Does being overtly sexy hold women back?

As actress Helen McCrory warns against trying to be too sultry...

Decades of women’s lib hasn’t rewired men’s brains

YES

ACTRESS Helen McCrory has some words of advice for younger women in showbusiness: don’t make getting a part ‘dependent on your sexuality... because that’s not going to make it easier for the women behind you’.

Some may find these provocative comments a bit rich coming from a woman recently seen in BBC’s Peaky Blinders wearing a postage stampsized scrap of black lace. But she makes a good point.

When women — on or off screen — take pains to portray themselves as pouting, utterly desirable creatures, it reinforces some pretty narrow ideas of womanhood and does them (and other women) no favours.

Young girls are now bombarded from every angle with the nonsense that ‘empowerment’ means looking like a blow-up doll in endless revealing posts on social media.

This millennial brand of feminism is all about women ‘reclaiming’ the right to be sexy; the idea being that decades of shame and guilt meant women couldn’t ‘embrace their sexuality’. Thus, being overtly sexy is cast as something feisty and cool, a revenge on the patriarchy. So we are forced to hear actress Emma Watson gushing about a sex education website that improves her orgasms, or Jane Fonda boasting that she still uses vibrators.

Sadly for most of us, putting our sexuality at the forefront is not the best way to get on at work.

You can make the most insightful comments in a business meeting, but if you’re showing two inches of cleavage, minds may be elsewhere. Decades of women’s liberation has not rewired men’s brains to ignore female flesh. While it may be unfair, if a woman acts or dresses in a vampish way, it undermines her as a person to be taken seriously.

When Labour MP Tracy Brabin spoke in the House of Commons recently wearing an off-the-shoulder dress, it caused a furore. She later complained of ‘Victorian’ attitudes. But no one remembers what she was debating in Parliament that day.

This is the problem with women playing up their sexuality: it feeds the old sexist suspicion that women are best for looking at, not listening to.

We don’t all have to abandon make-up or dress in shapeless tweed. But if you want to get on in life, aim for attractive, rather than rip-yourclothes-off sexy.

As Audrey Hepburn said of the pressure to be sexy on screen: ‘There is more to sex appeal than just measurements. I don’t need a bedroom to prove my womanliness. I can convey just as much sex appeal picking apples off a tree.’

In other words, less is more.