It’s lunchtime on a Friday. We’ve had a four-day week, I’ve just got back from holiday and it’s my birthday this weekend. I should be in a brilliant mood. And yet I’ve already been driven to rage twice today.

Why? The internet! More specifically: people on the internet having opinions on women’s bodies.

The first rage hit came courtesy of a Guardian headline: “Nicola Coughlan is a little bit fat and a lot hot. Like her, I dream of the day when we’re not talking about this”. 

I kind of get the point. But I’m afraid that saying you wish we weren’t talking about something – in this case, Coughlan’s body and sexiness – is cancelled out by, er, talking about it. Just don’t mention it at all. 

In her recent Stylist cover interview, as she took the lead in season three of Bridgerton, Coughlan herself told us: “There is so much discourse online about how I look, and I don’t think I could ever express how hard that is. It’s insulting because I worked hard on this show; a year of fittings and dance lessons and shooting, I barely saw my family, I gave it my absolute all. And then I start doing press and all people want to talk about is my body? It’s so fucking disappointing and reductive.” 

So why can’t we all just respect that and stop going on about it? Who wants to disappoint Nicola Coughlan? Not me! And neither should you. 

The simmering fury threatened to boil over again when I read a post on X from CMAT, in which the Irish singer said the BBC had turned the comments off on a video of her recent performance at Radio 1’s Big Weekend “because so many people were calling me fat in the comments”. She added that another video from this year’s Brit Awards is “currently going viral on [South American TikTok] and now people are calling me fat in Spanish”.

Imagine. Just imagine seeing that glorious video of CMAT at Radio 1’s Big Weekend, leading the crowd in a joyous rendition of I Wanna Be A Cowboy, Baby while wearing frilly white pants, and the first thing you think – and not just think, but write down for the world to see – is, ‘I must tell her how “fat” she is.’ Why? Who hurt you so much? 

Many people, including the feminist writer Roxane Gay, have argued that ‘fat’ shouldn’t be seen as an insult at all; that we can take its wounding power away by treating it like any other neutral description of someone’s appearance, like saying someone has long hair or brown eyes - although I like to imagine a place where all comments on our bodies are totally unnecessary. But I’m going to take a wild guess that the people flinging these comments at CMAT on TikTok are not fully paid-up members of the fat positivity movement. They want the word to sting. They want CMAT to be so hurt that she disappears off their social feeds.

Needless to say, CMAT had an incredible response: “i didnt realise it was ILLEGAL to have a HUGE ASS !!!! i am GUILTY as CHARGED it is time to lock me up and throw away THE KEY!!!!! by the way i am an award winning songwriter that has released two albums which were received to ‘universal acclaim’”.

While I love this, I hate that she has to even make this point. Why can’t she just sing her brilliant songs, and make the crowd happy, and that be OK? 

It’s depressing and, in the words of Coughlan, “disappointing and reductive”. In the (almost) 15 years of Stylist’s existence, we’ve written versions of this feature so many times, yet though we see glimmers of hope (someone that’s not a size zero on the catwalk, plus size collections), nothing really changes. The fat shaming, the body judgement, the making women feel bad about themselves; it all just slips into a different form, finding new ways to grind us down and try to make us hate ourselves. 

It’s something my colleague Meena Alexander explores in this month’s issue of Stylist, looking at the rise of Ozempic: “Quietly and by stealth, while we’ve been getting on with the exhausting business of trying to like ourselves, diet culture has had a rebrand. It’s practically ‘feminist’ to get thinner now according to the weight loss merchants.”

As for me, it’s time to go and watch Bridgerton season three again… and try and calm down.

Images: Getty, Netflix