Woman's Hour - Laura Bates on extreme misogyny online, Stephanie Yeboah on body positivity, the end of the office romance, women and debt.

Episode Date: September 12, 2020

Laura Bates is founder of the Everyday Sexism Project. In her latest book, she traces the roots of extreme misogyny across a complex network of online groups from Pick Up Artists to Incels. Laura explains what attracts men and boys these movements.Blogger Stephanie Yeboah has been a part of the fat acceptance and body positive movement for years. Her first book – ‘Fattily Ever After’ – is a self-help guide and love letter to black, plus size women everywhere. In the latest of our How To series, Jenni discusses how to be on time with Grace Pacie, author of LATE! A Time-bender’s guide to why we are late and how we can change, and therapist and writer Philippa Perry. Buy Now and Pay Later is increasingly being offered by many online retailers. How much are young women being led to spend more than they can afford? Jenni speaks to financial campaigner Alice Tapper, Sue Anderson from debt charity Step Change and Anna, who has managed to clear considerable debt. Now that non-invasive cosmetic procedures are able to resume operating after lockdown, are treatments such as Botox being normalised? We take a look at the trends over time with journalists Alice Hart-Davis and Melanie Abbott. As we increasingly work from home, is this the end of the office romance on screen and in real life? And why do we love the idea of one so much in the first place? We speak to the film critic Anna Smith and the Metro lifestyle editor Ellen Scott.CLIP CREDIT: The Office. Written by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. Presenter: Jenni Murray Producer: Lucy Wai Editor: Lucinda Montefiore

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme, peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Good afternoon. In today's programme, the websites that offer the chance to buy now and pay later. How much are young women being led into spending more than they can afford? The stigma suffered by women who are seen as overweight. It's happened to the campaigner for body positivity, Stephanie Yeboah. When you're bigger, you have the spotlight on you negatively almost all the time. So there have been plenty of times when I've been in a restaurant with friends and I've seen people taking pictures of me eating. From the body to the face. Why has fear of wrinkling made Botox ever more popular? And what's it like to use it regularly? And the death of the office romance on screen and in life. How would Dawn and Tim in the office

have got together during lockdown? And why has it been such a staple for romantic drama? It's to do with partly fantasy, like, oh, what if my boss was so handsome and charming and we fell in love? And partly reality, like, for example, the Bridget Jones films, where, in fact, that boss really isn't very suitable at all. Eight years ago, Laura Bates set up the Everyday Sexism Project, where anyone who'd suffered unwanted attention or abuse could post the details online. It became a huge phenomenon. Well, she's now spent 18 months posing as a young man called Alex to investigate what's known as the manosphere, tracing the roots of misogyny across a complex network of online groups. The result of her research is a book called Men Who Hate Women. From insults to

pick-up artists, the truth about extreme misogyny and how it affects us all. What prompted her to start her undercover investigation? A couple of years ago, in my frequent visits to schools, I spend a lot of time working with young people in schools across the country, perhaps two schools a week on average before lockdown. I suddenly noticed that something really quite chilling was shifting in the teenage boys I was working with. Of course, there'd always been awkward conversations and difficult moments and, you know, embarrassment to get through in those conversations. But suddenly boys were arriving with very, very firm and clear ideas about things that simply weren't true. And really, the only word I can use for it is radicalization. These boys had been groomed online,

and they were so confident that all women hate men. They were so confident that our world is a feminist gynocracy, that there's a government conspiracy against white men who are the true victims of society, that false rape allegations are so rife, that they're at enormous risk, that men everywhere are losing their jobs and being stealthily replaced by evil women who've made up false claims of sexual harassment. And these stories really went on and on. And suddenly I started to realise that these boys in schools from rural Scotland to inner city London were repeating the same quotes verbatim, word for word, and even using the same completely false statistics. Let's deal, Laura, with some of the terminology. What is the Manosphere? So the Manosphere is a sort of complex web of

thousands of websites, forums, blogs, videos, groups, organisations and campaigns. It's not just confined to the internet, but it does have a large presence there. And what I'd realised was that it is starting to have a massive offline impact on boys as well. That grooming, that sense of radicalization was what made me decide it was time to investigate this and to write the book, that we couldn't ignore these groups any longer. Now incels is one group. Who are they? That's right. So incels are perhaps the most violent and extreme of these groups. Incel stands for involuntary celibate. And these are men who believe that they want to be having sex.

They're not. And as a result, instead of investigating their own extreme misogyny as a potential cause for their lack of romantic success, they blame women. But they take this to an extreme. They believe that evil women are denying them the sex that is their birthright as a man. And as a result, that women ought to be raped, kept as sexual slaves, stripped of even being considered people, or that they should go on what they describe as an uprising or a day of retribution where they carry out mass killings of as many women and sexually attractive men as they can. Pick-up artists is another group. Who are they? So the international pick-up industry is valued at $100 million. When we talk about pick-up artists, we tend to portray them in popular culture as the lovable rogue, you know, the sort of slightly hapless guy with a chat-up line in a bar,

