Linda Kelsey, former editor of Cosmopolitan: Men are now the downtrodden sex

‘She writes like a pretentious sixth-former … ‘

Funnily enough, the term ‘Cosmo Feminist’ describes infantile women with trenchantly misandrous views.

As a teenager I had a very silly and immature girlfriend who worked in London. I used to catch the same train as she and the clutch of brain dead, acid faced ‘young women’ she sat with on the morning commute. To a silly girl (there is no point in saying ‘to a woman’ because they weren’t that) they all used to try and put me in my place with what they thought castratingly witty remarks and to a silly girl they all scowled at me in impotent rage when I turned the remarks back at them. To a silly girl, they took out their copies of Cosmopolitan on publication day and read them while sucking something (thumbs, sweets, strands of hair, biros, their own teeth or tongues), occasionally nudging each other, smirking and whispering as thought to keep dark some dreadful secret to be known only by themselves. I laughed out loud when I first heard the term ‘Cosmo Feminist’ because I knew immediately what it meant, so your description of a former editress doesn’t surprise me.

As an aside, the girlfriend’s parents thought I was daft enough to marry their daughter and reproached my parents when they learned that I’d married another, who turned out to be just as much of a disaster, if not more.