AND ANOTHER THING
What have vulgar abuse, Newt Gingrich, stretch-rubber and ectomorphs in common?
PAUL JOHNSON
One of my pleasures as a historian is to observe the many ways in which the young slip out of the guidelines laid down by their elders. It still goes on even in our own hair- raising relativistic times, when moral behaviour is dictated by politically correct pressure groups, secular sex instructors, Channel 4 agony aunts and the like. I note with satisfaction that liberated bossiness is no more successful than the old puritanism and that plus ga change, plus c'est la meme chose.
Thus, teenage boys continue to celebrate their friendship by brutally insulting each other, using their own idiosyncratic racial- sexual lore. The other day, on a Bayswater omnibus, I found myself alone on the top deck with two 15-year-olds, both with iden- tical Thames-Grunge accents. One was East, the other West, Indian. They began comparatively mildly. 'You're a . . . pig'ead."No, you're a . . . pig'ead.' This was repeated a dozen times, then varied with `dog'ead', `dine'ead' (dinosaur head?), tong'ead' etc. Then a bit of friendly, neigh- bourhood racism: 'You're a wog, wog, wog- gity Welshman.' You're a tossed-off Irish nigger.' The insults became more furious, the four-letter words more frequent, the decibels rose until, finally, in a paroxysm of simulated rage, a climactic salvo was exchanged: `Gynaecologist!' German gynae- cologist!' At that point the conductor stumped up the stairs and ordered them off with a truly Shakespearean flourish: 'You shall not foul my bus no more!'
A week before, across the Atlantic, I had found myself in a hotel near Miami. The place was being prepared for an interna- tional meeting of big shots and was almost empty as a result. But there was a little group of debs about to attend a coming-out dance, primping themselves in the lobby. Their attire was old-style: masses of white tulle and net, silk and satin bodices, long white gloves. These girls, 18-year-old fresh- ers, were not Latinas, like most of their sex in southern Florida, with suitcase bosoms and tree-trunk legs, but blue bloods from Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia, tail, blonde, long-legged, with languorous blue eyes and perky breasts. While waiting for my car I got talking to these beauties and asked them what was cooking in their world. The ringleader, Dahlia (pronounced Dal-ya), told me, 'We're all virgins. We don't sleep with boys. No, sir! Why? Aids. Hassle. Boys mis-be-have. No respect. If we want sex, we have it among ourselves — don't we, girls? And the guy we do like is Newt Gingrich.' Then the girls began an Ivy League chant: 'Newt, Newt — we want Newt!'
This gave me food for thought. I have written before of the way in which women are making use of the new freedoms not to replicate men's behaviour but to strike out for themselves. So I am not surprised by the news that militant lesbians, who have been patronised and exploited for so long by male homosexuals, are turning on their masters and planning a series of 'zaps' against them this year. They have rightly surmised that the glums, as I call them, hate all women, including themselves. Another, even odder, way in which women are asserting themselves is by taking over sado-masochism, traditionally the vice in which men displayed their cruelty to women most blatantly. Not any more. Pret- ty young women, battling against organised homosexual aggression, which they rightly see as a long-term threat to their economic well-being, now ensnare normal men and bisexuals — and seduce paid-up inverts by taking on the sumptuary and insignia of traditional sado-masochism and transform- ing it. It began, I suspect, with working girls becoming punks, an invasion of a male pre- serve which was easy because it was cheap. The girls gave it a twist of their own by transforming themselves into cyberpunks, wearing plastic gear and high-tech gadgets. Then, using their new earning power, they invaded the motorbike scene, no longer as passengers but as riders. This involved new kinds of tight-fitting leather uniforms with ubiquitous zippers. Next they stole the male tattoo and glamorised it, followed by a female takeover of body-piercing. The girls see piercing — I am not endorsing this belief, just noting it — as a form of power assertion, and have their nipples and navels pierced for rings, often adding what are called tongue-spears and nose-horns. Male `partners' are persuaded or forced to do the same, become `goths' and even have their penis-skin pierced for multiple rings — five is not unusual, it seems, according to one of my women readers. In so far as SM remains pristine, it is the women who take on the dominant function.
However, sado-masochism, never a taste with wide appeal, has slipped into the back- ground, being now merely an excuse for fashion. At the new techno-glamour clubs all over Europe, girls exhibit themselves in outrageous get-ups and so attract hus- bands. What started with latex catsuits branched into an ever-growing range of patent leather, PVC, plastic and new artifi- cial materials, plus ingenious use of stretch- rubber. Rubber is now available in ultra- delicate shades and transparencies for wrap-skirts, shifts, long tank-dresses and other garments, under and outer. New hairstyles and make-up systems have been created to accompany these modes, and young fashion photographers, many of them female, record the results with strik- ing skill. Women, it seems, feel liberated and empowered in these costumes, entitled to invite men out and even to propose mar- riage.
The birth of this ectomorphic world has been helped by the willingness of estab- lished high-fashion kings (or queens) to adopt its gimmicks. Jean-Paul Gaultier has put tattooed and pierced models on his cat- walk, and Karl Lagerfeld has shod his girls in see-through ultra-high-heeled boots, a hallmark of the trend. But ectomorphism is producing its own designers, like Tentacle in London, Fischer in Aachen, Shosham and Leth in Copenhagen, Kato in Ham- burg and LGS in Gensenkirchen.
I don't know what Cristobal Balenciaga, my old fashion guru of the 1950s, would have said of these clothes; given them the thumbs-down I suspect, since his maxim was: 'A successful mode is what makes a 65- year-old Chicago meat heiress, who has nothing but her dollars, look good.' Elderly meat-mogulesses do not shine in stretched- rubber tank-dresses. But Christian Dior would have approved, holding with Danton that fashion was a case of `L'audace, encore de l'audace, toujours de l'audace!' And, in the meantime, audacious girls are winning power, inch by inch.
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