For all their obvious sexualisation, young girls today may be no greater threat than any previous generation
IT’S NOT hard to tell when there is a disco on in our local rugby club, because the main road is swarming with beautiful young girls who are half-naked. This street theatre elicits various responses from passing motorists. You thought you were going to the shops but you’ve ended up cast as a kerb crawler, as the girls stumble along in their high-heels. To this day, we have no idea how the boys get into the disco: they must have a tunnel.
But there has been a change in the nymphet uniform in the past couple of weeks. Less cleavage and more leg, if it were really possible for these girls to show more leg. I mean that their legs are now the main things on display. The girls are still in black cocktail dresses which end at the hip, but the necklines are a lot higher. Also, black cocktail shorts are putting in a strong showing. Whatever else this country has lost in the past year, we are rich in endless, perfect female legs among the under-18s, all perfectly polished with fake tan.
These are probably the only females in Ireland who know that the erogenous zone has moved from the breast to the leg. I read that startling piece of information in the London Times, while wearing sweatpants and eating a digestive. These girls are living the news.
But last Thursday, there was another theme present: California. Coming round the curve at Donnybrook Garda station, there was a blond girl leaning nonchalantly on a bollard. She was wearing: dark shorts, a yellow vest and flat gold pumps. Her hair had the roughened texture of a surfing blonde. She looked sensational, like something from Wilshire Boulevard. She could have been anywhere between 13 and 34. The female form in all its youthful perfection.
I love these girls. The trouble they take. The aggression of their look. Their no-holds barred, totally sexed-up beauty. For straight men the situation is more difficult. The sight of these girls is guaranteed to make their testosterone rocket. But then they remember that the beauties are only kids, and become uncomfortable. And then they remember their own daughters, and start ranting and raving.
Even adult females get annoyed. One friend, a broad-minded woman of the world, wants all these girls locked up until they are 21. Another, a responsible mother of two small children, has started pricing teenagers. She looks them up and down, adds hair colouring to the price of a gallon of foundation, does a quick estimate on the beaded top and usually comes up with a figure of about a grand, not counting dental work.
As an adult woman, it is fascinating to view a group of females who are doing the things the magazines tell us we should be doing, all the time. Our legs are still potato white, our roots are showing and the razor has been down the back of the bath since February. Then you see these grooming storm troopers, who would rather die than be caught with chipped toenails. Like any display of uniformity and discipline, it is impressive.
What their male contemporaries say I have no idea, and would really rather not know. And what their less-slim, less-tanned and less-willowy classmates say, as they sit at home on the night of the disco, or slip on to the premises undetected by passing motorists, does not bear thinking about. However, it is what their parents say that is really disturbing.
The parents of teenagers are now more teenaged than the teenagers themselves. The mothers of teenage boys hate these girls, and the way their sons will be upset by them, poor things. The parents of the girls scare themselves to death with urban myths and second-hand accounts of horror. Every parent of a teenage girl “knows” someone who dropped his/her daughter to a disco, only to return unexpectedly to find their little girl performing some outrageous act on an undeserving youth. Every parent of a teenage girl “knows” that girls put their knickers in their handbags these days, before dancing round them.
Presumably it has always been the job of teenage girls to cause scandal and upset wherever they go. This generation of teenage girls has reared its parents under too liberal a regime. They have told their parents far too much over the years. They are sissy enough to ring their parents when they are helplessly drunk. They have led their parents to believe they are their friends. Consequently if a daddy starts yelling that your dress is too short, you just despise his fashion sense: he’s not going to get you to change your mind, or your skirt.
Parents don’t understand that this sexual display is all about rehearsal, and the parents should know better. In real life, the office siren is always the one in the prim blouse, not the figure-hugging sheath. These teenage girls have constructed a shop window, a sort of playground where they can look seductive for their female friends, and then refuse to really seduce.
It is undoubtedly disturbing for the rest of us, but society has coped with sexy teenagers before. There was no fake tan around when priests were beating snogging couples out of ditches, but the story was the same.