You might imagine what women want is equality, reproductive rights, or even a nice lie down, says Bryony Gordon in The Daily Telegraph. According to Victoria Beckham, you’d be wrong: “thankfully for the world’s headline writers”, what women really want is a “nice, round, curvy bottom”. The 48-year-old’s new-fangled desire for a buxom backside is being applauded as a liberating, feminist statement. For years, her super-skinny frame was a “national obsession”: tabloids speculated about how many edamame beans she indulged in, and whether her waist was, as rumoured, only 23 inches. But now, apparently being thin is “old-fashioned”. And, helpfully, curvaceousness complements the designer’s new clothing line. (“The curvier you are, the better my VB dresses look,” she says.)
Despite being “the owner of a nice, round, curvy bottom myself”, I find the whole thing a bit sad. Even if wanting to be thin is outdated, is longing for Kim Kardashian’s voluptuous figure any more progressive? It’s the same old body policing, just parading as feminism in yet another ploy to flog us designer garb. If only Beckham had told the interviewer what women really want: to exist “without being told we need to be smaller or larger or somehow better”.