What happened? Why are women who ought to be too young to care dressed like suburban glamour models on a night out at Chinawhite in the West End? And why are women old enough to know better dressed, well, exactly the same? It’s not just the clothes, though the clothes are alarming: enough pink and glitter to satisfy the girliest of five-year-olds, tiny vests, expanses of (plastic) bosom and stomach, vertiginous heels, incredibly short skirts or shorts, massive handbags, and huge designer sunglasses. And then you have the accessories: orange tans, acrylic nails, hair extensions, blindingly white teeth.
When I see a picture of Victoria Beckham or Paris Hilton or Nicole Richie I feel scorn, pity and irritation. But clearly I’m in a minority: these women with their bling, their weight issues and their vacuous lifestyles are regarded as being the acme of chic by vast numbers. You know the situation has got slightly out of control when Coleen McLoughlin, fiancée of Wayne Rooney, uses her column in Closer magazine to tell young women that enough is enough, as she did last week.
“Apparently, more and more young women are getting into debt because they try to shop and party like a footballer’s wife,” she wrote. “If I heard of anyone doing that, I’d tell them to get a grip.”
I wonder where the madness is going to end. Where are the normal adult females under 30? Well on the way to extinction is the answer. The ones over 30 aren’t doing brilliantly either.
I can see how it happened. My generation and the ones before it had to behave more or less like men in order to get where we wanted to be. It was hard work. Subsequent generations observed this, registered that it seemed quite labour intensive and twigged on to the fact that there was another way to live in a nice house and buy attractive clothes, a way that had been discredited but still worked beautifully: look pretty, stick your chest out and marry a rich man. It’s got to beat working at Tesco.
Advertisement
This was fine; such women have always been around and society is elastic enough to accommodate them. Or at least it was. Research published last week showed that half the women in this country would now choose a fat wallet over appealing looks; and that in order for a man to be considered a successful and affluent proposition he needs to earn at least £50,000 a year — so that’s 90% of the male working population disqualified. No wonder people are so dissatisfied.
But then, apparently overnight, looking like you were a woman on the pull became normal rather than anomalous, regardless of whether you were rich or poor, thick or clever, hot or not. Talk about post-feminist backlash. There are horrible women-beware-women divisions that go with this territory. As they work at turning themselves into visions of loveliness these women become pathologically judgmental about other women.
This is a whole new thing and on a whole new scale. Women have always been each other’s worst enemies and have always bitched about each other, but never like this. This new generation of blonde skinnies think if you’re not a size 6 (tops) you’re a fat blimp. If your handbag isn’t designer you’re a loser. If your shoes cost less than £300 you’re not worth talking to.
I want to shout: “What are you so proud of? Your eating disorder? Your inability to string a sentence together? Your little dress?” But it’s not worth it, because the answer to all of those questions would be “yes”.
Victoria Beckham’s forthcoming book, That Extra Half an Inch: Hair, Heels and Everything in Between, promises to be their bible (“If you wear skinny jeans and flat shoes you end up looking like a golf club” — well, she should know).
Advertisement
It’s not like I want to grab everyone and force them to sit down and read The Female Eunuch — though it mightn’t be a bad idea — but surely enough is enough. The women other women idolise are either wraiths, such as Nicole Kidman who is beautiful but so thin she is transparent, or imbeciles like . . . well, you fill in the blanks.
In the past year I have had the same conversation with practically all my girlfriends: what on earth is going on is the gist of it, because we can’t keep up — and nor do we want to. When, for instance, did a size 12 come to be seen as on the porky side? When did it become de rigueur to file your nails away to nothing and stick plastic talons on top? The worst thing is that all of this smacks more of self-loathing than it does of self-confidence: I wouldn’t mind if these bizarre physical changes were a clear sign of emancipation and progress. But they seem so disastrously retrograde: it is as though no young girl knows how to be herself any more and instead she has been rendered so insecure by the people and images around her that she is forced to turn herself into an approximation of them. And then to spend every moment bitching about people who were confident enough in the first place to not bother with any of this artifice overload. So it goes round and round. Scary.
I am writing this from a clinic in Austria where, ironically enough, I am being starved. I subsisted on stale bread (to teach me how to chew) and clear broth for three days until I felt completely light-headed and slightly mad; weedily, it turns out, as some people carry this on for a fortnight. Things have improved since then, though it’s all relative: I am now allowed ham, which doesn’t sound like much but which caused me to feel tearful with gratitude.
This is in aid of a magazine article and to look as reduced as possible for the jacket shoot of my forthcoming diet book. But it all links in with what I was saying above: I’ve dropped four dress sizes and lost five stone over the past year but, according to the bonkers new definitions of beauty, I will remain a gigantic lump until I am a size 4. Or 2. Or 0.
Which basically means that women like me are only going to be deemed appropriately skinny when we are dead and decomposed.