It’s an old, old story: Nasty Unfaithful Sex-Crazed Man treats Poor Nice Monogamous Woman like crap. Everything explodes, and they all live divorcedly ever after. This is also the plot of singer Lily Allen’s latest album, West End Girl. Only here it has a fresh new twist: Nasty Unfaithful uses non-monogamy as a cover for his shitty behaviour, forcing Poor Nice Monogamous to (kind of) consent to him seeing other people.
Non-monogamy is becoming increasingly popular, with the growing acceptance that having only one romantic and sexual partner isn’t for everyone, and that there are other valid ways to conduct relationships. Advice about how to do it ethically isn’t hard to find: there are hundreds of books, websites, therapists and communities out there. The narrative arc of West End Girl is an absolute disaster movie, and an entirely predictable one. It’s a caricature of what to avoid: the bad communication, the fact that one partner clearly hates the whole idea and is being pressured into it, the attempt to implement rigid rules in order to “tame” the extramarital encounters. (The rules fail to do this, and are promptly broken anyway.)
But the story resonates deeply for so many listeners precisely because it is familiar. Anyone who’s spent time in non-monogamous circles (or, frankly, on any online dating platform) knows this story too, and these men. Every woman who ever fell for a modern Nasty Unfaithful can see herself in West End Girl, and now she has a whole album of (absolutely belting) new tunes with which to vent her feelings. So far so innocuous: new generations need new versions of old stories.
And this is a story. Allen describes West End Girl as “autofiction”. Crucially, this means it’s not autobiography: it’s a collaboratively made album, and some of the content is made up. The main character (Poor Nice Monogamous) is an alterego of Allen. She is the reluctant partner “trying to be open”, trying to be something she’s not. So many of us have been that woman, trying to defang our fears of abandonment with some kind of self-improvement project.
Did Allen the flesh-and-blood human really do the things the character does in these songs? Did her real husband, or the real “other woman”, do the things described? We’re invited to imagine that they did. The lines between real people and fictional characters are blurred in exceptionally clever ways.
Social media is part of the album, as well as part of the broader media landscape that feeds and is fed by it. Instagram, Tinder and Hinge all show up in the lyrics. The proximity of the album’s launch to the release of the last season of Stranger Things – starring Allen’s erstwhile husband – extended the tendrils of the Upside Down into the West End Girl storyline. The album’s promotional materials have caused a stir, particularly the specially branded butt-plug USB drives – a call back to the now infamous song “Pussy Palace”, where Allen’s alterego describes discovering her husband’s sex toy-laden New York City pad (which, again, may or may not be a real event).
Meanwhile, the storytelling itself gently invites the listener to blend life with performance: the first song on the album is about theatre and acting, and the inciting incident for the entire drama is that the narrator gets cast as the lead in a play, as Allen was in real life. The second song then describes a question posed by Nasty Unfaithful as a (fucking) “line”.
If all the world’s a stage, maybe all the world’s a concept album too. Where does West End Girl begin or end? And why does it matter?
As individuals, we relate the stories we consume to our own bodies, our own senses of self. The labels we use to refer to ourselves are tools of self-creation – be they dating app pseudonyms, metrics like height and age, or social roles (the Allen character describes herself variously as “mum to teenage girls”, “modern wife” and “non-monogamummy”). These are the ingredients for alchemising life and people into recognisable narratives.
In our late capitalist economy, those narratives are often structured by what or whom we possess, and what or who possesses us. As Allen sings: “You’re mine, mine, mine”. When you approach a relationship as a casting of another person in the role of your partner, you objectify them: they become supporting cast in the drama of your life.
Meanwhile, of course, they are busy doing exactly the same thing to you. Existentialists and romantic partners Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre disagreed on whether heteroromantic love could ever be more than a power struggle, each trying to “win” by objectifying the other. Beauvoir was the more optimistic of the two, but remained in a life-long open relationship with Sartre regardless. In Allen’s penultimate song, the narrator refuses to let her (ex-) husband “win”.
But this is about more than individuals. Media narratives play a key part in the social construction of romantic love itself, as well as in the construction of gender roles in romantic relationships. When we keep telling the same story over and over, we strengthen the grip of existing scripts.
West End Girl plays into the standard narrative: it’s men who want sex and therefore non-monogamy. Women who agree to it to try and make men happy will get screwed over and it will all end in tears. It’s obvious that misogynistically practised non-monogamy is no better or worse per se than misogynistically practised monogamy. But it’s more comfortable to demonise non-monogamy than to come to terms with the reality (and ubiquity) of misogyny. It’s easier to cling to the myth that monogamy would solve misogyny, if only men could keep it in their pants long enough. In the Paris Review, Jean Garnett calls West End Girl “a rather neat, crowd-pleasing, bias-confirming presentation of nonmonogamy that casts male extramarital libido as the bad guy and Allen as the victim.” Of course it is: that’s the story people want. That’s how you sell albums and concert tickets and branded butt-plugs.
Which brings us back to capitalism, and the sheer marketing genius surrounding West End Girl. The album is a giant invitation to chime in. It reads like a friend’s post on social media, on which we are expected to comment “you go girl!” and “yes, men are bastards who just want tons of pussy!” It’s chatty and unchallenging, rather like a patter song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury, in which a late Victorian incarnation of Nasty Unfaithful gets hauled in front of a law court (and of course the theatre audience) to be judged for his abandonment of a Poor Nice Monogamous, offering in his defence the touching plea that “one cannot eat breakfast all day, nor is it the act of a sinner, / when breakfast is taken away, to turn his attention to dinner.” Edwin, though, is a caricature in a comic operetta. The trial-by-audience of Allen’s characters, and the real people behind them, is not a joke.
Sex sells. And people assume non-monogamy is just about getting lots of sex – an impression not exactly refuted by this album. In reality, non-monogamy takes many forms. Polyamory, for instance, is defined by openness to more than one loving relationship. But West End Girl is not a nuanced treatise on love. It is first and foremost a marketing triumph. Lily Allen and her collaborators are presumably making a lot of money out of all this. Is that, under capitalism, what passes for feminism?
This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2026 issue. Subscribe now.
