Gauntlet

In the 21st century, thin equals success: posh clothes shops don’t make big sizes; rich footballers marry skinny birds. And fat is no longer just a feminine issue. These days men, worried about the moobs, are every bit as likely to refuse the bread at lunch as their wives. The days of the porky chief executive with his “chauffeur chub” and long lunches are gone; these days moguls are lean, mean and up at 6am to work out with their personal trainers. It is the poor, with their takeaway buckets of fried chicken and cheap processed stodge, who are fat.

— Eleanor Mills

Now that Belle has outed herself, I wonder why it remains so difficult for people — or indeed the law — to understand that not all prostitutes conform to the stereotype of the abused, trafficked, addicted victim. Of course such women exist in vast, shaming and regrettable numbers. But to claim, as so many commentators did last week, that this is the only version of prostitution that exists seems to me extraordinarily naive.

The fact that I don’t wear a grubby mac or a trilby with a press card in it and don’t spend my evenings going through your bins doesn’t mean I’m not a journalist — only that I’m not one kind of journalist. The fact that Susan Boyle isn’t Beyoncé doesn’t mean she isn’t a singer. Nice estate agents must exist; you do (not often, admittedly) come across a human-seeming traffic warden or member of parliament. So why maintain that there categorically cannot exist a single former prostitute who a) doesn’t think she did anything morally heinous and b) never got assaulted?

— India Knight

Cohabitation is gradually gaining more recognition in English law and without much debate. Recently, special laws for cohabitants, which would treat them like married couples on separation or death, have been proposed by the Law Commission and, in a private bill, by the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Lester. This is dangerous. Despite the no doubt good intentions, cohabitation law retards the emancipation of women, degrades relationships, takes away choice and would extend an already unsatisfactory maintenance law for married couples to another group. Women do not need and ought not to require to be kept by men (and vice versa) after their relationship has come to an end. Instead, we should all have the right to live together without having a legal structure imposed without our consent or contract to that effect.

— Ruth Deech - professor of law at Gresham College, London, and a crossbench peer, writes in The Observer today.