Now, I love NW magazine. It's got lots of pictures and gossip and it's amorally glib about everything. It's perfect trash. However, have just been going through it and found a headline that kinda made me go "Whoah, NW dudes, that's not cool". The headline referred to Rosie O'Donnell's recent marriage, but with the words "Rosie marries gal pal". It kinda made me suck air through my teeth and recoil. I mean, "gal pal"? Kinda a disrespectful usage of the term, if my NW-conditioning about its deployment is anything to go by. See, 'gal pal', in NW-land, has two observed uses; (1) it refers to women who are friends [and you know what they get up to, with their lacy panties and 'sleepovers', wink wink], and (2) it refers to short-lived girl-on-girl flings. Madonna and Sandra Bernhardt were 'gal pals' for instance, as, for that matter, were Madonna and Rosie. So you can see that the term doesn't exactly apply to a deal where you're having a big time relationship, and stuff. I just thought that the headline was kinda eeek. But maybe I'm being precious. I can't just applaud amoral glibness and then say that lesbians formalising a relationship are sacred cows, can I? Hmmm, I don't know. But I would have people consider the different treatment and respect that would usually be afforded to a heterosexual star's decision to marry. I just don't think it's fair to relegate Rosie's marriage to the 'joke marriage' level, and it frightened me how automatically that was done.