Project Sea clears rubbish from Aqaba’s reefs, which is recycled into bags by Palestinian refugees – a female-led scheme in a country where women must still fight for equality

The yacht Diversity leaves the harbour of Aqaba, the only coastal town in Jordan. To the right is the Israeli resort of Eilat, framed by barren mountains; in the Red Sea, a boxfish makes leisurely circles in absurdly clear, turquoise water.

The boat soon anchors just offshore, directly in front of Aqaba’s electricity plant, and suddenly everything happens quickly: the passengers don wetsuits, pass around gloves and cloth bags, and then, one by one, dive in. They all have one mission: to collect as much rubbish as possible in 30 minutes.

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He’s seen as one of the quintessential writers of male experience, but as a new book explores, his resonance with female listeners is just as complex

At Bruce Springsteen’s recent show in Edinburgh, a fan managed to hand the 73-year-old rock icon a copy of his dissertation about masculinity. Pondering the masculinity of the Boss is logical: his themes include brotherhood, father-son conflict and the trials of physical labour; his songs are populated with downtrodden blue-collar workers, suicidal firefighters, forgotten soldiers returning from various wars, and economically disempowered men driven to murder. Indeed, he’s seen as one of the quintessential writers of the male experience. So why does he appeal to so many women?

A new book by Lorraine Mangione and Donna Luff, Mary Climbs In: the Journeys of Bruce Springsteen’s Women Fans, explores the reasons why. Both authors were aware of the stereotypes of female fans, be it the groupie or infatuated screaming teen, and their findings happily upended them: fans found community through concert experiences, and related to Springsteen as a result of loss, suffering, the quest for self-knowledge and for meaning in life. Luff says: “When I talked with other women fans, they were mostly not giddy about Springsteen in terms of sexual attraction. Instead, they spoke about identification with his writing and the emotions, experiences and feelings in his songs and concerts.”

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The New Zealander’s latest novel, set in 1980s suburban, Catholic Wellington, moves to a dark denouement powered by lingering uncertainty

New Zealander Catherine Chidgey’s 2020 novel, Remote Sympathy , was set in Buchenwald and made both the longlist of the Women’s prize for fiction and the shortlist of the Dublin literary award for its devastating insights into the Nazi propaganda machine and the deadly role played by those who were all too willing to be duped. Now comes Pet , a sly psychological thriller that might seem to require a little less of the reader but saves its most sinister twist for the end.

It’s set largely in suburban, Catholic Wellington in 1984. For her adolescent pupils, charismatic new teacher Mrs Price holds rock-star status. The glamour of her blond curls, red lipstick and white Corvette (“it had no back seat and no boot, so where on earth did she put her groceries?”) is only burnished by the knowledge that her daughter and husband died in a car crash.

Pet by Catherine Chidgey is published by Europa Editions (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

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Breanne Mc Ivor has spent years giving people the makeup look they need to make life work for them. But, she asks, is makeup just a mask to hide behind – or is it a way to celebrate who we truly are?

I want revenge makeup. I want him to regret ever breaking up with me.” I was working as a professional makeup artist, and the speaker was my client, a newly single woman going to a concert where her ex was the guitarist. She didn’t want to get back together, but she had a fantasy of his eyes finding her in the crowd. She looked so good that he played the wrong notes and his heart broke on stage. I would always ask clients to send me a picture of the look they wanted. The only brief she gave me was those lines above. That was the only brief I needed.

I did the type of makeup I often do on myself. Smooth, poreless skin. Glowing highlights. Subtle contour. Thick dark brows. Fluffy lashes. Softly glossy lips. I’d been trained to balance and correct less desirable eye shapes, to give clients with unflattering foreheads the illusion of an oval face, and to take a fine, stiff makeup brush and blot out minor wrinkles. She later told me his jaw hit the floor when she walked in – and I knew I’d done my job. It was the cosmetic version of Princess Diana in her revenge dress.

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It’s no wonder 30,000 women are awaiting a cream that claims to make skin actually younger

That the launch of a – purportedly – rejuvenating moisturiser is now considered national news is, you have to admit, a kind of progress.

Well within living memory, face cream manufacturers would have found coverage of their triumphs hidden away, if they made it out of women’s magazines, somewhere within the lifestyle pages. And even there someone might ridicule the more absurd claims. Or some feminist muscle memory might respond adversely to the expectation that women should fall upon anything claimed to alleviate signs of non-youth, a project that Susan Sontag described in 1972 as women’s “passionate, corrupting effort to defeat nature: to maintain an ideal, static appearance against the progress of age”.

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Through startlingly poetic memoirs and intimate footage of a woman discovering her grandmother’s incredible life, this documentary delivers a gut punch of a story

A middle-aged woman hovers anxiously in her idyllic French farmhouse kitchen, its table strewn with reams of yellowing papers. Among them is her grandmother’s diary: an account of her imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps, first Ravensbrück, a female-only camp in Germany, and later Mauthausen in Austria. For 20 years, Sylvie Bianchi has been gathering the strength to read these pages. Now, she is finally ready to face this account of the horrors her grandmother survived.

The diary tells of how Nelly Mousset-Vos – an opera singer who Bianchi later discovers worked for a Belgian resistance network (she was not Jewish) – was arrested in Paris in 1943; “torn away from this world”. Her poeticism is startling: when it snows, the barbed wire encircling the camp appears to be “dusted with powdered sugar”. After spending five days in a cattle wagon packed so tightly with others that she cannot move, leaving her trapped amid the putrid stench of dysentery, she arrives at the “antechamber to hell” and falls asleep on the floor.

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Recent stay on the abortion pill ban is a contest between conservative institutionalists and ideologues on the court

In a way, Matthew Kacsmaryk – the Trump-appointed federal district court judge in Amarillo, Texas, who issued a sprawling and aggressive injunction on 7 April that would have removed the abortion drug mifepristone from the market – did the supreme court’s conservative majority a big favor: he made them look reasonable by comparison.

On Friday, after days of anxious waiting for abortion providers, the pharmaceutical industry and American women, the supreme court declined to allow Kacsmaryk’s stay – and another, also dramatic ruling from the fifth circuit court of appeals – to go into effect. The court that destroyed the abortion right last year thereby preserved the availability of the most common abortion method – at least in the dwindling number of states where abortion remains legal at all.

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While, in general, the world is getting more sexually liberal, how we choose to define ourselves is ever evolving. Our writer explains what being sexually fluid means for her

When asked, I define my sexuality as “around 84-87% gay”. I suppose this would equate to the upper end of the Kinsey scale , which rates nought as exclusively heterosexual and six as its opposite. But there is plenty of disagreement as to whether sexuality is innate or acquired, immutable or fluctuating, and even what certain terms mean.

“Fluid”, originally attributed to the psychologist Lisa M Diamond , has become a buzzword for those who do not “fit” into traditional categories. Fluidity is different from, for example, bisexuality, because a person who is bisexual might be bisexual for life, whereas fluidity suggests oscillation. But fluid is, I suppose, what I am.

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Keir Starmer calls for specific offence as part of broader pledge to tackle violence against women and girls

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Keir Starmer has pledged to make spiking drinks a standalone offence as Labour seeks to bolster its “tough on crime” message.

The Labour leader said the offence was needed and thought the government was “wrong” to dismiss calls for the law to be introduced.

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