighbourhood, writing off their house and 85 per cent of their belongings. More than 200,000 people were displaced. Many of her friends fled to New York, whole communities upped sticks. Alanis Morissette in 1996. Photograph: Steve McNeil/Daily Record/Mirrorpix via Getty Images It was the ocean, the communal living vibe, the general feeling that made her want to stay in California. The family initially found a temporary solution, living 'communally' with four friends between January and May. About a month ago, Morissette worked 'feverishly' to find the house she's in now, a block from where she used to live, surrounded by hills, 'room-mating indefinitely' with a friend who lost his home in Altadena, north LA. She says a heaviness persists in the city, 'a grief'. She avoids the devastated areas, even if it means taking long detours, 'because when you drive through Sunset all the way down, it's still surreality'. She says her mind can't compute what her eyes are seeing. And the beach is out, because any time she contemplates going in the water she remembers, 'it's likely filled with toxins' from the ash. 'It's a different city now, but it's always a cool city. I'm pretty in love with Los Angeles.' A few days after we speak, the city lit up again, this time with protests against Donald Trump's immigration raids, which spread across the country after the US president's deployment of the national guard. The night before Morissette and her family left for Norway for the first date of her summer tour, a curfew was imposed by the LA mayor. I ask about living in Trump's America, and she says (with a touch of sarcasm) that she was looking forward to this part of the conversation. 'The gift of travelling the planet is I get glimpses of how the international community perceive America,' she says. She has a way of summing up how Canadians respond to rudeness. They are, 'Nice, nice, nice. Then piss us off on the wrong day and we explode.' Is this prime minister Mark Carney's way of doing business with Trump? She laughs. 'It becomes a hard no. We try to be amenable, but then it's a very hard no. Unequivocal. So that's kind of our thing, culturally. We came by it honestly.' Morissette's tour will take in cities all over Europe including Malahide Castle in Dublin and Ormeau Park in Belfast. She says when she's touring, she's pretty nocturnal, going to bed as late as 4am. Mornings are sharpened with a bulletproof coffee and she practises 'intuitive' intermittent fasting. When she's at home, she 'putters – you know, organising and cleaning with no agenda. I'll get back to you on what that means neurobiologically.' She says her awareness is 'diffuse' while she does this, which is 'instantly feminine'. 'You can be aware that your child just stubbed his toe, the dog needs his food, the husband needs a snug. That's the divine feminine capacity.' Her mentor, the late author and addiction specialist Pia Mellody, once said vacuuming was her spiritual practice. 'I was like, 'That's mine, too!' So, if you see a clean environment, it means I was meditating.' Alanis Morissette describes herself as part of the 20% of the population who are 'highly sensitive'. Photograph:While we talk, her husband, whose real name is Mario Treadway, is padding about somewhere in the house. He's released nine albums, and there's some thematic crossover with his wife in terms of an interest in spirituality, 'inner child work' and mental health (he lost an older brother to suicide). Certainly, from the outside – see Instagram – their home is a sweet, functioning environment. He's the kind of husband who wears a Patriarchy Hurts Us All T-shirt and makes juices (spinach, celery and lemon) for breakfast before shouldering his share of the children's home schooling. As musicians, they 'make sense to each other', Morissette says. 'I'm not strange to him. I'm not weird or freakish.' But they put the work in. She can't imagine how relationships manage without couples' counselling. 'I'm a huge couples' therapist person. I have been for ever.' Her non-negotiable is that the therapist be 'trauma-informed' and 'addiction-informed'. 'I can't be supported by someone who doesn't look through those lenses.' [ How good was Alanis Morissette in Dublin? You Oughta Know Opens in new window ] She's long been frank about addiction, deliberately so. 'I call addiction 'relief-seeking measures that kill you eventually'.' Work, love, sex and shopping, 'those are the chestnuts' for her. They are 'Whac-a-Mole', in that as soon as she's bashed one, another pops up. Being a workaholic is 'especially' hard. 'Because the number one priority is being clicked into some seed of productivity. There's no worth in just being. And it's a higher power thing, so work addiction is also called the praise addiction.' For instance: 'If I said, 'Oh, I did heroin till four in the morning and totally blacked out,' people would be like, 'Oh s**t. Bitch needs some help.' But if I said, 'I've been working my f**king ass off for this deadline and I finished at 4.15am,' people would be patting my back and be, like, 'Good work, girl.' It's equally corrosive. Because any addiction, if we keep going with it, we're dead. It is great for 20 minutes, then you're dead.' She's joking about the '20 minutes' and at the same time very much not joking about the 'dead'. She describes herself as part of the 20 per cent of the population who are 'highly sensitive' as well as part of the 4 per cent who are 'empaths' – meaning she'll walk into a room porous to everyone else's issues, pain and general unresolved junk. It's a cursed trait, she says. Society loves the 'yield' of the sensitive person: 'They love the songs, the photos, the art. But they don't love the human.' Without therapy, she 'would not be alive'. She was suicidal? 