Have you ever described a woman as “bossy”, or worse, the other “b” word? Whether you’re a man or a woman, that makes you a misogynist. At least according to today’s new rules.

Nobody quite knows who sets these rules, but one high priestess of modern morality (for younger generations, at least), leading by example, is Taylor Swift, and she has just re-released one of her most famous tracks, cleansed of “misogyny.”

In Better Than Revenge, a song written in 2009 about the nameless girl who stole her boyfriend, the then 18-year-old singer seethed: “She’s not a saint and she’s not what you think, she’s an actress. She’s better known for the things that she does on the mattress.”

At the time it was seen as feisty and authentic, but today that “diss line” is problematic. Dip into the alarming quantity of social-media posts and think pieces devoted to these “slut-shaming”, “anti-feminist” lyrics in the build-up to the re-release of the album, Speak Now, last Friday, and you’ll get a dizzying insight into the complexities of fourth, fifth or sixth-wave feminism (I forget where we are now).

Bottom line: no woman in 2023 should ever negatively judge another. Certainly not Swift, who whether she likes it or not changes narratives and sets agendas. Which is why that contentious line has been rewritten to: “He was a moth to the flame, she was holding the matches.”

Creative writing teachers may squint at the rhyming of “actress” and “matches”, but Swift’s thinking is, at least, clear. “There is no such thing as a slut,” the 33-year-old explained in her documentary, Miss Americana, “there is no such thing as a bitch. There is no such thing as someone who’s bossy. There’s just a boss.”

I’m loath to contradict Swift – because my daughter might never speak to me again, because she’s impressive in so many ways and because I once met her in a Beverly Hills ladies’ room and she couldn’t have been nicer – but on this point, I have to disagree.

Bossy women do exist, as do bitches and women best known “for the things they do on the mattress”. And even if we don’t need to use pejoratives to refer to the latter, if one of them is sleeping with your boyfriend I’d say the whole sisterly pact thing has already irretrievably broken down, wouldn’t you? Simply put: there are flawed and plain unpleasant women in the world, just as there are men. So don’t call yourself a misogynist, Taylor, when you’ve done nothing wrong – and there are plenty of people deserving of that slur.

Take the transgender activist who told the crowd at a London Trans Pride march on Saturday that if they saw a “TERF”, they should punch them in the face. Sarah Jane Baker – a lovely lady who served 30 years for kidnapping and attempted murder – is a Grade A misogynist.

Then there are the people responsible for compiling the glossary at the London charity Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust. The ones who saw fit to include the term “bonus hole” as an alternative to “vagina” (you know, to avoid offending or excluding trans men or “non-binary” people), and actually tried to defend this yesterday by saying that although “women are our main audience at Jo’s… some trans men and non-binary people have cervixes”. Setting aside the stupidity of alienating that “main audience” in favour of a tiny minority, it’s hard to imagine what could be more misogynistic than the erasure of female body parts – or indeed what would happen if penises were cancelled.

Yesterday, beneath a link to the “bonus hole” abomination, my best friend messaged me: “Is it just me or does the f---wittage of the world know no bounds right now?” I told her that it wasn’t just her – it never is – but that if you trace back every one of these imbecilities the same thing is responsible for all, and that’s the absurd tribal thinking we’ve all been told we must embrace.

Women need to be pro-women, and probably anti-men. The trans lot are anti-TERFS, but possibly anti-women too. Stay in your box, spout the accepted narrative of the day, and you’ll be fine. But if Swift’s self-censorship tells us anything it’s that the narrative is constantly changing, and I’m curious to know where the singer’s all-important “lived experience” is in all this?

Interestingly, the new, improved, misogyny-free version of Better Than Revenge hasn’t been welcomed by all. “Using Better Than Revenge to make some kind of grand feminist statement feels a little too much,” said one fan, while the esteemed Rolling Stone essayist Larisha Paul echoed that view, writing that the song should have been kept in its original version as “a crucial point in Swift’s complicated journey through coming to an understanding of intersectional feminism”.

I have no idea what that means, but I do know that if we misappropriate words like “misogynist” and use them for no good reason either against others or ourselves in acts of self-flagellation, we devalue them. Then we leave ourselves without the ammunition we need for those many instances of “f---wittage”.

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