Someone linked to this article on Facebook today: “20 Things Women Should Stop Wearing After Age 30”.  Yes, fellow humans, the omnipotent Kallie Provencher from shallow-as-a-puddle website Rant Chic has bestowed upon us twenty rules for those too stupid to consider the impact our terrible dressing might be having on the world.  Did you know that kitten heels cause global warming?  That snoods are directly linked to cancer?  That every time someone wears leggings as trousers, a baby panda dies?

Actually it’s all just because “women over 30 should know” that these items are like totally not cute any more, mega LOL, sorry, I mean, delicate giggle.

Items on the list include crop tops, Abercrombie & Fitch (all of it), dirty trainers, mis-matched socks, furry boots and short dresses.  Good GOD.  Do you even KNOW what will happen if you wear a miniskirt beyond the age of 30?  THE MOON WILL CRASH INTO THE EARTH AND WE WILL ALL DIE A THOUSAND DEATHS.  I think she’s pretty irresponsible even putting these ideas into people’s heads in the first place.  Now people will read the article and think “ooh, crop tops!” and buy them age 29 (this is ok, FYI) but maybe keep them in their wardrobes post-watershed and then the moon will inch a little bit closer, the tides will go all skewiff and basically Kallie will be singlehandedly responsible for the destruction of the planet’s ecosystems.

Screw you, Kallie.  I don’t even wear sparkly trousers now but I’ll bloody well start wearing them the day after my 30th birthday this December.  Along with oversized leopard-print sunglasses (which I intend to buy specially) and the non-matching socks I own which are not only non-matching but intended to be non-matching.  And not only THAT, but they were bought for me by MY OWN MOTHER.  Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.  Oh, and I’ll wear hoop earrings too; perhaps the glitter-encrusted hoop earrings I wore on Saturday. That’s right, two in one.  And they’re fuchsia.  FUCHSIA.  Did I mentioned they’re covered in glitter?

I love worn-out plimsolls.  I prefer them scuffed up, which is good, because when I buy new ones I wear them whilst cycling and they get filthy after three minutes.  But this is bad because “If you can’t afford a new pair, then it’s time to reevaluate life as a 30-year-old.”  But Kallie, what if I have more important things on which I choose to spend my money?  Like electricity and property?  I wish I’d know that it’s more important to own new trainers before I’d renewed my mortgage.

Oh, and here’s an excellent piece of advice.  Platform flip-flops are a no-no for literally everybody on earth because “There’s nothing cute or sexy about platform flip-flops”.  This, as we all know, is the only basis on which women choose their clothes.

American Eagle is also banned. “Sure, their jeans fit perfectly, but that doesn’t make it trendy for women over 30 to be wearing them.”  Er, why?  They fit perfectly but we’re . . . what . . . not allowed?  According to whom, exactly?  And sorry – my tiny female brain forgot – are we more concerned with being “cute and sexy” or “trendy”?  Because as any true fashionista knows, these are rarely the same thing.  So which is it?  Should we 30-somethings worry about being admired by superficial women, or superficial men?  Sorry, could you repeat that?  I’m struggling with this classy pair of dungarees (cinched at the waist) and didn’t catch what you said.

I know that it doesn’t matter.  Her article is just one ignorant collection of words in an under-visited corner of the internet, just as my response is one furious blog post in another.  But every time we spew this garbage, every time we as women judge our fellow women for their clothing choices, every time we waste our energy reading about how to dress appropriately for our age instead of how to treat our fellow humans with respect, how to help the environment, how to teach gender equality to our children, society slips that little bit further.  It seems meaningless but it isn’t.  Because if one 31 year old woman skims that article and suddenly feels self-conscious about her painstakingly applied glitter eyeshadow, worn for no other reason than it brightens her day, and stops wearing it, then that article has done its damage.  She didn’t harm anyone with her glitter eyeshadow.  But just like that, she’s lost her means of self-expression, her confidence, her individuality: all thanks to someone who arbitrarily declared what she could or couldn’t wear.

And yes, there will be plenty of women who – like myself – will read it and scoff, or be infuriated, and even vow to wear more of the clothes that are deemed unacceptable.  But there will also be those who are indoctrinated and influenced by society’s definition of “acceptable” – who will fear that wearing the wrong thing will render them sexually unappealing to men, and indeed that what they wear is the single most important part of their attraction.  And they won’t stop to consider that perhaps the man of their dreams is not interested in an identikit woman wearing the clothes she has been told are acceptable but a woman with scuffed trainers and glittery hoop earrings, who know who she is and isn’t afraid to express it.

Look Kallie, I’ll give you a little hint.  “By this age, women should know” is never a good way to start a sentence, unless it’s “women should know that their true value is invested not in the clothes they choose to wear but the impact they leave upon society and the world through their actions and personalities” or “women should know to look both ways before crossing the road”.

Or perhaps “Women should know never to tell another woman how to dress, not least when half the items they discuss refer specifically to the way they appear to the opposite gender and how attractive they appear”.  Women should know that rocket scientists can wear disco pants, neurosurgeons can wear crop tops, good listeners can wear furry boots, lovers can wear dungarees, and activists can wear hoop earrings.  Women should know that what they do, and what they say, is so much more important than what they wear.

And women should know never take advice from a random article on the internet.  Except this one, obviously.