It's Still All About Me

Seventies feminist icon Rosie Boycott is developing a nice little sideline in mea culpas for the Daily Mail. Only a few months back she was telling us that biology is destiny, now she's telling their readers yet again what a bad girl she's been.

Well, not quite. She's got a confessional to publicise - first issued in 1985, now to be republished - and the DM do like a good 'middle-class girl gone wrong' story. They don't come any more middle-class or go any wronger than our Rosie. Bring them together and let toxic synergy do the rest.

I suppose it's possible that the DM have tweaked the interview to make her seem like a self-centred airhead. What can you make of this, describing her father, an upright military type who didn't speak to her for a couple of years after the original washing of the dirty linen in public :

"His rejection of my book was very painful to me. I think now it was partly his British stiff upper lip, but he probably also thought: "Gosh, maybe I didn't take care of her enough,"' she says.

'My life got very out of control and maybe he felt there was more he could have done. He probably felt, as a parent, that he had failed me.' "

But enough of him, let's talk more about me, eh ? The poor chap was probably regretting all those times he left the belt on the back of the bedroom door.

I also notice that the most influential of Ms Boycotts years - the feminist, Spare Rib years - seem to be airbrushed out. Ms Boycott has one child.

Another Seventies alternative icon with one child and a past of drug abuse and sexual liberation wasn't quite as middle class as Ms Boycott, and never found peace on a Somerset chicken farm. Her parents didn't speak to her for a couple of years, either.

If you were casting a pornographic blockbuster now I'm not sure you'd cast a Karen Carpenter lookalike as your star, but Marylin Chambers, who was found dead in her California trailer last week, was a Seventies hit in Behind The Green Door, which cost less than a hundred thousand but reportedly grossed 25 million dollars. Along with the late Linda Lovelace, she - or more accurately the men who filmed her - helped make pornography more mainstream - almost chic - in fashionable America, a trend which ain't stopped yet.

She leaves one child.