The Carrie Bradshaw Effect

The sociopolitics of oversharing online

Is it just me or is this post-Christmas pre-New Year’s netherworld feeling particularly loose and lawless?? So much juicy stuff has happened recently and I want to tell you EVERYTHING. Of course, being a journalist, I am always mining my life for material, ossifying off-kilter interactions into article fodder, weaving intimate nights and weird mornings into stories. There are so many recent frissons that I am GAGGING to anthropologically dissect with you (some of which you’ll be reading about in 2026). But I’m also wondering how much I want to divulge about myself here, how much to separate my job from my personal antics, how loose I can be without feeling flooded with anxiety (/as if I’d just published the internal monologue of some sort of mental breakdown??).

Substack queen Emily Sundberg once described this platform as “a really good way for women to monetize their diary entries” — which is true. Reading someone else’s diary feels like entering into a forbidden world, bejewelled with ugly feelings, sprawling with secrets. We’re all hungry to feel less alone in our twisted feelings, to feast off each other’s unkempt selves. Monetizing our diaries is a smart idea on a macro-level, with global audiences increasingly distrusting of legacy news organisations and eager to form parasocial bonds with vivacious podcasters, TikTokers and livestreamers.

Since the noughties, women have developed a particular knack for confessional writing — dissecting the ‘private’ parts of our lives. One 2013 study of opinion pieces published in Australia found that men had written close to three-quarters of the political op-eds. The only subjects dominated by female writers were related to relationships, parenting, and gender.

Critics are divided on whether this is a good thing. Female-written personal narratives have been described as “consciousness-raising”, reifying the invisible parts of women’s daily lives. Others have dubbed it as navel-gazy and narcissistic. One HuffPost journalist described the oversaturation of women blogging about their “latest sexual escapades” as the Carrie Bradshaw Effect. “We can’t turn a page, web or paper, without reading about a young woman over-sharing details about her love life,” Courtney E. Martin wrote, “The Carrie model is not going to get women writers recognized -- it's going to keep them in the stronghold of a lineage that doesn't produce many Pulitzers.”

I don’t think that writing about sex is vapid. We can glean a lot about ourselves by examining what we desire and how we connect to each other in private. But I’m not sure what I think about oversharing — or, as Jia Tolentino put it in the New Yorker, “the commodification of personal experience… placing a delicate part of your life in the hands of strangers.” I’m sure my thoughts on all this will evolve in 2026 (and please tell me what you’re interested in reading about!). But in the meantime, I’ll tell you about last December, because it feels less messy to talk about my mess with distance:

• I’d moved back from Brooklyn and in with my parents (after a stint living with my ex in East London, then breaking up).

• I was spending a lot of time in my dressing gown in my Cath Kidston-themed bedroom, wondering how things had gone so downhill.

• I got into a shouting fight with my mum because I’d eaten too many of the tomatoes in the fridge.

• I was dating a man who told me that he’d “probably cheat” if he got into a relationship again and that he was finding it overwhelming having “so many cuties” asking him out on Instagram.

• A copywriting gig that felt too good to be true was. The guy who’d commissioned me ended up ghosting me, owing me hundreds.

• 40ish job rejections deep, I was ready to give up on trying to do journalism full-time.

I won’t get into the weeds of why life is soo much funner and sparklier now, because that would be boring, but it is. Maybe next December I’ll tell you about this one. In the meantime, here are the pieces I’m most proud of this year:

Two girls fell in love at a camp for ‘troubled teens’ and made an audacious escape. Their captors weren’t far behind - The Guardian

This story took about a year to report. Two summers ago, I heard about an institute called Re-Creation Retreat (RCR), a hellish-sounding therapeutic treatment center for teenage girls with “behavioral problems” in Arizona (girls say they weren’t allowed to look each other in the eye or look out the window). I started interviewing girls who went there. Then, a few months into my reporting, I heard a story I couldn’t stop thinking about. It was a story about two girls, Ashley and Cassia, who met at RCR, fell in love and managed to escape. A few months after my article was published, RCR was shut down by the Arizona Department of Health Ser­vices.

A Finasteride Nightmare: Inside the Dark Side of the Hair-Loss Drug - GQ

My other big reported story this year was on the anti-hair-loss drug finasteride, which some users say has wrecked their lives. I conducted interviews with numerous men who had taken the drug and were reporting horrible symptoms. Insomnia. Brain fog. Genital shrinking. Suicidal ideation. I focused on the story of one man, Marc Turner, who took finasteride for hair loss in 2020 and died by suicide in a hotel room less than two years later.

My Awkward Night in an AI Sex Doll Brothel - VICE

I wrote a lot about sex dolls this year. I think it’s because I spend so much time thinking about intimacy and loneliness our inherent unknowability to each other… which naturally brought me to people who wanted to ejaculate inside silicone dolls. My sex doll adventures began in February, when I flew to Berlin to spend the night at Cybrothel, the world’s first AI sex doll brothel. I spent the night cuddling up to a doll called Techno Babe (when in Rome!) and watching a ton of psychedelic VR porn. It was surreal and kaleidoscopic and existential and lonely.

The Hidden Lives of Guys With Sex Doll Girlfriends - Men’s Health,

Another sex doll story. Off the back of my sleepover at Cybrothel, I started conducting interviews with men who had formed romantic relationships with their dolls. The story grew to be about so much more than sex, but loneliness, isolation and what it means to be a man in Trump’s America.

The rise of India’s first kink fashion brand - A Fucking Magazine.

I started writing for Feeld’s sexy magazine A Fucking Magazine this year, which kicked off in Jaipur! I came across a designer called Randhir Singh, who said he’d launched India’s “first kink fashion brand,” SUBCULTURE, working with a family who had been making leather products like slippers and diaries for 150 years. Today, they create blindfolds, bite gags, hard and soft leather handcuffs.

Sauna Raves Are Coming to London - i-D

A couple of winters ago, I photographed and wrote about Sam Liebling’s iconic bathhouse rave, Steamroom, for Brooklyn Magazine. Since then I’ve written a tonne about sauna/bathhouses, including in Finland and Sweden, where I learned loads about sauna lore — how they are portals with unique social rules (kind of in the same way nightclubs are). I think I’m so interested in saunas because I’m always thinking about our desire to temporarily escape ourselves and extreme heat provides a way to do this without drugs and alcohol… If you’re in London the rooftop saunas in Hackney is one of my faves.

Thank you so much for reading this and Happy New Year! I can’t wait to take you to some exciting places in 2026! 🫧🫧🫧