View from a broad

Hurrah for men! Their jobless figures are down 5,000 in a month. Fantastic news. But the unemployment figures are at their highest for three years. How can this be?

Incredibly, practically every single person who lost their job last month was female - 42,000 of them, in catering, cleaning, service industries and just about everything low level and necessary that keeps the country going. A lot of these jobs are the muckier kind that nobody really wants, but are the only sort a less-qualified woman can find while also bringing up her children. Given the inroads women have made into all the serious professions, it's still a shock to be reminded just how many are picking up the slack

Obviously we'll know to worry for the boys as well when terrible losses are announced in the vital positions of football commentator, priest and shouty trade union leader

Happy birthday to woman's worst enemy in the field of beauty! Yes, the perm is 100 years old this week. One hundred years of burnt flesh, perm-lotion smell and the ability to look like a surprised fraggle or Deirdre Barlow, born from the ridiculously optimistic belief that poker-straight thin hair could be turned into a cascade of rippling Andie MacDowell locks by the simple expedient of drenching it in boiling acid for five hours.

Jo O'Neil, director of Toni & Guy, insists, "New technology allows you to put movement into the hair that will fade away rather than being cut away. The perm has, at last, come of age."

But those who've heard this hollow promise continually over the past 100 years know it's not true, it's never been true, and, until someone invents Speedy-Gro-Magic-Girl's-World Hair that comes out of your head at the touch of a button, a perm will always be just a frizzy scorched-earth disaster area with a peculiar smell.

Oh, Sharon Stone, you of the brain haemorrhage, toe-eating lizards and peculiar custody arrangements. On Basic Instinct 2, premiering this week, you say, "It explores the sexual dynamics of a woman in her 40s, in a provocative and powerful way."

Does this mean it's a) a quietly moving documentary of a typical single 45-year-old woman's romantic life, b) a dangerous quest into the hidden and difficult psychological world of female sex crime, or c) TITS!!!!?