somebody like Barney Stinson in How I Met Your Mother. But when you look at the reality of this industry, you're actually talking about gurus charging thousands of pounds to train men in cities around the world, essentially to sexually harass or even assault women. The men training them are men who have, in many cases, committed, boasted about committing sexual assault themselves, posted videos online of themselves sexually assaulting women, argued for rape to be legalized. And a great amount of their doctrine focuses on things like overcoming what they call last minute resistance. In other words, pushing a woman into having sex with you, even if she's changed her mind and says that she doesn't want to. Now, there are other terminologies, which I'm sure will come up as we continue our conversation. But you are very careful right at the beginning of the book to insist this is not all men

and that there are many men who support the feminist movement and certainly would not be speaking in the way you've just said. How big is the manosphere? How many men are we talking about who you are genuinely worried about? Of course, absolutely. There's a huge critical mass of men who don't know these groups exist. There's wonderful men, a huge number of men who are very supportive of feminism. But I think what's important to say is that while of course, we're not suggesting that this is all men, it is nonetheless a very significant number. So we are talking about groups about networks about

communities that number in the hundreds of thousands we're talking about websites videos blogs which are receiving millions tens of millions of hits even on perhaps a single video about this kind of thing we're talking about communities where thousands of men are online discussing and egging each other on on a daily daily basis, minute by minute, as you log on, you can see. But, you know, we've all had a kind of idea that these things exist and we've generally assumed that these men are sad, lonely, sitting in a basement in their underpants, as you describe them, and not at all dangerous.

Who really are they? So I'd say two things. I think the first thing to emphasise is that these are the kind of men you might walk past on the street. I know this because I've met them, because going undercover for this book, I also went undercover offline in real life. I turned up to their meetings and events and I met, you know, a young white man in his 30s, extremely smartly dressed, he was affable and charming and polite, the kind of man you might work with, walk past in the street, sit next to you on the train. Moments later, he was on stage baying for the blood of former Crown Prosecution Service Director Alison Saunders for the crime of having supported female victims of sexual violence.

And when we think of these men as harmless, when we talk about this as a group of sort of internet trolls who never come offline, it's really important to say these men have committed mass atrocities explicitly in the name of these ideologies. There isn't any doubt about it. They've left clear manifestos. They've gone out and massacred women in real life. And in the book, I trace these movements specifically to 100 murders or serious injuries in the last 10 years alone. But we don't know about it because we don't describe these acts as terrorism, even though they meet every international definition. But the other issue, I think, is that we are so used to violence against women. Violence against women, men killing women, is the wallpaper of our daily lives. Two women a week, over two women a week on average, are killed by a current or former partner in the UK.

And so we don't recognise these as forms of terrorism because they don't shock us, because we are so used to it. And we don't take sexism seriously in our society. The backlash against people trying to get misogyny defined as a hate crime is a really clear example of that. And in the same way, men who carry out these massacres against women are not described as terrorists as we would other groups. And crucially, you know, we have very, very robust systems in place to look out for the grooming and radicalization of boys. But something like the government's Brent strategy, for example, which is so overzealous that it's seen boys arrested and taken into custody by police officers because they made a spelling mistake and said they lived in a terrorist house instead of a terrorist house, doesn't mention gender at all. And when I

spoke to a project facilitator at the Good Lad Initiative, Ben Hurst, who is probably the person most locked in on this in the UK, talking to the most teenage boys about this stuff. He told me he would estimate 70% of the boys he works with in schools are in contact with this material. And he estimates that absolutely, he would say almost none of the teachers or parents he comes into contact with have any idea that this even exists. You wrote that you wept at some of the things you saw and read about. What, for example? The thing that I found the most difficult was the extent to which these communities idolize and canonize the men who have raped and murdered women offline in their name and for me that there was I had to push through it I had to just get on and do it but there was one day when I stopped and let myself cry and it was a day when I was reading messages from men about a woman who'd been killed in one of these massacres and they were speculating about the fact that the killer might have stalked or fantasized about one

of these women and been rejected by them and how great it was that he'd killed her as a result. And somebody wrote that he just hoped that he'd raped her first so that she would die, knowing that the man she rejected had been inside her. And that was what broke me, I think. You argue that there's often a close connection between these communities, the alt-right and white supremacists. Where's the evidence for that? Absolutely. That's really important to say. There is huge evidence that these groups are massively interlinked and you really can't tackle one without tackling the other, which is why there is so much in the book about white supremacy and neo-Nazism. There's a great deal of evidence for this. First, many of the current leading lights of the alt-right and white supremacist movements rose to prominence during Gamergate,

which was a manosphere, deeply misogynistic online trolling campaign. You also see how the language, and there's a very complex lexicon of invented vocabulary used in the manosphere, crops up enormously in the alt-right and in those communities. But also, most chillingly of all, members of those communities like Andrew Anglin, for example, one of the sort of foremost members of that white supremacist online community, has actively and explicitly written a style guide for anybody who wants to recruit young boys to that movement, in which he advocates not only using memes and viral videos and cultural jokes to draw young people into the movement, which he describes as adding cherry flavor to children's medicine to target boys as young as 11. But he explicitly says that anti-feminism and hatred of women is the ideal gateway to the alt-right.

