The feminists will never learn,
That girls are girls and boys are boys
And sluts are nothing but sex toys.
Self-respect can ne'er be gained
From female desire unrestrained.
What's driving this new crop of female antiheroes? Unsworth, 35, who drew on her own friendships for Animals, a gloriously over-the-top account of female friendship, says it's partially a desire for something new.She sees her angry protagonist as strong, but everyone else sees her as "unlikeable, damaged and lost". Here's a hint: everyone else is right. It's actually rather remarkable that female novelists have managed to produce a new crop of protagonists that make Bridget Jones look sane and stable by comparison.
"There's room for books about getting the guy, and I enjoy reading the good ones, but there need to be alternatives," she says. "I felt as though there weren't many stories that featured women just dicking about, and I also wanted to address the idea that if you keep partying, you're an idiot or a failure – like there's just one way to live, which there isn't."
A similar desire to depict a woman happy to live outside of society's boundaries lay behind Pilger's Eat My Heart Out, with its furious young anti-heroine. "Some reviewers have said Ann-Marie is unlikeable, damaged and lost, but I see her as strong," says 29-year-old Pilger. "She's frustrated at the social facades that make up so much of daily life. If you're a man, you can be a disaffected antihero and have a proper existential crisis, but if your character is female, her concerns are dismissed as the petty stuff of personal life."
And our societal devolution continues....