What vulgarity!
These two women cackle and expose their breasts. And yet it’s me who feels ashamed
I’M NOT much given to handwringing about ‘the youth of today’. This is partly because I was once one of them, and partly because it would mean admitting I’m no longer one of them, and I’m too narcissistic for that (a narcissism that’s preserved, ironically enough, by not looking in the mirror).
I must confess, though, to clutching my invisible pearls on reading about the shenanigans at Cheltenham this week. In the first case, two young women, both ‘glamour models’, bared their breasts to the cameras. In the second, two young men, both soccer players, were pictured urinating into beer glasses, and one of them then emptied the glass over the balcony of the executive box.
It’s enough to make you choke on your Werther’s Originals. What’s happened to decorum, you ask yourself. What’s become of that fine old custom of behaving well in public and behaving badly – when you want to behave badly which you almost certainly do and quite right too, off with you – in private.
But as I stared wretchedly into my Ovaltine and mused on these questions, I realised I was in the thick of a really troubling double standard. I realised I disapproved of the girls more than the boys.
THE ‘boys’, Samir Carruthers and James Collins, both of whom are former Ireland underage players, issued grovelling apologies to anyone and everyone afterwards, and both drew attention to the embarrassment they had caused their families. ‘I wasn’t raised up to do that,’ said Carruthers.
The young women, reality TV star Jessica Hayes and Page Three Girl Katie Salmon, have not apologised. ‘No one was offended. Everyone’s seen boobs before,’ said Hayes, adding that piddling into a pint glass is far worse.
She’s right, of course, it is worse. But this is the thing: if my son threw a glass of wee over a balcony at Cheltenham, I would be disappointed in him.
If my daughter flashed her boobs for a photo at Cheltenham, I would be disappointed in myself.
The footballers who urinated into the beer glasses seemed not to be aware there were cameras watching. The glamour models who flashed presumably did so because there were cameras watching. They got their pictures into the papers, which must have pleased them greatly. Doubtless they want to be famous, and there is nothing at all unusual in that, whether you approve of it or not.
We live in an age of acute narcissism, an age whose peak arguably began when the first forward-facing camera was built into the iPhone. From that moment, the subject of a photo became the photographer, not the world. Of course, selfies had existed before – Albrecht Dürer was all about them in the 15th Century for instance – but that was the moment when the self-portrait became the rule rather than the exception.
NOW, nothing is worth doing – an accomplishment, a relationship, a walk in the sun, a lunch – unless you can be seen to be doing it. If you’re not seen to be doing anything, you don’t exist, and if you’re famous, you exist on a higher plane. It’s a creepy, 21stCentury take on the Socratic principle that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’, in which a life that is worth living has to be examined by others, not oneself.
So it’s not the young women’s narcissism or blatant attentionseeking that I find so troubling. We must all be inured to the widespread and desperate hunger for fame by now; it’s been going on for years.
What is troubling is that, in this day and age, any young woman can have been brought up to think that the only worthwhile capital she’s got is under her jumper.
It’s been more than a century since the first wave of feminism, and more than 200 years since Mary Wollstonecraft argued for the rights of women, and yet here we are, still raising girls to think they’ll never get what they want in life unless they show their nipples.
Carruthers and Collins probably told the truth when they said that they weren’t brought up to behave the way they did.
But the evidence seems to suggest Jessica Hayes and Katie Salmon were brought up to behave that way – if not by their own parents, then by society at large.
I’m ashamed of that.