They use it deliberately to pull boys into white supremacy. So if these groups are as dangerous as you say they are, what can be done? Well, the good thing is that there's a huge amount that can be done because we're currently doing nothing. I think the first thing is that we need to recognize these groups for what they are, see them as a form of terrorism, prosecute them as such, describe them as such, and train and where these groups are inciting violence and hatred that social media platforms, in particular YouTube, are playing a big role in this radicalisation. But for me, what's really crucial is to recognise the complexity of this. Caught up in these communities, yes, there are killers and men who are inciting violence against women. But there are also very vulnerable men, men facing very real offline issues, boys who are anxious and lonely and have gone online and become sucked into this. And actually to tackle a lot of the offline issues affecting these men, increasing funding for male mental health, giving young people a community to feel part of offline, for example, the cuts to youth funding, youth services, the fact that 600 youth centres have

closed, it leaves boys vulnerable to the clutches of these people who want to radicalise them. So if we could provide those kinds of offline communities, places to talk and explore these issues about gender stereotypes, about sexual violence in schools and elsewhere, then we'd be helping, I think, to inoculate boys against it before it happened. Laura Bates. Stephanie Eboa has been a part of the fat acceptance and body positive movement for several years. Her book, Fattily Ever After, is what she describes as a self-help guide and love letter to black plus size women everywhere. In it, she shares her own experience of racism, sexism and fat phobia and explores how damaging stereotypes about black plus size women

are reinforced in the media. Jane asked her how she thinks thinner people are offered societal privileges. So when I say societal privileges, it means it's not me saying that because somebody is smaller, they automatically feel better in themselves. Because I do believe that regardless of the size you are, you can still have body image issues and feel, you know, have days when you don't feel good but when i say societal pressure societal bodies what i mean by that is bodies that can go out into the high street for instance and automatically you know pick up clothes in their size it's bodies that don't have the hassle of being stared at being filmed being turned into a meme having your picture taken when you're eaten having people not um want to sit next to

you on public transport um so it's all of these little things that I think people take for granted when you're in a smaller bodies but when you're bigger you have the spotlight on you negatively almost all the time so there have been plenty of times when I've been in a restaurant with friends and I've seen people taking pictures of me eating but they forgot they forgot to turn off the flash so I can see when they're you know taking pictures and you know all of these little things sorry I mean I people take pictures of you eating yeah and then they turn it into memes or they send it to their friends and there have been a few times when I have confronted people um about this and like shouted at them in public in the street.

It's happened to plus size friends of mine when we've been walking like on Oxford Street. We've had people actually doing Instagram live videos of like me and my friends just walking across the street and they've been laughing and joking. And we've had to, you know, confront them quite viciously saying this is not right. This is not right this is not cool in the book you also talk and i this resonated with me a lot about the and i felt slightly embarrassed about it but the four were more than slightly the four most common stereotypical character tropes we see on television of the larger black woman can you just talk us through well if we haven't got time for all of them, certainly a couple. Can I begin with the so-called black mama fat character?

Yeah, so that was a character that was really spurned by Hattie McDaniel in Gone With The Wind. So she played a slave or a servant. And what we found was that throughout Hollywood and throughout sort of TV and movies, we see a lot of roles being played by larger plus-sized women as subservient roles as slaves um as um supporting characters who are who have no character arc but to help the main character who is normally white achieve their goal whether it's an emotional goal or a physical goal. We're always being cast as the help. We see it in cartoons with things like, you know, Tom and Jerry, you've got the, the, the servant or the, the housemaid who is one of the protagonists in that.

So we see a lot of that in Hollywood. We also have another trope, which is the, the, the lady who nothing ever, nothing positive ever ever happened so it's like all my life i've had to fight so it's a struggle character you know they if it's not an issue with their weight then it's an issue with their color or it's an issue with their self-esteem or job issues um their whole character arc revolves around trying to get out of some kind of struggle. And then we have the hypersexual fat black character who is a man eater and is very kind of, you know, animalistic and feral and hypersexual. And we don't seem to have characters that are just normal human beings that have nice jobs and a nice relationship and has great friends and all of that stuff. And you know this is a difficult question in some ways but I'd be irresponsible if I didn't

ask it. You are body positive and you talk and you've every right to to be that way but we do know that there is a link between being overweight and a higher risk of really suffering with COVID. Does that not concern you? When it comes to body positivity, I think a lot of people don't understand what we're trying to do. So a lot of people think that we are glamorising or promoting obesity, which isn't the case and has never been the case for body positivity. What we are saying is if you do happen to find yourself being big or large, you don't have to consider yourself less than other people. You don't have to stop loving yourself and you don't have to, you know, think of yourself as disgusting. So it's not us encouraging a certain way.