'All the time. I still struggle with it. I have an anxious, depressive tendency. Those who are sensitive are much more susceptible to their environmental information. If you put a highly sensitive person in an environment where they're browbeaten or reduced, they'll basically want to kill themselves. It's the worst. If you put a highly sensitive person in an environment where they're supported, championed and listened to, they thrive.' For her own children, Morissette has tried to create an environment where their 'multiple intelligences' are nurtured. A word about 'multiple intelligences' for the uninitiated. It's a theory developed by the US psychologist Howard Gardner, who identified eight different types of intelligences alongside the old 'academic, sit in your chair and get good grades in a test' type. Morissette is a fierce advocate of the intelligences. I'll let her take it from here: 'My job has always been to understand an entire model through clinical training and otherwise, and then update it. Expand it. So when I interviewed Gardner on the podcast, I said, 'Can I update the multiple intelligences?' And he said, 'You can do whatever you want, Alanis.'' What I found in terms of the lovely patriarchy, was that at that time if men couldn't f**k me, they didn't know what to do with me 'So now I have 16 intelligences. Not only do I use that as a template when I'm home schooling, but I also use it as a template if friends come to me worried about their kids. Or if we're talking about the conventional curriculum in public schools, or what the government's up to with education. I constantly reference multiple intelligences, because so many kids say, 'I'm really dumb.' And it kills me. I'm just like, 'What do you mean? Where are your intelligences? Where do you spark up? Where do you jump out of bed in the morning?' And it might be physical intelligence. It might be that you're meant to do backflips in a way that I'll never do. I'll need a stunt double for that. So I go through it with anybody who's across from me and seeking support.' She calls home school 'unschool', and the kids are allowed to opt into the mainstream the moment they choose. Ever, for instance, chose to go at seventh grade. I ask her to give me a flavour. 'Like, Winter will be singing to us his whole day, channelling his stream of consciousness. And then Onyx is twirling around the room. Artistry as a way of life is so normalised in our family. It's not like if one person's loving their academic moment, that isn't recognised. If someone's loving the backflip they just mastered, we're like, 'Awesome!' So there is a celebration of process here. Destination is fun, but process is everything. We value that here.' Morissette calls the people who help the family the 'caregiving gang', certainly a nicer way of putting it than 'nannies and tutors'. Everybody in that gang knows about the multiple intelligence system. 'What I've done is laminated maps and posters to indicate what each might look like. For example, musical intelligence might look like Souleye in the studio writing a song. He'll bring Onyx in, and she'll write a song, and he'll record it.' Naturalist intelligence is another. The family have a farm in northern California where they keep cows, turkeys, ducks, snakes 'and tons of chickens. Onyx is super knowledgeable, to the point where, when I don't know a thing about an animal, I just turn to her. So we've got our naturalist intelligence there, our animal empath. I can't even keep a plant alive.' She loves the tranquillity of the farm, the peaceful escape. 'I love anywhere where there's a vortex,' she says. For a second, I think: vortex? The internet informs me that there's an alternative definition. A vortex in this context is 'a state of alignment with one's desires and source energy'. Morissette says she gets 'a little word salady sometimes. It's a linguistic issue.' She loves words, loves using them, 'but sometimes I play with them a little much'. She'll create words – tangentalise, decohesify – that intuitively seem to fit. Alanis Morissette and her family had been living in LA, until wildfires destroyed 85% of their home. Photograph: CBS via Getty Images How does she talk to her kids about the post-partum depression she experienced after all three were born? 'I apologise all the time. They'll say, 'I remember that whole era,' and I'll say, 'Well, I wasn't exactly available to show up for you in the full way that I wanted to.' I am pretty transparent about how I failed them. And my running joke, which is not a joke, is that I have accounts set up for their potential college fees, if that's the route they take, but I also have whole accounts set up for their therapy, because they're going to need it.' She says interest in post-partum depression is better than it was, say, 30 years ago. 