When I was a teenager, my mother’s glossy magazines taught me an important lesson; no matter what you’ve achieved in life, no matter how much money you’ve made or how much good you’ve done, it all means nothing if you haven’t found a husband and had children.  And you’ve only got til your early forties to manage the latter, so best get cracking.

There was article after article about how to cope with being married to an insensitive slob who never washed, ignored you in favour of football, and generally acted like an overgrown four-year-old.  That was your only choice.  You couldn’t marry a man who wasn’t like that, because there weren’t any men who weren’t like that.  You couldn’t be a lesbian, because lesbians only existed as horrifying examples of what you might look like if you picked the wrong outfit.  You couldn’t stay single, because that would involve becoming a sad old woman who went home every night to an empty flat and was secretly pitied by everyone at work. It was the insensitive slob or nothing.

Every single book they recommended was either about a woman whose whole life collapsed after finding out that her husband was cheating, or about a desperate single woman with a ticking biological clock, who eventually ran into a “knight in shining Armani” who took pity and married her. Every article on friendship warned against the negative effects that your friends could have on your marriage. Every article on food told you what to cut out of your diet in order to maintain your clear skin and trim figure. Every article on parenting told you exactly how you were destroying your children’s chances this week. They were pretty great at telling women what they were doing wrong.

They taught us that all women regularly bought size-eight outfits to put in storage for when they’d lost enough weight.  They taught us that our failure to ever lose enough was yet another sign of our inadequacy.  They frequently reminded us that all men fantasised about busty blondes with tiny waists.  If you were not a busty blonde with a tiny waist, you could rest assured that your husband had settled for less by marrying you, and was secretly on the lookout for something better.  Luckily, after every such reminder, they’d print an article about how plastic surgery was becoming more and more socially accepted these days.  And really, didn’t you owe it to the people around you not to constantly horrify them with your hideous body?

And every so often, in the midst of all of this, they would stop and assure us that we were lucky to be living in an age of equality, where women were independent and free to be anything they wanted to be. Now, isn’t that nice?