It's saying if you are a certain way, you don't have to beat yourself up about it. You're still beautiful. certain way it's saying if you are a certain way you don't have to beat yourself up about it you're still beautiful and nobody nobody has the right to treat you in the way that you described earlier in our conversation yes exactly absolutely and i think you know for us it's not a case of us denying that there is a link between it of course you know it would be ignorant for people like us within the body positive community to say oh oh, there's absolutely, you know, no link between this and our weight. But I think also it's so important to strain that fat people are not a monolith. We are not the same. And I think sometimes the media like to portray all plus size people as being the same unhealthy people that sit down in their homes and do nothing

but eat. But there are so many of us that are healthy. There are so many of us that, you know, they're trained, we can, we exercise, we can eat healthily, we can do our day to day runnings without, you know, going out of breath or feeling really sick. Those of us like myself who have never been sick, you know, or had anything to do with health-related issues. And so I think it's important not to tar all people who may look the same as the same. It's very dangerous to judge somebody's health

based on how they look. Because of course you can have smaller people who can have a host of health issues, but because they may have a six pack, they are judged as automatically being healthy. And I think it's just important not to assume that every single person is going to have diabetes or have heart problems, because that's simply not the case. Stephanie Burr was talking to Jane. Now, many, many years ago,

I was given a very important piece of advice by an older, experienced broadcaster. Jenny, you must always be on time. If you're late in this job, it means you've missed it. Well, it's meant a lifetime of obsession about timekeeping, which has often created irritation for friends and family. I have to be early to make sure I don't miss anything. And so often I've been asked, why did we have to leave so early and have to hang about for so long? Well, today's how-to guide is how to be on time, not too early and not too late.

I was joined by the therapist, Philippa Perry and Grace Pacey. She's the author, writing under a pseudonym, of Late, a time bender's guide to why we're late and how we can change. How does she define a time bender? A time bender is actually somebody we all know very well. They are the people who arrive last at any meeting or class or the mums whose children have to run into school at the last minute. They're the people who don't want to be late, but they have a strange resistance to being early like you

and they don't allow enough time. They are the ones that assume that lights will always be on green and the roads will be empty and they'll get there in the shortest time. So it's not surprising they're often a little bit late. Now, clearly, this is something you suffer from. Why does being a bit late matter to you? Well, it matters because I've been what I'd call a time bender all my life. But when I tried to improve my timekeeping, I couldn't find anything about how long things take. I try to fit an awful lot in. It's not all bad news. I'm adaptable. I don't mind being interrupted. I'll drop what I'm doing if you ask for my help. And actually, I can be on time if it really matters. I'm quite good at hitting deadlines, but only when it's a real

deadline with consequences. For example, this interview now or an important meeting or, you know, if I was a teacher, I could get to work on time or if I had to open up an office. But it's the social events, the events without the deadlines that are the ones I tend to be late for. Yeah, you see, if you'd been late for this one, you would have missed it. Let's bring in Philippa. Philippa, where do you fall on this scale from time bending to time keeping?

I'm, I'd say, neurotically punctual. I'm always early. I don't mind being early. I prefer it to sitting on the edge of a taxi trying to get the car to go faster. I don't understand why time benders find it so hard to mooch about at the airport looking at the shops rather than, you know, rushing to the end of the carriage of the tube to try and make the deadline. I mean, why give yourself that stress? Why, Grace, are you prepared to give yourself that stress of,

I know exactly what Philippa means by sitting in the car, wishing it would go faster because you're worried. And, you know, I've usually left in plenty of time, but I still get that anxiety. Well, Jenny, I envy you because I know logically that it's exactly the right thing to do. But there's a little demon in my brain that doesn't want me to be early. And that's really the secret behind what's going on in my head. therefore I aim to be on time but not before time and yet I have got data that says 20% of the population can be late for work once a week you know struggle to be on time. There is definitely a psychology going on. What is the psychology?

Why are people late? Well there is there are many reasons why people are late. And there's probably as many reasons there are people that are late. But underlying it all, there is this fear of being early. And the fear could be a fear of being conspicuous, a fear of standing out in a strange place, of having no one to talk to, feeling a bit alone and awkward. The other reason people are always late is because they're optimistic that all the traffic lights will be green. And they generally sort of stretch the time somehow in their minds and just think there's time to do absolutely everything they've packed in. People also have a horror of changing gears. What I mean by this is that, you know, when you know you should go to bed, but you're still just flicking through your phone on the sofa and you

can't be bothered to get up. And then when you're in bed, you know you should get up, but you just think you'll have five more minutes. So that's the sort of thing about not wanting to stop what you're doing to do something else, because it feels like it takes a bit of effort. So, Philippa, if it's so entrenched, how do you break the habit? You know, you could tell somebody who's always late, oh, well, it starts at seven when actually it starts at half past seven. Are those good ways of doing it? Well, they're a little bit like a plaster, aren't they? Because if you don't take a plaster off as a measure, you'll get gangrene underneath it. So it's a temporary mend, but it's not going to do anything permanently the only way the only way to become

a person who's slightly early for everything because you're allowing for yourself to get a flat tire is not to try to be on time but to decide to be on time And there's a big difference between deciding and trying. Because if you make the decision to be early, you have to leave like half an hour earlier than you would if you're being your normal self. So Grace, you have to make the decision. You have to say, right, I'm going to leave half an hour early and I will be on time and not worry if I'm early. The answer is just you have to make the deadline real for us. So if you say that you're leaving or that we need to leave at 7.30,

you have to leave at 7.30. If you say dinner is at 8 o'clock, you need to start dinner at 8 o'clock. It's cruel to be kind, but although I can tell you we'll be really upset that you didn't wait for us, the next time we will take the deadline seriously. I was talking to Grace Pacey and Philippa Perry. Still to come in today's programme, how did the trend for Botox begin? Why did it become so popular? And what's it like to use it regularly? And the demise of the office romance during a lockdown.

