Ash Ford-McAllister

  There's a lot of very impassioned discourse, particularly online,  about how "problematic"  age-gap relationships are, and the "dangers" of women under 25 dating men who are any more than 2yrs older than them. (Interestingly, there is very little said about men  under 25 dating older women , and nothing,  beyond the bigots' 'justifications' of their homophobia, about people in same-sex age-gap relationships - I have ideas on why the focus is on young women, but that's another blog post!) Personally, I feel that peoples' attitudes to age-gap relationships, like peoples' attitudes to many things, are determined by their experience; my grandparents and my parents both had a 10yr age gap, with the man being the older party - in my grandparents' case, my maternal grandmother was 19 when she married my 29yr old grandfather; their relationship lasted for 43yrs, until her death in 2004. Two sets of my parents' friends also had a 10yr ag...

  If you've taken a moment to have a look at my  publication history , you'll notice that my writing to date has been published under the name Ashley Ford-McAllister  (as was my previous blog, that I lost the login details for...) So - why the move to Ash Ford-McAllister?  It's a very small change on paper (which it technically isn't - Ashley is still my legal first name) but a huge change on a personal level, and one which reflects a lot. Ash  was a name that, at 9yrs old, and with an absolute certainty that the answer to the question of "What do you want to be when you grow up?" was "a man", and a belief that the "change" people kept warning me about would be when I'd get the same genitals as my Dad had (yes, a female puberty came as a hell of a shock. Such a severe and upsetting one, in fact,  that I just assumed what was probably severe endometriosis was "just normal girl stuff" - PSA: if you're bleeding for 6+ days, a...

  I want to start this article by mentioning just how long  it took to find a picture of a genuinely 'fat' person where they weren't miserable, engaged in a gym workout, or standing on a set of scales. There were almost no photos at all of full-bodied men. Eating disorders are skyrocketing in the UK , including among children and teenagers.   A lot of commentators place the blame with social media, and heavily filtered, professional, fully employed, paid 'influencers' (many of whom are instructed by the media companies which pay their wages to present themselves as "ordinary homie done good" types, representing their regular, paid  job, complete with purchased followers, paid-for likes, and a vast marketing budget available, as "a wild bit of absolute luck") presenting unrealistic beauty standards. Others go back further, blaming catwalk supermodels, and routine print magazine airbrushing of women who were already very far from even well-nourishe...