An Englishman’s dilemma on a topless beach: do I look?
Tell you what makes me feel truly British. Not Wimbledon or the Shipping Forecast or Marmite or Shakespeare or royal weddings or Mary Berry’s Victoria sponge. No. The thing that makes me feel truly British is a topless beach.
This week, on holiday in Spain, I visited one for the first time. Not intentionally – I had no idea it was a topless beach. There I was, strolling along, daydreaming pleasantly, before I noticed that all around me – splashing, sunbathing, laughing – were scores of topless women.
Topless men too, I should add. But then, I was used to seeing topless men in public – I’d been to Newcastle. Never, though, had I been to a beach full of topless women. And this was what made me feel so acutely, painfully British. All the Europeans around me, men and women alike, seemed entirely at ease. Whereas I didn’t know where to look.
Not that I have anything against toplessness – I once worked at a lads’ mag, for pity’s sake, so you’d think I could cope. And I wouldn’t dream of telling women what they should and shouldn’t wear on the beach – I’m not a French policeman. But toplessness in public takes some getting used to, if you’re British. I don’t think we know how to react to it. It’s not just our helpless instinctive awkwardness about nudity, it’s our terror of seeming impolite. So we daren’t look – even when the people we daren’t look at surely wouldn’t mind if we did look at them, because otherwise they wouldn’t have taken their tops off.
So, in my neurotic determination not to be thought rude, I found myself staring very hard indeed for a very long time at a yacht on the horizon. I was being, if such a thing is possible, ostentatiously oblivious. I was desperate for the women to notice my obliviousness. The trouble was, of course, that I had no way of knowing whether they’d noticed my obliviousness, because to do so I’d have to look at them, which would prove that I wasn’t oblivious. So I just had to hope they’d noticed.
The pasty-looking guy in the T-shirt standing on his own? Perfect gentleman. Hasn’t so much as peeked. He’s just really, really interested in that yacht. Definitely not a pervert. Not that I would know this, because of course I didn’t look, but there’s something unsexy about topless beaches. I don’t mean that as an insult to the women who were at the topless beach I stumbled on to (because, as I’m sure I needn’t repeat, I have no idea what they looked like). It’s just the context, somehow. But there may be something else to it. When I worked at that lads’ mag, our most popular cover star was a woman called Lucy Pinder. And she had, among topless models, a unique selling point. She refused to go topless. She would be pictured in a bra or bikini, but wouldn’t remove it. And that, counterintuitively, was what made her so popular. She made readers yearn for something they couldn’t have. To boost sales, the editor was keen to change her mind. Someone told me he’d asked her to name her price. Supposedly, it was £250,000. If true, a little bit beyond our budget.
Eventually, though, a rival magazine did persuade her to do her first topless shoot. The issue no doubt sold well. But after that, I got the impression that readers weren’t so excited about her. Not that she’d done anything wrong. She’d given her public what they wanted. But sometimes, what people want isn’t really what they want. What’s the most hated word in English? The publishers of Oxford Dictionaries have commissioned a worldwide poll of English speakers.
Personally, I vote for “smear”. Not only because of its ugliness but because of its increasingly wild misuse – specifically in politics.
Until quite recently, a “smear” was a mendacious slur; an attack that was calculatedly untrue. Yet now, it seems, the definition is changing. The more fanatical followers of Jeremy Corbyn use “smear” to describe and dismiss any information that threatens to undermine their idol. In a Corbynite dictionary, the definition of “smear” would simply be “unhelpful fact”.
Take this week’s revelation that the Labour leader had only pretended he couldn’t get a seat on a Virgin train. “Richard Branson Tries to Smear Jeremy Corbyn,” howled the headline on The Canary, the hard-Left conspiracy theory website. Mr Branson had released photographs that showed Mr Corbyn walking past available seats. Yes, we are now living in a world where documentary evidence constitutes a smear. In the eyes of the Corbynistas, even reality is biased against them.
But it isn’t only the angry Left who dismiss inconvenient truths in this manner. The angry Right are doing it, too – as we see in America, where Donald Trump and his fanatics shout “smear” almost any time a newspaper quotes him. Mr Trump and Mr Corbyn have radically different political views, but in at least one respect they are similar: both constantly stoke paranoia about the media. In doing so, they encourage their supporters to see only what they want to see, to believe only what they want to believe – and to denounce any news source that treats their hero with anything less than uncritical admiration.
While seeming to promote scepticism, Corbyn and Trump are actually promoting gullibility. Which suits them both rather well. Speaking of Mr Corbyn: YouGov regularly asks the public who would make the best prime minister. Yesterday it published its latest findings. Theresa May won with 50 per cent of the vote. Mr Corbyn got 19 per cent. This left him, I’m afraid, in a distant third place, after a surge in support for Don’t Know, on 31.
If it were possible in an election, I’d quite happily vote Don’t Know. I suspect millions of others would, too. I can see the slogan now.
“Don’t Know: the true voice of the British people.”