Can you fall in love through Zoom? Advice about spending money used to be pretty uncompromising. From my parents and grandparents came, neither borrower nor lender be, and if you can't afford it, don't buy it. Well, there seems to have been a significant change in that philosophy. Buy now, pay later, which is kind of what a credit card offers you, has now become an increasingly common way for

the young to get what they want, when they want it, online. A number of companies offer the chance to defer payment, receive the goods and complete the purchase in stages. And debt, particularly among young women, is rising, Just as the UK goes into recession and job security can no longer be guaranteed. Anna is now 22 and has managed to clear considerable debt. Alice Tapper is a financial campaigner and the author of Go Fund Yourself. And Sue Anderson is from the UK debt charity Step Change.

Why is she particularly concerned about Buy Now, Pay Later? The Regulate Buy Now, Pay Later campaign acknowledges that there are a variety of credit and financial products out there, but we're focusing on Buy Now, Pay Later because there's a gap in regulation, which means that consumers aren't being sufficiently protected unlike products such as credit cards and how that translates into reality is that we're seeing very

pink and fluffy advertising, celeb sponsors, the use of influencers which are really normalising debt in young people and then there isn't really any counterbalance. There's no information about the risks of using these products at checkout or in ads, which you would expect with other financial products. And then retailers are also incentivising the use of these products, offering hefty discounts. So I'm interested in this group of young women in particular who ultimately aren't being sufficiently protected by regulation. But you see, Klarma, the best known of these companies,

say they don't target young women at all. The average age is 33. Yeah, well, when we look at the products as a whole, firstly, we're seeing arguably very gendered advertising. And whilst the overall 33 might be the average age of the customer, I still think it's very important that we look at who they are targeting on social media, which when you look at how they're working with influencers and this overly pink, very Instagrammable aesthetic,

and also combine that with the heavy promotion of Buy Now, Pay Later from retailers who have young customer bases so pretty little thing nasty gal for example last week were promoting clear pay day which is clear pay being one of the largest buy now pay later providers in the uk offering really hefty discounts but only if you pay later and this you know these target customer bases are 18 to 24 year olds on average. So how in principle would you say this way of paying for goods is really different from using a credit card? So I think it's different because, as Alice has pointed out, it's not regulated in the same way, which means the way that you are presented with the information won't necessarily be the same. The other major driver that's massively different is that this

is presented to you right at the point when you've put those goods in your online basket, and it's then sort of effectively sort of dangled at you as an option. So it's very much in the moment of when you are actually concentrating on the stuff rather than on the payment mechanism, I think. Whereas a credit card, it's something you have in your back pocket. At some point in the past, you have applied for that. You've thought about it. Now, you may still end up using it in a way that is for emergencies or perhaps spending more on it than you meant to. But I think the approach, the psychology is different in the way that Alice has highlighted.

Now, we've obviously spoken to Clarma and to Clearpay. And what Clearpay said was our business model is the reverse of traditional credit in that it has inbuilt customer protections and is designed to charge the retailer, not the customer, which allows us to offer a free service to customers who pay on time. So you don't have to worry about interest, do you, Alice? Yeah, so whilst there might not be any interest, as we see with

traditional credit products like credit cards, I think it's important to note that there are other costs to using these services. Some charge late payment fees, for example, and what Klarna aren't mentioning, although if you dig into their terms and conditions, you will see that there is the use of debt collection and debt collectors. And so you contrast, I've now received over 250 case studies, majority from women who have been negatively impacted by buy now pay later. They're getting into serious financial difficulty. They're being pursued by debt collectors, perhaps, you know, incorrectly prioritising buy now pay later debt over another debt, which has a serious knock on effect to their financial future. And then you contrast that

with this overly positive glamorisation of finance. And, you know, something's just not right here. Anna, how did you get into debt? So I had taken credit cards out when I was 18. So that was obviously four years ago now. And I basically took them out. I don't think we really learned enough about credit cards and just day in general when we were in school I really had no idea and I basically

took out a credit card thinking you know I'll buy something pay it back and fill the same month I'll build up my credit score um so I had good intentions but it didn't really um work out as planned and it basically felt to me as if it was free money which I know sounds silly now but at the time I was an impressionable 18 year old and I was just thinking you know I can buy whatever I want I'll pay it back whenever and I wasn't really fully aware of you know charges and the impact that debt can obviously have so I started off with credit cards and then I'd basically maxed those out and then you know when I was kind of 20 so about two years ago is when um kind of buy now pay later schemes

um became more accessible and they were on kind of more and more websites so I had maxed out my credit cards and instead of at that point being like okay I shouldn't use these anymore I should pay these back and just pay what I can actually afford with my own money I started using binary pay later instead so that one was a bit more um kind of complex for me even because at least with a credit card I had in my head okay I'm only really going to use this um you know if I if I really feel like I need this or if it's going to make me feel better or whatever because I knew I still knew that there was charges even though I didn't know how much whereas with binary pay later as you mentioned there's not really any charges if you pay on time so I was thinking you know this is totally fine I'm still going to be paying this

