The predominant line image here of two women engaged in a sit-down conversation is adapted from a counselling textbook. I came across it as part of a masters in art therapy, which I am currently undertaking. In the art therapeutic context, art is understood as a conduit for empathy and for the non-verbal expression of traumatic memory. The caption in the book invites the reader to judge what is 'good and not good about this image'; there are a range of nuanced rules concerning the posture and elevation that a counsellor should take in relation to a client. Floating beneath the two women are three layers of imagery: a more abstracted scene of two women in an exchange, their voluptuous bodies negotiating but not touching; an array of toilet wall graffiti in which a number of women exchange advice about managing period pain; and a 19th-century image, adapted from Dicky Doyle's The Smoking Room at the Club, a quintessentially masculine space of exchange that, though the founding image of this painting, has been slowly, by increments, usurped by the feminine.