« The Toynbee tendency | Home | When the kissing had to stop »
Skirt lengths do matter
Most young girls have no idea how exciting they can be
It always astonishes me, even though I was once a schoolgirl myself and ought to be used to the idea, how silly young girls are about their legs. They always have been and they probably always will be. They think their legs are fat when they are not, they think they are just right when they are emaciated, and they think they ought to be able to expose them, fat or thin, as much as they want without upsetting anybody.
Most girls - at least I hope it is still most girls - don't actually understand why exposing their pubescent thighs and flashes of underage knickers does indeed disturb people, both those who like it and those who do not. Nobody should pay any attention to their views; schoolgirls shouldn't go around dressed like jailbait. Sensible headmistresses and headmasters should not let them.
These Taliban-like sentiments have been prompted by the headmistress who sent home 21 girls for wearing their uniform skirts more than two inches above the knee, thereby breaking school rules. She would have sent home another 23, if their parents had not been out at work. It seems that the little nymphets at The Dormston School, in the West Midlands, like most young girls, are so obsessed with wearing their skirts as short as possible that local people have complained that they appear to be wearing pelmets, or even no skirts at all.
Others, according to local complaints, were wearing skirts with "inappropriate" splits in them . So the headmistress wrote to parents, explaining that girls must wear their uniform skirts no shorter than two inches above the knee - no doubt on the principle of the motorway speed limit, that stipulating 70 mph will probably keep everyone below 100 mph. Otherwise they would be sent home. And so they were. Good for her.
Whatever schoolgirls may think about it, showing your thighs is an unmistakable form of sexual display. And sexual display, if it is marked, is not just a matter of flirting and looking cute. It is not simply a matter of following fashion. It is a clear sign of a sexual invitation. It may not be meant, but it is often understood that way, especially when not in private.
Hence the kerb crawlers who have been stopping these young girls in the roads near their school; they see them not as schoolgirls but as slags who are asking for it on the street. These girls are putting themselves in danger. They are also, if they don't mean to send out sexual invitations, misleading and confusing people in a very mean way. Forget the kerb crawlers; I mean the boys and men on the bus, in the shops, in the playground and in the classroom. I don't suppose that many of these girls really appreciate that; there is no reason why they should have much understanding of male sexual responses, or of sexuality generally. Besides, in the first flower of teenage narcissism they are probably quite indifferent to anybody's else's feelings.
Most young girls have no idea how exciting they can be. Even those who sense their power have not the slightest idea of the extent of it. Obsessed with their minor imperfections, they don't realise that even the podgiest and the plainest has the seductive glamour of youth. There is hardly a schoolgirl alive who could not lead a man astray, without even trying; there are, after all, a great many men and boys who are extremely easily led.
It is pointless to listen to the objections that young girls always raise to rules about skirt lengths; they simply do not know what they are talking about. I didn't myself, at that age. I wore outrageous clothes myself.
Left to themselves, girls would not only want short skirts. They would also go in for a wide range of crippling shoes and body decoration and of course body piercing from navel to nipple and beyond - all with obvious sado-masochistic undercurrents that they don't seem to appreciate - and wide expanses of enticing girlish midriff.
They can hardly be blamed for all this. Newsagents are stuffed with erotica posing as teen magazines. Television programmes and soaps regularly feature pierced and preening young slagettes. Popular culture has been so sexualised that people have almost stopped noticing that everything is about sex. Sex has been made to appear anodyne; its conventions and signals have been trivialised, and the representations of it don't seem to refer to it.
I think this every year at the Notting Hill Carnival, when hundreds of thousands of people stand about in the streets where I live, supposedly dancing. An anthropologist would tell you that what they are all really doing is simulating sex; those who do it most convincingly are considered the best dancers. In a culture in which no one seems to find this odd, in which these powerful sexual signals appear to be empty, perhaps it is not surprising that young girls don't really understand what it is good to reveal and what it is better to conceal, and why.
That is why it is so important for adults, such as the headmistress of The Dormston School, to assume their proper authority and tell them. No doubt there are some European directives on the subject.
The Sunday Telegraph | Sunday, March 21, 1999
