Bridget Jones is NOT a role model!

With insecurity, obsessed with her weight and can’t be happy without a man. With a fourth movie in the works, one teenager says thank goodness MY generation has higher standards

RENEE ZELLWEGER is returning to London to film her fourth outing as Bridget Jones, the Mail On Sunday recently revealed. Now a 51-year- old single mother of two, Bridget takes her search for love online in this latest instalment, we’re told, via dating apps and social media. Am i the only one whose heart sank when they heard this news? i doubt it — at least not among Gen Z.

As far as we’re concerned, the Bridget Jones joke has worn very thin.

Perpetual victim Bridget may be a cult hero to our mothers, but to us she’s the embodiment of the toxic behaviours that held women back.

Obsessed with her weight, focused on finding a man above all else, uncomplainingly harassed at work — these are terrible messages to send to women about what’s important. With her ice cream binges, her cutesy pyjamas, her wearisome self-flagellation, Bridget makes us cringe, not laugh.

Don’t get me wrong, i’ve read the original Bridget Jones’s Diary and, now 19, i’ve been watching the films since i was 12. i can see how well made they are, but i also see how easily women (and men) have absorbed the idea that Bridget’s myriad paranoias and insecurities are just a normal part of being female.

take the weight obsession. Every day, Bridget details her weight in her diary and whether it’s fluctuated up or down. that figure then sets the tone of her mood, meaning body size is directly equated with happiness, and the skinnier the better.

Defenders of BJ say her creator, helen Fielding, was only reflecting the preoccupations of real women in the mid1990s when she began the newspaper column that would turn into the books and the films. Were real women frantically hopping on and off the scales like their life depended on it?

BUt WAS Bridget amusingly easy to relate to? Or part of the harmful body culture herself, alongside a host of waif-like supermodels and actresses who fuelled the endless dissatisfaction women felt about themselves during that decade?

Bridget was skinny. She’s almost always under the average female weight for her age, yet when she hits 130 pounds (9st 4lb), she calls it ‘a terrifying slide into obesity’. We’re supposed to laugh at that, of course, but, to my generation, it also seems, well, terribly sad. Poking fun at a woman who’s been sold the notion she’s fat when she’s barely over nine stone just adds insult to injury. i know she’s fictional, but it doesn’t feel very feminist.

her friends are no better. When Bridget tells them that Mark Darcy likes her just as she is, Jude replies: ‘ Not thinner? Not with slightly bigger breasts or a slightly smaller nose?’ hilarious!

to Gen Z, that’s not ‘funny honesty’ or ‘ how girls speak to each other’ — it’s just body shaming! Friends should never speak to each other like that.

it comes as no big reveal that the generation that grew up idolising Bridget are overwhelmingly unhappy with their bodies. the average UK woman has been on 61 diets by the time she’s 45.

Not that needy Bridget and pals ever were feminists, of course. ‘there is nothing so unattractive to a man as strident feminism,’ she writes in the original 1996 book, Bridget Jones’s Diary, neatly summing up her entire raison d’etre — which is, of course, being attractive to men.

the work was roughly based on Pride And Prejudice and, despite the 183 years between publication of Jane Austen’s classic and the first Bridget book, the premise is essentially the same: a woman must find a man in order to be happy and whole.

in the original 2001 film, Bridget has a job she enjoys at a publishing company and a close relationship with her parents. She lives in London with enough money to enjoy it but none of it matters if she hasn’t got a man. All her success is irrelevant without a boyfriend by her side and, if she eventually dumps her boss, the roguish sexual harasser Daniel Cleaver, she’ll immediately settle for Mark Darcy instead.

in fact the first time we see Darcy, played by Colin Firth, even he’s ‘negging’ her — a dating buzzword for lowering a woman’s self- esteem. ‘She is a verbally incontinent spinster, who smokes like a chimney and drinks like a fish,’ he says.

But that’s fine, ladies, don’t dismiss men who don’t respect you. they’re quite likely to be the love of your life, after all. And men? She’ll fall for you no matter how insulting and horrible you are.

to be fair, Bridget doesn’t have much self-respect either. to catch her boss’s eye, she wears increasingly scanty outfits to the office. A mesh top with a black bra hardly sends the message ‘i take my work and my career seriously’. it also shows a willingness to put her career at risk for a man.

DANiEL CLEAVER’S attitude to her, meanwhile, proves that if #Metoo had existed in the 1990s and early 2000s, we’d have had a bloodbath. Played by hugh Grant, Cleaver leaves a hand on her bottom and sends emails across the office telling her he ‘likes her tits’.

Cleaver’s own boss is a sex pest, too, an ogler whose nickname is Mr tits Pervert. the way the film handles sexual misconduct at work is to joke about it. At one point, Bridget writes that she is ‘v. much enjoying being sexually harassed by Daniel Cleaver’.

Even helen Fielding has admitted that the original film wouldn’t be made in the same way today.

Yes, the sex Bridget has with Cleaver is consensual, but the implication that Cleaver’s creepy caddishness is what makes him hot is straight-up sexism.

it’s also extremely insensitive to the huge numbers of women who’ve experienced the misery of harassment at work.

Worse still, in the aftermath of the failed relationship between Bridget and Cleaver, it’s Bridget who resigns.

the victim pays the price for her harassment, while her harasser gets off scot-free, and maintains his position of power.

Diminished in every way, Bridget takes a job on a tV show where her odious new boss Richard Finch ( Neil Pearson) tells her, with a leer on his face: ‘No one ever gets sacked for shagging the boss.’

No, Bridget is not a role model. She is emotionally incontinent and crippled by low self-esteem.

this isn’t how Gen Z women see themselves — powerless and full of self-loathing.

So let’s put her out of her misery and create a new cult heroine to love and idolise instead — no calorie-counting allowed.