These days, everybody wants a piece of you.

They’re a plague of the suburbs: the shopping centre squatters. These are the folk who set up stands outside the stores, selling everything from mineral make-up to car accessories. (Just make sure you don’t mix those up, scouring your skin with a chamois or putting lipstick on the bumper bar.)

 They make a trip to the shops an obstacle course worthy of Sally Pearson. “Madam, I would like to talk about your skin,” one slippery salesman said, before shoving an $80 jar of Dead Sea Exfoliant under my nose. “In the Middle Ages, wine was used as a chemical exfoliant,” I replied brightly. “So I’m off to stick my head in a bucket of chardonnay.”

 Everyone has the right to make an honest living, but how much more space can these shopping centre squatters devote to the almighty dollar? “Quick, there’s one square metre of unoccupied space. Let’s find a tenant!”

 At one Westfield last week, I discovered a pint-sized brow bar. Women were lined up to have stray hairs torn from their heads. Sure, it was fun putting bets on who would cry or grind their teeth, but it was undignified.

 It’s like those billboards being towed by motorbikes. No, I’m not going to sign up to Foxtel because you are blocking my lane! Other sources of advertising annoyance include environmental groups sending out letters by snail mail instead of email, politicians who address their mail-outs to “Dear constituent”, doorknockers at 5pm who ask about your electricity bill, phone-callers at 6pm offering telecommunications deals and pavement charity hustlers who want to garnish your wages.

 Just for one day, I’d like to live without advertising. I’d have to turn off the TV, radio, computer, mobile and home phones, and bin the newspapers. But there are hidden dangers: discount vouchers on the back of shopping receipts, ads inside books for the next exciting instalment and competitions on food labels.

 Maybe the only place to avoid advertising is inside the womb. Research shows the poor little suckers can hear at six months’ gestation. How long before clever companies devise ways to get to the foetus? Mums-to-be could make a few extra bucks by playing a recording of “Coke is life” to their swollen bellies. You may think I’ve gone too far. But free samples of baby formula are given out in maternity wards, in a promising form of advertising to vulnerable mothers.

 Which brings me back to shopping centres.  If I’m struggling with seven shopping bags, I am not in the mood for a sales pitch. These squatters should be evicted.

Do women know what men really want?

 Ok, for a moment, let’s pretend that I’m a 25-year-old heterosexual male. It’s Friday night and I’m out on the town, keen for…OK, sex, yes, but with someone I might also like to eat breakfast with in the morning. Some of us like to chew toast and eggs rather than our own arms off trying to escape.
  So what do I see? Blow-up dolls – hundreds of them. All Kim Kardashian look-alikes, with their padded chests and hair and eyelashes stuck on with glue. I see cleavage and thighs and – as she downs her fourth vodka – other bits I really don’t want to see, not least because my mates can see them too.
  They’re funny these girls. Smart, too. But they look and smell like sweaty sausages sprayed with perfume, and they’re deck-stained to the ankles. I wouldn’t mind a kiss, but those lips look as inflated as jumping castles. And, God, the nails – terrifying talons that could do some serious damage down below.
  Of course, I’m not a 25-year-old male. But if I’d said all that as a mid-thirties woman, you delicious young things would yell “Get lost Grandma!” But stay with me for a minute – I’ll shout a round of mojitos – because I’ve asked these boys and, truly, that’s what they think. Well the nice ones; the jerks will take what they can get.
  Yes, they do love a molten leg and a short skirt, but those tart trotters you can’t even walk in even when sober need to go. Ditto the hair extensions. Seriously, guys want freshly washed, soft and beachy. You know the chick Zac Effron falls in love with in The Lucky One? The blonde in denim shorts and gumboots? The one who loves her dogs? Her.
  They like personality and originality but not fierce. Yes, you might like fierce, your girlfriends like fierce, and you’ve been raised on Rhianna’s brand of scowly sexual liberation, but the guys? They like Pippa Middleton’s bum – even though they’ve never seen her bum, only the outline of it, in a bridesmaid’s dress, no less.
  Writer A.A. Gill reckons if you asked men what they’d like to see women wearing, they’d say, “me”, “sweat”, “a smile”, “baby oil”, and “chocolate sauce”. But in truth, he argues, they prefer painted red toenails, women in men’s shirts, tanned legs in cowboy boots and, wait, a girl who walks confidently. “The cantilevered – tits and knickerless -micro dress thing is a gawp and a guffaw,” he writes, “but it isn’t what most men want their girlfriends to wear – that’s not about respecting you (sorry), it’s about what his mates will think of him.”
  If you’re any sort of feminist, here’s where you shout, “Who cares what men think? As if we dress for them!” And no, you shouldn’t. But surely gallivanting about like Barbies at a Hugh Hefner pool party, your self-worth as deep as your spray tan and barely a bra strap to distinguish you from your friends, is as big a tragedy to your smarts and imagination.
  Come on girls, you’re 20. You’re not supposed to conform to some tired template of flesh, tramp-stamp and silicone. You can annoy your parents with something better than that. They were Goths, punks, hippies, and mods, and Dr Martens. Go on, grab a pair. They’re so much comfier than anything you’re wearing – whether the boys like them or not.