with my own money um just maybe at a later date but then that just incentivized me to buy more so you know at least half of the things that I've bought I wouldn't have bought if buy now pay later schemes weren't available. But where did the responsibility lie then Anna with with you wanting to buy now or the buy now pay later companies and the ease of getting credit? It definitely was my own issue you know it's not to kind of you know shift layman anything like that obviously I hadn't really realized that it was a problem until recently um so that was obviously a personal issue but with the buy now pay later scheme schemes I do think that we should be making it a bit more you know obvious as Alice mentioned as well they're kind of um you know most popular um age range usually would be 18 to 24 years old at least on social media you know all the adverts and things

like that um as she said as well it's kind of gendered it's you know fits in with like your instagram aesthetic so it looks like those adverts are meant to be on your timeline and they fit in with what's already on your instagram your twitter things like that um so it's not so much that you know they should be um kind of banned or anything like that obviously it is a good service if you can exert self-control and you know how to use them properly but I do think that they should also be making it a bit more you know kind of obvious and what the actual consequences can be. You see Anna Klarna said to us that they do invest in financial literacy, offer a clear repayment schedule.

And of course, as we've said, don't charge interest. How much financial literacy did you have? So with, you know, understanding kind of financial jargon and things like that, again, it's not, even now, to be totally honest, it's not something I'm 110% clued up on and totally knowledgeable of. But I do think that, you know, it's not something i'm 110 clued up on and totally knowledgeable of but um i do think that you know it's not so much that they were um you know misleading per se because it does say this can affect your credit score but i would personally as somebody that has built update

and has spent you know so much more money than i would have you know if i didn't use buying ip later i personally would have preferred if it was a bit more obvious what the consequences can be because although they say at the bottom of their adverts or you know their posters and things like that you know this can affect your credit score it doesn't really tell you the true extent of it um luckily I've not really missed any payments or anything to have like a long-term you know you know kind of financial detriment using buying IP later um but not everybody has been in you know such a fortunate position a lot of people i should mention have built up more day and i don't think it's obvious enough especially to a younger audience that you can actually build up a date with that

how have you got yourself out of debt um so with my credit cards um i basically just at the start of lockdown obviously we can't go out and things like that so i just kind of had um a bit more spare money than I normally would and I was just like you know what I'm not kind of I can't keep going on and just kind of paying the minimum amount and paying so much interest because I did that for you know basically four years I was just paying off the minimum amount so I wasn't really making any dent in the balance that I had outstanding and it was making me quite anxious and I was just trying to kind of not think about it and obviously the longer I do that the worse it's going to get it's going to affect my credit score um so at the start of lockdown about March time I just kind of had to bite the bullet sit down have a look at you know what was actually outstanding and you know for so

long I did put it off but see when I actually sat down and worked out like some sort of kind of budget or a plan it was so much easier than I thought it would be and I'd been putting it off for so long so I wish I'd done it earlier on but um to actually pay off I just kind of worked out um you know what I could be affording to pay every month um luckily I was in quite a good position because I have been working ever since lockdown I'm a key worker so I've not had to take any kind of hits in my wages or anything like that um and I've been doing as much overtime as I can as well I've been working like 50 hour weeks for like two months because

I just had it in my head, I want this paid off and then I won't feel so guilty if I go out and spend money on myself or something like that. I was talking to Anna, Alice Tapper and Sue Anderson and there are details of organisations that can help with debt, you'll find them on the

Women's Hour website. And Isabel emailed, she said, I was really pleased to hear you talk about Buy Now, Pay Later. It's a real bugbear for me. When buying online, the Buy Now, Pay Later payment option is often prioritised and is a simple one-click type operation. I have once not even realised that I was paying through this scheme. Having life experience of recessions, I can see why they aren't trying to appeal to me, but to a generation that hasn't lived through those realities. Now, even those of us who've got a bit older and determined we won't have any work done on the face, there is something slightly disturbing about seeing yourself on Zoom and wondering if maybe something should be done. Even some young women, like the 29-year-old who appeared on the Today programme, have been tempted to use Botox to perk up their Zoom faces. Kathleen Moran has said

she's changed her mind about Botox and was photographed in the Sunday Times with the headline, this is what a Botoxed feminist looks like. Well, as beauty salons have reopened for now at least, demand for the treatment has risen. So will it soon be as much a part of a woman's beauty routine as getting your hair done or having a pedicure? Alice Hart-Davies is a journalist and founder of the Tweakmentsguide.com. Melanie Abbott is a reporter for you and yours. What exactly is Botox? Botox is a trade name. It's made by the company Allagan. It's a real money spinner for them, a multi-billion pound product.

It's made from a toxin, which is the same one which can cause the food poisoning botulism, but it's used in incredibly small doses, and it's injected into your muscles in small amounts and then it causes temporary paralysis by disrupting the nerve signals to that muscle and that's where you get the frown lines that stop appearing. Right, and how long has it been a part and parcel of the beauty business? It's been around for quite a while now. I mean, it was initially used for things like spasms, facial

spasms, twitches. It's also been used for quite a long time for things like cerebral palsy in children. But apparently it was discovered, its kind of beauty effects were discovered by a woman who was having it for eye spasms and then mentioned that she had found that her frown lines were disappearing and was saying, you know, can you put a bit more into my brow? So that's when it started to be marketed as a beauty product. Right. And it's now available, some would say worryingly, on the high street. Well, that's right. Two years ago, Superdrug began providing it in its clinics in store.

