Welcome to ‘Lady Island’ — no men allowed
Imagine a retreat, where you can relax and bond… but only if you’re female. Tanya Gold braves ‘Supershe’ Island
After you’ve been to Lady Island,” says my son, 5, “won’t you love me and Daddy anymore?” He speaks of Supershe Island, a female-only retreat off the Finnish mainland. It opened early in the summer to global attention and excited rage. Men denounced it as sexist, as if a female-only retreat was some kind of existential threat in which women were plotting acts of grave misanthropy, such as facials, or equal pay.
“You’ve already got a whole
Ghostbusters film!” cried one wag, before imagining that men, given their own island would just eat each other. “Why do you need an island?”
It was also denounced by some women as elitist because it costs £3,500 a week. That may well be true, but it’s the fag end of the school holidays and I am feeling more than usually insane.
With 36 hours on Supershe Island, I can get some all-female rest and – I think this is what is frightening to people – maybe even make some new connections and “network”.
I am met at Helsinki by a very beautiful Supershe employee – or, what, agent? – and we drive east. Within ten minutes, we have fallen to what is, in my experience, the Supershe skill. We have a warm and honest conversation: who we are, how we got here, and what is bothering us. Mine is a list which would be familiar to most women I know; I can’t say no to people and I exist in an almost continual state of rage and exhaustion. I am always staring at my floors, wondering why they don’t clean themselves.
Eventually, we reach a shabby harbour on the Baltic Sea. Men sit outside a café staring, I fancy, towards Supershe Island, which is apparently not too popular with the locals. Which is understandable because, come on, who likes what is denied to them? We take a small rubber boat – the kind the sometimes appears in James Bond films – and skid past tiny islands filled with yellow flowers and pine trees.
Supershe Island is tiny, a fiveminute walk end to end, and it has only been infiltrated by non-females twice since it was built; once by a drone, which I would have thrown a stick at, and once by two male kayakers, who landed, and asked if it was a kayaking hotel – do they even exist? When told to kayak away, they apparently left – very slowly.
The owner of Supershe is Kristina Roth, a New Yorker who made a huge fortune in management consultancy. Founding the retreat, she says, was “a coincidence”. Initially she bought the island as a refuge for herself, “then I started renovating it, and in the process, I thought: wow. It would be the perfect backdrop for a retreat.
“I knew I wanted to meet amazing women and I wanted to be inspired and to inspire women, but I didn’t really know what form it would take. I have decades of management consultancy behind me, but it wasn’t a business plan – I just put one and one together. I found the island, I fell in love [with a local man whose parents own a nearby island], and I followed my heart.”
And so pristine gravel paths have been laid, which lead between creamy yurts – for yoga and exercise – a sauna with outside shower, and wood cabins. My cabin faces the beach. It has smooth decking on three sides. Inside it is minimalist and sumptuous, black and white, and very clean. (There is a no shoes indoors rule on this island, which I think would be impossible to enforce on any island which contained men). It looks like a design catalogue, and it knows it does; the only books are design catalogues, and a thriller in which men drown women for spite, which I think – and hope – is a coincidence. There is a £10,000 bed, a drench shower, underfloor heating in the bathroom, an open fire, a fridge containing fruit and lamps sprouting from models of small animals. I did not know a rat could be chic, if porcelain, but apparently it can. There are piles of fluffy throws and cushions. I decide that the accusation of elitism is fair, and decide, as swiftly, that in this case I do not mind. Some Corbynistas speak of “luxury communism”. This is it.
The other guests are eating a supper of salmon and salad 50 yards away, on a table by the sea. At Supershe Island a charming chef prepares daily meals that could have been designed to star on Instagram. But – and this is one of the reasons I am happy here – we are not starved. At the retreats I’ve been on before I tend to feel famished and then relapse by eating Pringles on my journey home, suffer a downward spike in my immune system and am often ill for months afterwards. At Supershe, I eat lamb, and even potatoes. I also manage an exercise class – my first in a decade.
While this island is certainly luxurious, it is definitely not a hotel – it feels more like a commune; a swanky lady-kibbutz. I mean – we even carry our own tea cups to the sink. My fellow guests – all vetted by Roth for the “mix” – are an actress, an expert in textiles and three businesswomen. We are all mothers, and we are all at various stages of ragged. We spend the next 36 hours together eating, doing yoga, kayaking, having saunas, sea-swimming and talking. Very quickly, we develop a bond – we are all Facebook friends now, and plan to meet again. Outsiders might call “networking”, but, to me, it feels like genuine friendship. We share our anxieties and listen to each other.
It is almost a parody of what you would expect when the competition for men – the main source of dispute between women – is removed. We are so kind to each other that it might, if we were given enough time, turn competitive.
I was not sure I would like it before I came. The promotional video showed women walking to yoga in dappled sunlight, and they did not feel like my people. So it is surprising to have found a tribe on Supershe Island. I feel genuinely happy. Partly I put this down to the fact I’m eating and partly because I have been covering the antisemitism in Labour crisis in England and there is no anti-semitism here. I can’t even feel the rise to wade into angry debates on Twitter (yes there is Wi-fi).
And then, sadly, we all have to leave: back to men. We have a final drowsy chat on the terrace, pack our bags and take a boat to the harbour on the mainland.
The men at the café on the dock stare at us – have they even moved since I last saw them? – wondering, I fancy: what have we been doing on the island of lady mystery? What are women like when there are no men around to please? The answer is horribly obvious: we speak openly and honestly with each other, while smelling sweet.
Men denounced it - as if we might plot acts of misanthropy, like facials or equal pay