Back in the old days……

 Whenever I feel like a laugh, I talk to a young person about technology. “Once upon a time,” I say, “If you wanted to call someone, you picked up the handset on the phone, which was plugged into the wall, and dialled. There was no answering machine. If they weren’t there, you had to call back!” Inevitably, their face becomes a mask of horror. “But what if it was, like, an emergency? Like, you saw Kim Kardashian in the street. In Sydney! And you had to tell someone?” This is when I shrug, shake my head, and start with “Back in the old days….”
  Then, I recollect my first mobile phone. It was a flip-phone that was as long as T.V remote control attached to a battery the size of a briefcase. It weighed nearly a tonne. Back then, we thought we were at the cutting edge of technology. You could talk on a phone while walking down the street! Who would have thought that would ever be possible?!
  Then came Facebook. Finally, you could share photos with friends. Of course, we used to do that on slide nights, all snuggled up on the couch marvelling at the magic of transparencies. Believe it or not, these older technologies are cool again. (I’m not exactly sure whether the word “cool” is cool, but that’s another story.) Polaroids are back. So is the pinhole camera. And a handset you can plug into your iPhone.
  I don’t know whether it will stop brain tumours – I’ll get back to you on that. But it’s certainly a hit with the young folk. I listened with rapt attention as my best friend’s 14-year-old son pored over his new iPhone, pointing out the slim shape and fancy features. Then I pulled out my purple handset. “Oh, my GOD! Oh, my God!” he stuttered. “That is so bad, it’s good!” Whatever that means….
  Now, he wants one. Apparently all the stuff I grew up with is retro. Vicariously, I’m hip. Next on the list is the typewriter keyboard for the iPad. I miss the clatter of regular old keyboards.
  Maybe the key is to embrace new technology, while fondly remembering its ancestors. Like Facebooking the next slide night, tweeting a picture of a typewriter, or handwriting, scanning and emailing a letter. Another opportunity to begin a sentence with, “Kids have it so easy these days…”

Can’t always believe what you see.

 When Victoria’s Secrets models are regularly airbrushed to “look better”, surely it’s a sign that the apocalypse is nigh. These women are considered the world’s most beautiful and are paid cash mountains to model underwear. Their only job is to look good. And yet even they’re not “good enough”.
  Erin Heatherton, Victoria’s Secret Angel and girlfriend of Leonardo DiCaprio, said this about the use of photoshop by Victoria’s Secret, recently exposed online: “We’re not selling reality; we’re selling a story. It’s all about creating this fantasy. Retouching is an essential part of our job.”
  She also reckons body image has nothing to do with fashion imagery. “I think that’s something children should be taught by their parents. It should be taught in schools.” Except that 99 per cent of us don’t realise the images we see have been airbrushed because there’s no fine print to tell us.
  And if women like Miranda Kerr and 180cm Erin Heatherton aren’t considered slim or flawless enough to escape the airbrush, there’s something very, very wrong with this picture.