You can get it there for £99. It's only just actually reopened two of its clinics in London. You can only get it in two London clinics at the moment because of lockdown. But there were people who were saying that, you know, that was what was making it seem like popping into the hairdressers. You can pop into a pharmacy and get it done. That was, a lot of people said that that was when it started to be seen to be far more normal. I mean, I think in truth it was. Well, I've got to be honest, I dye my hair.

What's the difference? Well, that's what some people argue. But I mean, the difference is, I suppose, that this is a medicine. It's a prescription only medicine. I mean, there are those flying under the radar who are getting around those rules, but it is a prescription only medicine. Let's bring in Alice Hart-Davis. Alice, how often have you had Botox? I guess I, how often in total? I haven't added it up. It's about two or three times a year right and you started starting in about

2003 or four because I've been writing about non-surgical cosmetic procedures and beauty for over 20 years and so yeah I was well aware that it was there but I was a bit wary of it at first and the first time I had it done actually it's uh back in those days it was all about just getting rid of the lines so I was given a whacking great dose which just totally immobilized my forehead and that was so terrifying I had to have a fringe cut to hide the evidence because you know it looks really really unnatural we need to move our faces to communicate and um anyway I went back to it in time of course because you know i was uh 40 i had small children i had full-time job you know and you after a bit looking at those lines on your face you think would it be so bad to try this yeah um sometimes i wonder whether being short-sighted

has actually protected uh those of us who are short-sighted from some of these some of these worries i've just never really seen myself all that clearly for so long but you were very young when you first had it done can I just ask did it did anybody notice and if they noticed what did they say? I was 40 I wasn't that young. That is young. Except that you now get a lot of 25 year olds doing it preemptively which is which I think is awful but that's another point to go back to, back to what you were asking, nobody did notice because I got the fringe cut quite quickly and it was very uncommon in those days. You know, I, it was, it scared me not being able to move my face. So that's why I didn't go back to it. But then, you know,

then you discover the better practitioners who have a more subtle touch with it because all I want really is softening the kind of pleat I get between my eyebrows. And what drove me to it was when people like my mother started to say, why are you looking so anxious? When I wasn't anxious at all, I was just thinking. Yes, this opens the rather large maternal can of worms, doesn't it?

But what is wrong? We're all going to die. We're all mortal. What is wrong we're all going to die we are all mortal what is wrong with just growing old and looking like you are because it's better than frankly not being alive at all there is nothing wrong with that and we know we are lucky to be alive but a lot of women choose weather because of those in embedded societal pressures to want to look fresh they want to look good for their age do they just look like they've had botox well that depends who you go and see you know what puts people off is trying tweakments is because of all the judgment around

it because we've seen so many examples of so many people looking weird, Hollywood celebs, you know, footballers' wives, Love Island people. There's a very done look that is easy to spot and people are becoming better at spotting that that is work rather than just looking weird. But there's also... Sorry, I just want to bring back Melanie. There are no harmful side effects at all, Mel. Are we sure about this?

Well, there appear to be no long lasting side effects from Botox. The complication rates are really pretty low, but you may have a problem, according to the stats from the British College of Aesthetic Medicine, in five out of every thousand treatments. Now, the thing about Botox, though, is it does wear off. So you can, if it's injected into the wrong place, you can, for instance, get an eyelid droop. You can get a headache. You can sometimes get flu-like symptoms, people report. And there can be redness or even bruising. And as you've also discovered, if too much, or also discussed, if too much is injected, then you can end up with that frozen look

that we've all seen on some people. Yeah, I know we absolutely have. And to go back to my earlier point, I pride myself on being able to tell, I think, when someone has had it. But perhaps I don't notice those people who've really paid a load of money to have it done like that. Just very briefly, Alice, is there going to be a time when you just stop? Because let's say you've got to 65 or 70 and you think, well, I know, I don't need to worry anymore.

It's over. No more Botox for me. Me for myself? Yes. I don't know. I always think the key thing in any of these tweakments area is to know when to stop with any procedure before you look weird. So I don't see myself stopping, but there may come a point where I think what's what's the bother. But mostly, I mean, it's also because I've got a professional curiosity in this area and I want to see what these things can do. You know, I don't just have Botox in my forehead. I have it in my chin, down the sides of my mouth,

you know, where you pull it down around the sides of the eyes to stop the crow's feet being quite as bad as they are. It's just like Melanie was saying, to damp it down, it's not to knock it out. Alice Hart-Davis and Melanie Abbott were talking to Jane. The office romance has long been a staple in drama. Two people spend eight hours a day brushing up against each other and in the classic example of Tim and Dawn in the office, it all gets a bit flirty. You getting it?

Yeah. Tiny bit, Marilyn. Sorry. Oh, can I have this when you're finished? Yeah, you can have it. When will you be finished? I don't know. Maybe we could share it.