'But 'interest' isn't salve. Being interested in someone's suffering isn't the same as showing up for it. There's not a lot of education around anything feminine, but this one especially. So, it's rugged. But I really consider myself a sort of existential cockroach. There's a tenacity – I don't know where it comes from, probably my parents – to keep going.' She puts on a voice here of someone asking a question after the birth of Winter, when she was 45: ''Why would you get pregnant again if you've already been through it twice and it gets progressively worse?' I'm like, 'Well, look at my children. I'll do anything for these kids. To meet them, even, I'll suffer anything.'' She pauses then adds: 'It's also a generation X thing. We're known for our white-knuckle approach to fricking everything.' She's tugging the ends of her hair. I should say something about her hair. It's still long, brown, middle-parted and what the kids would call iconic in the way Janis Joplin's was, too. Morissette helicoptered it on stage, semi-dreaded it in You Learn, wore it as her only clothes in her video for Thank U. 'I mean, my hair is a band mate,' she says. 'It's a way of expressing and flailing and raging. It's like a typewriter, it speaks on my behalf. Without me, even. It's a friend who protects me when I'm feeling vulnerable on stage. If you have 80,000 or 200,000 people looking, a well-placed moment of deep' – she mimes retreating behind her hair – 'and then I'm back' – she mimes re-emerging – 'It's a pretty way of hiding. The perfect tool for an introvert. And I've always felt androgynous, so in some ways my earrings or my hair length can remind someone that it's a female body.' She doesn't mind when it's long and greasy, she likes the 'aesthetic of dirty chic' (I fear Glastonbury may test even the steeliest Californian). Plus, her hair supplied a fierce and tangible shift from the way she'd been moulded as a child star back home in Canada. Born in Ottawa, she was one of three children of teachers Alan Morissette and Georgia Feuerstein; her mother's family escaped the Hungarian revolution when she was 10. 'Basically, they were on a train, someone leant over and said, 'Hey, we just want to let you know that every family getting off at the next stop is being taken away to be killed. Your family might want to jump off.' They did, looked back from the field, and saw everyone being executed.' Morissette has an older brother Chad, and a twin, Wade. By all accounts she was a child in constant motion, always spinning, singing. 'My twin brother used to joke he would be playing soccer while I was writing songs about fate,' she has said. She tells me two clear things about her early life. One that she had a 'prophetic' vision of herself travelling the planet and singing. 'That's what I saw as a very young person.' The second is that her 'psychological leanings' were always there. 'We all have our funny roles in our family, and my role was the 'psyche understander' and the conflict resolver. Some might think that made me the peacemaker, but really, I was just the family therapist. Which is exciting, but also horrifying.' (Does she still have that role? She laughs. 'I quit.' She mimes handing out other therapists' numbers, 'Here's a couple of business cards.') We thought that whole era was done, right? We sorted this out! Didn't we? Oh, we didn't. We dropped the ball At the age of 10, Morissette – Lady Di hairdo and roll-up jeans – appeared in five episodes of the Nickelodeon kids' series You Can't Do That on Television. She used the money she earned to make her first album. At the same time, she was a competitive swimmer with a punishing training schedule. Not long after, she was signed by MCA, who turned her into a cringy pop princess bopping with Paula Abdul-style dance moves in a crucifix and bra top. She even opened for rapper Vanilla Ice. She was cutting records in studios until 3am and still attending school – even if the classroom desk was just a chance to catch up on sleep. Behind the teen gloss, of course, were the predatory men, the exploitative financial deals, the criticisms about her looks and weight. All this, in an era that celebrated size zero, cemented a severe eating disorder. After high school, she learned to play guitar and started writing songs. Aged 19, she moved to LA and spent her days trying to navigate a culture where no one asked her a question and just writing, writing, writing on the beach. Music was suddenly an outlet. Her lyrics were, 'psychologically, spiritually, emotionally informed'. She was signed by Madonna's label Maverick and Jagged Little Pill was released when she was 21, selling half a million copies in one week. Nonetheless, it was a 'rough time' to be a solo artist. 