Not very ladylike
What a mischievous fashion ad gets right about 21st-century women
LESBIAN kisses, hairy armpits, the gentle roll of a soft belly: in 2016, none of these images is unprecedented on our screens. Girl-on-girl smooching is almost too ordinary to mention; everyone from Madonna to Julia Roberts has shown us their oxter fluff, and images of well-padded bodies are much more commonplace than they once were.
Even so, throw them together with a girl sitting legs akimbo on the Tube and a glamorous young woman picking her teeth, and you have the perfect montage with which to bait the conservative press. The new autumn/winter commercial by clothing giant H&M has got right-wing commentators hot and bothered because it claims to want to recast the terms “lady” and “ladylike”. The ad is mischievously set to a remake of Tom Jones’s paean to chauvinism, She’s A Lady (quote: She’s the kind I like to flaunt and to take to dinner/But she always knows her place) and opens with a voluptuous model padding to the bathroom mirror in her undies, her folds of flesh softly framed. It then cuts to a series of other images of women: a shaven-headed beauty; a ripped Thai boxer; a 72-year-old Lauren Hutton in a classy business suit looking bored with her male companions; a woman eating chips on her bed and then reclining to show her unshaven armpits; and singer Jillian Hervey picking her teeth with a fork. These are women being unafraid and non-conformist. These are women being unladylike.
It’s not offensive; it’s not even particularly edgy. Hell, everyone shown has been in hair and makeup for hours, and there are no crooked teeth, bad skin shots or big noses – now that really would be groundbreaking. But the advert has upset the usual suspects anyhow. “Do these pictures REALLY sum up what it means to be a lady?” asked an indignant Daily Mail, getting all sniffy at H&M for suggesting the term “ladylike” is “old and outdated”. Then columnist Sarah Vine weighed in, attacking the advert for exalting those who defy convention (God forbid) and complaining that most women “don’t spend their time rolling round on hotel beds showing off their underarm hair”.
Vine is right about one thing: it is a bit contrived. It’s a fashion advert, after all. It’s designed to shift frocks, and thanks in part to the Daily Mail, it’s no doubt doing so. There’s been an excitable reaction on social media and the ad has been viewed more than two million times.
But to give it its due, this short commercial has also raised an interesting question: exactly what does it mean these days to be “ladylike”? The term was once deemed a compliment, but to many women today, it no longer feels like it.
H&M claims to want to redefine “ladylike” to mean “badass, independent, free-willed, entertaining, opinionated and offbeat” – pretty much the opposite, in other words, of what it has traditionally meant. Can that really be done? Can you actually recast the meaning of words that no longer fit the zeitgeist? Possibly – the gay community managed to reappropriate “queer”, after all.
But it seems doubtful whether many women want to reclaim “ladylike”. The term has too much baggage attached: hat boxes overflowing with class connotations and dainty valises packed with prescriptive rules of behaviour. Better, surely, that the word “ladylike” falls slowly into obsolescence and our notion of womanliness and femininity broaden to take its place.
What did being a lady, and ladylike, traditionally mean? In the early middle ages, “lady” referred to the female head of a household, a term that soon expanded to mean a woman who ruled over subjects as well as servants. Later, it became the female analogue of “gentleman”, and was used more casually as a polite term applied to all women above a certain, rather loosely defined, social standing.
So “lady” in popular understanding has been tied up with notions of class from the very beginning.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “ladylike” involves “having the distinctive manner and appearance of a lady”. It implies refinement, decorum and abiding by socially acceptable modes of feminine behaviour (including, by implication, sexual behaviour).
The class-conscious Victorians and Edwardians certainly knew a lady when they saw one – and apparently my grandmother did not fit the bill. She was born in 1904 and told my mother the story of how, aged 12, she travelled solo by train from Bradford to Darlington. To amuse herself, she started whistling, only to be interrupted by a man sitting in her carriage. He told her disapprovingly that “a whistling woman and a crowing hen, wake even the devil out of his den”. The message was clear: females whistling are unnatural and unladylike. (She can’t have taken it much to heart because my grandmother carried on whistling throughout her life.)
What a terrible bore it must have been to be a lady, no matter how respectable it made you. Being ladylike was – still is – about adhering to certain approved modes of female behaviour, which really means being kept in your place. Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion became a lady by learning how to pronounce her vowels and curb her free and colourful opinions.
Jackie Kennedy Onassis: surely she is the epitome of the late 20th-century lady. The First Lady’s rigidly maintained public persona was of a demure, softly-spoken 1960s wife of impeccable appearance who maintained a sweet smile through all of her husband’s infidelities. To quote Tom Jones again: “Well, she knows what I’m about/She can take what I dish out, and that’s not easy.” Poor Jackie. Effectively, she seems to have lived inside a social straitjacket and it’s easy to see why, 50 years on, the term “ladylike” is not so well received any more, especially by young women.
My 19-year-old niece, Anna Hazelwood, a politics student, would define ladylike as “an etiquette thing”. To her, it’s about “never speaking out of line, wearing knee-length skirts, drinking out of china cups; a lady to me would be a sort of giggling, wet girl”. Anna would not like to be called ladylike; coming from a man, the term sounds patronising to her, like a “lesser form of femininity”. “A woman is earthy and true to life; a lady is confined. She’s all about appearance.” If she heard someone describe the Duchess of Cambridge as a lady, she would defend her, on the basis, as Anna sees it, that it must be hard being a royal. In other words, she would assume the remark was an insult.