OK, then. I'll just have it on weekends. OK. And then the inevitable happens and true love follows. But what about now? Hardly anybody meets in an office. Increasingly, people are choosing to continue working from home. All communication is done through the screen. Is it possible to have a technological office romance or is it all over? Ellen Scott is a lifestyle editor at the Metro UK and Anna Smith is a film

critic and host of the Girls on Film podcast. I asked her why the office relationship makes such a good storyline. Well, there's so much tension, isn't there, in being in a confined space with people, as we well know. But in terms of the office romance on screen, when you think about the opportunities of culture clash, you know, personalities clashing, which brings lots of comedy as well as tension. And we see it as you know it's something that's quite identifiable I mean most of us can relate or have been able to relate to being in an office with someone as opposed to being stranded on a desert island with someone so it's really the staple of a lot

of great rom-coms and I always think of for example Hugh Grant he's been in so many of these films and it's to do with partly fantasy like oh what if my boss was so handsome and charming, and we fell in love, and partly reality, like, for example, the Bridget Jones films, where, in fact, that boss really isn't very suitable at all. What are the other classics? Well, for me, on film, Working Girl is a great example, which really plays with that trope, because, of course, there's a lot of deception involved in the storyline behind Working Girl, because she's posing it, being someone that she isn't. But that kind of really ups the ante I think and that's a classic for me but of course another Hugh Grant film Love Actually is not one of my personal favourites but that really plays with

the trope of workplace romance because there's at least five or six different kinds of workplace romance within that film you've got the Prime Minister and the Tea Lady and then you've got extras on a film set who are drawn together. And there's all sorts of different office romances, some forbidden and some OK. And that really that really charms people, that one. Now, Ellen, I know you met your partner in the office. What happened? So we are still together and still working together. So we met about two years before we even really spoke because we're both awkward and British but finally started going to kind of work pub trips started becoming friends and then eventually

formed a relationship. What do you think it is about the office that maybe encourages romance? I think number one it's that you have this shared common interest. You're clearly interested in the same kind of career path. You're doing the same work. But also you have this easy conversation starter. You can both kind of complain about a specific, you know, the office air con is on too strong or the microwave is smelling of fish or something like that. It's not such an easy kind of common ground. And then obviously you're spending so much time together it's much easier

to form a relationship at work than it is to you know trawl through tinder and other dating apps and find someone outside of the office how careful did you have to be to keep it all a secret because i know some officers are now saying nope no office romance obvious romance here. It's not acceptable. We were very careful and we kept it secret for about five months before finally kind of telling my manager at the time and posting on Instagram announcing it. But yeah, it was really important to keep it secret just so we didn't get any kind of judgment or if it had gone horribly wrong and we were actually not a good match

I would have been glad that no one knew that we had then broken up. Anna, what will happen to the storylines as a result of the current situation? It's a very interesting question. We've already seen kind of horror movies and thrillers and some kind of rom-coms on TV hastily thrown together in the pandemic, which sort of revolve around people who are meeting or interacting on kind of online and conferencing systems and such. So I would imagine we're going to see film adapting. It's going to have to do that. It's going to have to look out people who are in different circumstances and perhaps then exploring the sexual tension that comes from

not being able to actually touch each other, because there's something really in that which has actually been explored in the teen genre, for example, in Twilight and a film called Five Feet Apart, which actually came out last year. So I think it's going to adapt. What, Ellen, do you reckon happens when passion is not reciprocated? Oh, that's a huge issue and i think that's why it's so key to kind of establish a friendship before you even think of going flirty because there is such a risk of it becoming uncomfortable for the person who's not interested and especially in a work environment for women

especially it's really difficult to say i'm not comfortable with this flirting or you're taking this too far it's very difficult to challenge that. Could you have developed your relationship Ellen if you'd been working from home? I think it would have taken us twice as long which is saying something because it took us about two years to talk to each other anyway I think we would have talked on Slack and maybe on Zoom but yeah it would have just taken so much longer without having those kind of in-person pub trips you know bumping into each other in the kitchen and also the Christmas party which was a huge thing but is the office romance dead now or can it revive itself I think romance will always prevail in my view and I think

certainly according to cinema and tv there is always always a way in the romantic storylines. And I think they will find a way. So how, Ellen, would you advise those with a workplace crush in the current environment? I think the onus has to be a bit on managers to make sure that socializing is still possible if we are going to be working from home more that might mean doing weekly you know workplace zoom pub quizzes or anything like that just making sure there's still a social aspect so you can talk but on a personal level it is very much about chatting on slack not immediately going for the flirting because like I said that does have the opportunity to go wrong but starting on a friendship basis just chatting about you know how work is going how

things outside of work are going and also you can start on the very common basis of we've all been in lockdown this is very weird isn't it that's a good conversation starter I was talking to Ellen Scott and Anna Smith and Janet said I first met my future husband on day one of our new entrance course at Barclays. We were seated next to one another. I returned from the lunch break late having been distracted by the shops and as I slipped into my seat I saw that my neighbour had written you're late on my work folder. That mutual humour gained from our first introduction has been the thread that's kept us together 40 years on. I still have the folder somewhere in the attic. Do join me on Monday when I'll be talking to Harriet Harmon.

She's chair of the Human Rights Committee. And we'll be discussing a poll that she's commissioned about being black in the United Kingdom. It includes black women's thoughts on their experience in the NHS. So do join me Monday morning, two minutes past 10. If you can enjoy the rest of the weekend. Bye bye. I'm Sarah Trelevan, and for over a year I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started, like, warning everybody.

Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story, settle in. Available now.