'There was no one to hide behind. What I found in terms of the lovely patriarchy, was that at that time if men couldn't f**k me, they didn't know what to do with me.' When she looked around her in the musical landscape, the people who seemed successful were 'secure in their loudness, à la Courtney Love. That seemed to be valued. I was like, 'Okay, I'm going to pretend to be an extrovert for the next 25 years.' So, tequila – anything that allowed me to be the life of the party – or if I was doing a talk, Xanax. Anything that would help me pretend I'm not me.' She takes a deep breath and says as if speedily wrapping up, 'And that's why perimenopause is so great, because now there's zero desire to present as something that I'm not. I spent 25 years trying to be someone who didn't have this temperament. At 51, I feel this is just what it is like.' A 2020 mural of Alanis Morissette by the Irish artist Emmalene Blake, in south Dublin. Photograph: Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images She says that menopause is 'rough and amazing, both'. She interrupts herself to ask if I know about the micro-feminism trend, 'where you just impose the feminine on everything. It's anything's like, 'Oh, I need to talk to a doctor, because she'll tell me ... ' I do it all the time. If someone sees a bug, 'Oh my gosh, she's gorgeous.' Because, obviously, patriarchy would have it be such that every f**king thing is male, including the creatures. I'm working those micro-feminisms into every board meeting.' She hates that the hypersexuality of the 1990s and 2000s is back. That 'size zero' is back. 'We thought that whole era was done, right? We sorted this out! Didn't we? Oh, we didn't. We dropped the ball. The collarbone thing came back in ... and the hypersexualisation thing is so boring.' She laughs: 'Of course, a perimenopausal woman's going to say that, right? My procreative imperative is, thank f**king God, chilling out. There are gorgeous things that come along with that – less people-pleasing, more directness. But I'm still in the middle of it. And that can be disconcerting. Most of my friends are in the middle of it, too, so we cut each other a lot of slack. My menopausal women friends are like, 'Honey, it gets f**king great.' It's the best news.' Is her view of sobriety is nuanced? 'There are some people who would get very mad at me for implying at all that it's nuanced. Because for those of us who were drinking at seven in the morning, well there's nothing nuanced about that. So, I guess it depends. For me, it's whichever addiction is bringing you to death very fast. Which one is it? Which one's ruining your relationships? And then there's the Whac-a-Mole approach, which is, 'Okay, I've stopped not eating. And now I'm working my ass off. Oh, yeah, and I took a few too many pills.' The Whac-a-Mole, that's what we have to keep an eye on.' She's looking ahead to Glastonbury, which is part of what she calls her 'summer of communalism'. She'll be travelling with her family and ever-expanding caravan of friends. When she takes to the stage, that long hair billowing, she expects to be wide-eyed, taking in the crowd in front of her, and 'beholding the shit out of everything'. – The Guardian Tickets for Alanis Morissette's Dublin and Belfast dates can be found via Ticketmaster . For support with addiction, see HSE Addiction Services , Addiction Counsellors of Ireland or Family Addiction Support Network Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or jo@
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Sabrina Carpenter releases ‘God approved' album cover after backlash
Sabrina Carpenter has released a new cover for her upcoming album which she quipped is 'God approved' after the original X-rated artwork upset feminists and conservatives alike. The cover of her new album, Man's Best Friend was criticised as being overly sexualised when she shared it with fans on social media earlier this month. The cover featured Carpenter, 26, dressed in a black dress and high heels on her knees while reaching towards the upper leg of a suited man who is grabbing her by the hair. The risqué photo sparked a fervent debate online with some accusing the Espresso singer of 'centring men' and embracing the 'male gaze'. On Wednesday, Carpenter shared a photo of an alternative cover for the album showing her and a man standing in a close embrace. In a nod to her critics, she described the new cover as 'approved by God'. 'I signed some copies of Man's Best Friend for you guys & here is a new alternate cover approved by God available now on my website,' she wrote on Instagram. The Grammy-winner has previously been criticised for performing sexually provocative dance moves at her concerts. Addressing concerns about her performance style in a recent interview, the singer claimed her critics are 'obsessed' with sex. 'It's always so funny to me when people complain,' Carpenter told Rolling Stone. 'They're like, 'All she does is sing about this.' But those are the songs that you've made popular. Clearly you love sex. You're obsessed with it. It's in my show.' She added that women nowadays face being 'picked apart more and scrutinised in every capacity'. 'We're in such a weird time where you would think it's girl power, and women supporting women, but in reality, the second you see a picture of someone wearing a dress on a carpet, you have to say everything mean about it in the first 30 seconds that you see it,' Carpenter said. Man's Best Friend, Carpenter's seventh studio album, is out on August 29. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
