Lily Allen’s new album tears the veil from so-called “ethical non-monogamy,” exposing how easily the promise of freedom still hides the oldest power imbalance of all.
Lily Allen’s new album is brilliant, as startling as it is brave. It is the voice of a woman pushing through the noise of modern hypocrisy, a wounded Nightingale telling a truth that no woman dared say for fear of being seen as a prude. West End Girls is not merely a collection of songs; it is a reckoning. It takes the language of contemporary freedom, non-monogamy, honesty, emotional evolution, and reveals the bargain still hidden beneath.
We are told that equality has finally reached the bedroom, that freedom now lies between the sheets. But Allen’s lyrics suggest otherwise. Beneath all the talk of boundaries and balance lies an arrangement as old as respectability itself. The trappings have changed; the dynamic has not. The same men who once moralised in public and transgressed in private now call it enlightenment, what we now call ethical non-monogamy, though it so often proves ethical in name only.
Victorian society perfected that art of contradiction. The gentleman could moralise in Parliament by day, then retreat to his club or his mistress by night. His wife, corseted in silence, was expected to smile and remain “unaware.” Marriage was never a partnership of equals; it was a moral theatre in which women were the scenery and men the playwrights. To question it was to risk exile from polite society.
And here we are again, only now the theatre has new lighting. The twenty-first-century husband no longer slips into a hansom cab bound for Soho; he opens an app. The contract, however, has not changed. “Open marriage,” we are told, is mutual, modern, liberated. Yet it often replays the same script: male freedom, female endurance. The wife becomes the moral adult who must process betrayal as “growth,” whose pain is reframed as progress, all while raising the children.
Infidelity, dressed up as enlightenment, still benefits the man. It offers him the illusion of adventure without consequence, while the woman must absorb its cost to her dignity, her confidence, her sense of safety. The old double standard has merely learned to speak therapy. We no longer say “fallen woman”; we say “she’s working on herself.”
In Madeleine, Allen sings: “We had an agreement, it would stay in hotel rooms, it’ll only be with strangers he paid, and never at home.” She is not describing freedom; she is describing a deal struck generations ago. And she lifts the lid on a Tinder world where infidelity hovers like dessert at the end of a good meal. Whether it is Tinder, Feeld, or Bumble, the language is the same: curated desire masquerading as choice. It is always dressed up as sophistication — my wife understands, we’re in an open marriage, this is our agreement. The power dynamic does not change. Control, when gilded, is still control.
Allen is the wounded Nightingale of our time, singing what others dare not say, that our much-vaunted sexual modernity still hums with Victorian ghosts. The corset may have loosened, but the silence remains.
Victorian women who dared to question their allotted roles discovered that truth-telling came at a perilous price. To criticise the system was to risk one’s sanity, at least on paper. A husband could have his wife declared “hysterical,” “unfit,” or simply “inconvenient.” She might vanish into an asylum or a seaside retreat while he continued to dine in company. Respectable society demanded not that women be content, but that they appear so.
Wilkie Collins understood this in The Woman in White, a novel shimmering with paranoia about how easily a woman could be silenced or disappeared. One accusation of madness, one forged signature, and a wife could become a ghost. It was fiction, but only just.
Charles Dickens provided the real-life proof. When his marriage soured, he publicly denounced Catherine, the mother of his ten children, and took up with a woman young enough to be his daughter. He built moral tales for the nation while dismantling the life of the woman who had shared his own. Catherine Dickens would, perhaps, have recognised every note of Allen’s music, the anger, the bewilderment, the loneliness in a world that insists her pain must remain private.
Dickens’s hypocrisy was not unusual; it was the pattern. The Victorians adored strong women on the page, the Miss Havishams, the madwomen in the attic, but only as cautionary tales. They locked away the real versions and wrote elegies to their tragedy. The women who might have been artists, poets, or singers were instead labelled hysterics. One suspects that if Miss Havisham had had a recording studio instead of cobwebs, she might have told the truth in three verses and a chorus.
The parallels with today are not coincidence. Technology has simply updated the hypocrisies. Victorian prostitution was visible; today’s is pixelated. Then, moralists fretted about the degradation of women; now, we monetise it as “content creation.” The emotional labour still falls on the female side. The “freedom” of the digital age often feels like the same old bargain, only faster, louder, and easier to access.
It is tempting to dismiss Allen’s lyrics as celebrity overshare. But she is, in fact, performing an act of historical honesty. She names what polite society prefers to bury. In the nineteenth century, writers like George Eliot and the Brontës did the same; they exposed the gap between moral language and lived reality. Allen is doing it too, holding up a cracked mirror to our respectability.
If Victorian morality taught us anything, it is that silence is the seedbed of exploitation. Every generation that believes it has moved beyond hypocrisy ends up reviving it in another form. When Allen sings “nothing changes,” she is not being cynical; she is being precise. The only thing that has evolved is the lighting.
And perhaps that is why her work matters, because progress without honesty is not progress at all. The Tinder generation believes itself liberated; the Victorians believed themselves moral. Both believed they were modern. Both were wrong.