Obviously, some uses of the term that are less controversial, such as when it is used as a suffix in “dinner ladies”. Many consider it respectful to refer to an older female as a “lovely lady” as opposed to a lovely woman. But even in this context, there are pitfalls. Anyone referring to a “lady doctor” or “lady engineer” – once acceptable terms – would today be seen as patronising. And some men, even younger men, still ingratiatingly address women as “ladies”, imagining they are being flattering or respectful. In fact, it makes these unfortunate males sound like fogeys or sleazebags.
THE way to measure the impact of newspaper stories, and especially pricey multipart investigations replete with anonymous by-lines and hidden cameras is fallout. What are the effects, both short term and long term?
In the immediate, it is obvious. England will need to get themselves a new national team boss and they may or may not have to give Sam Allardyce a pay-off. And a guy with the same name as the manager of St Johnstone has lost his job over an envelope stuffed with £5000 in cash.
Beyond that, what we have is tons of rumour and outrage. Which is fine, because rumour can lead to further investigation – ideally, by folks with the power to lock people up – and outrage fuels further inquiry.
Except there is one missing ingredient here: evidence of the kind that leads to action and prosecution.
This is where things get problematic. The folks happy to make allegations when filmed with hidden cameras suddenly deny everything and say they were lying to impress prospective clients when confronted on the record.
Pino Pagliara, one of the three intermediaries who named managers who had taken bribes (and in great detail), said he made everything up because he thought it was what the fictitious investors – really, Telegraph reporters in disguise – wanted to hear.
“I had to make sure my argument was compelling,” he told the BBC. “At the end of the day, I got a bit creative.”
Follow his argument through and it amounts to this: these were rich people willing to do something illegal, so I pretended I had done plenty of illegal things to impress them so they would hire me. (Hire him for what? But that’s a whole separate issue.)
Pagliara’s defence is, frankly, laughable. Almost as laughable as how the sting ruined his reputation. (Nope, that was already ruined when he was busted with a quarter of a million Euros in cash in a duffel bag and was banned for five years for match-fixing when he was director of football at Venezia in 2005.)
And yet his denials matter. Because without his co-operation, without Pagliara or others like him providing concrete evidence of the who, what, where, when variety, there is no way anybody can be brought to justice. It would have been a different story if, after being caught on camera, he had said: “Oops, you’re right. I’m sorry. If I go down, let me take others down with me. Here is everything I know, with details and bank statements.”
He didn’t do that. And so the Telegraph, the FA, the police and anybody else wishing to investigate is left with what they had before: rumours and suspicion surrounding certain individuals in the game.
A decade ago, a Panorama documentary raised serious questions and provided concrete evidence of dubious practice. That led to the Stevens Report which, while it may not have led to any convictions, at the very least raised more questions and scared some people straight.
Here, it’s not clear that anything like it will happen. All we have right now is guys rehashing the sort of rumours you can find anywhere on the internet and then telling us they were making it all up. That’s not enough to go on.
And that’s why, Allardyce aside, it doesn’t feel like this investigation will have any sort of lasting impact, other than minor collateral damage. ONE of the curious things about the investigation is that nearly everybody duped by the Telegraph’s fictitious investors can be traced back to the same two agents: the aforementioned Pagliara and Scott McGarvey.
Everybody they meet – from Allardyce to Leeds United owner Massimo Cellino, from QPR manager Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink to Harry Redknapp – is introduced by either Pagliara or McGarvey.
And this raises a fundamental question. Did they even consider approaching bigger fish than a convicted unlicensed match-fixer and a guy who Allardyce himself described as “desperate” and “down on his luck”?
That seems like a relevant point. Did they even think of trying this with, say, a Jorge Mendes or a Jonathan Barnett or a Paul Stretford?
Surely you would imagine that getting the guy who looks after Jose Mourinho, Gareth Bale or Wayne Rooney to talk about impropriety would be a much bigger coup?
You wonder if they did try and the above agents simply laughed them off – or, as you’d expect a sane person to do, Googled them, found nothing and got suspicious. Or whether they simply leaned on Pagliara and McGarvey because, well, they were low-hanging fruit. IT has gone under the radar but if Tottenham beat Manchester City today at White Hart Lane, they will move within a point of the top of the table. It is early, of course, but with 14 points from their opening six games, this is Tottenham’s best start to a season since 1960-61, which, of course, is when they won 11 in a row as well as the English title.
The curious thing is that it’s all happening quietly, without Spurs playing particularly well, at least relative to last season. Other than Victor Wanyama, the newcomers haven’t contributed much. The nearly £50 million spent on Vincent Janssen and Moussa Sissoko has yielded zero goals and one 90-minute performance each. Hugo Lloris missed two starts through injury, Dele Alli and Christian Eriksen haven’t been overpowering like they were at times last season, Mousa Dembele missed the first five games through suspension and Harry Kane is now injured. They have won just one game by a margin of more than a goal, mostly against unremarkable opposition.
Yet here they are. And that’s significant because this is a side that has got results without playing well, suggesting they can go to the next level or, indeed, the one beyond that.
Today can be a crossroads, especially with a run of three winnable games coming up ahead of the north London derby on November 6. A result – and a good performance – can provide serious momentum and help them jump-start the season.