Again, maybe it’s just me, but I've never thought feminism was about pedestals. Real-life women have been threatened into this new perfection (good god, look at the hedge-betting I’m doing in my own last sentence), and if we took a step back I think we’d realise no one wants that. But getting perspective in reality is hard. Watching a movie? That’s easy. So, if art and life are as reflective as we claim, then now more than ever, we need Bridget Jones.

Just as we need the empowered, we need the awkward. We need to let women stumble — we won’t break. We need to see Bridget fall for the bad boy, cry in the bathtub, and fret over her biological clock. I cringe and laugh watching her wrestle herself into control-top undies because I’ve been there myself! I’d done all those things and I should be allowed to have a bathtub weep without subverting the sisterhood. We all must have the freedom to be our silliest and most pathetic selves without fear of it defining us. We need Bridget Jones running bare-assed through the streets and not apologising for any of it. That lack of apology: that’s the part that matters.

For far less meaningful reasons, Bridget Jones’s Diary is just a highly enjoyable movie. It’s rom-com at its finest, largely thanks to the collaboration of three sincerely brilliant writers: Helen Fielding, Richard Curtis, and Jane bloody Austen. It makes no attempt to stray from its genre, and though it’s utterly formulaic, damn it, the formula works. But looking back on it, 15 years later, what matters most are its capital-p Problems. I think of those early reviews that called it “contradictory,” “clumsy,” and “too much” and yet still, somehow, a good movie. If feminism is about equality, then we who believe in that vital cause are bound to make room for both our honoured heroes and our lovelorn, tipsy goofballs. Whether they’re running for president or chain-smoking in the bathtub (again), they are human and have value. Period. It’s simply no one’s business to decide what makes a woman good.