Dawn French (pictured) spoke out against the ladette culture that has become prevalent among young women
Dawn French has done us a favour: with refreshing force. In an amiable interview at the weekend she was reflecting — as a comedy creator will do — on the absurdities of modern life when she landed, with sudden anger, on the ladette thing.
She had been watching reality shows about ‘young lasses out on the lash in Ibiza’, not only helplessly drunk but having reckless sex with all and sundry.
‘I am shocked at how they behave,’ French said. ‘These girls are preloading with vodka, primping . . . You reckon they want to meet someone who would love, cherish and respect them. But instead they go out and get utterly hammered and are s***ging in a bush and coming out and going ‘Yes!’ like men. Like the men we hoped we wouldn’t ever be like, and certainly not mimic as women.’
She asks: ‘Am I totally out of step? Is it really OK to be as sexually free as you like and as drunk as you like? I don’t buy it. It feels wrong to me.’
And to the rest of us, Dawn.
Her interviewer slyly observed that ‘maybe she’s taken on more of the Vicar of Dibley’s moralising than we knew’. But let’s avoid that poisonous M-word ‘moral’.
French asked: ‘Am I totally out of step? Is it really OK to be as sexually free as you like and as drunk as you like? I don’t buy it. It feels wrong to me’
French’s words came a day before thousands of freshers took to the streets to party. Pictures emerged of scores of drunk students enjoying Freshers’ Week, many of them female
Few outside extreme religions want to go back to the bad old days, when a girl losing her virginity outside marriage, even with honest love, was considered ‘ruined’, as if her young body was not her own business.
Rational feminism was right to reject this and point out that, during this prudish era, many of the same people thought it fine for young men to ‘sow their wild oats’.
Fathers fiercely guarded their virgin daughters, but took their 18-year-old sons to visit prostitutes. Or covered for them, with money and influence, when they got the housemaid pregnant.
Good riddance to such double-standard morality, and to the shotgun marriage with young men pressured to ‘make an honest woman of her’. Today, we accept that young people make sexual mistakes and need not be tied down forever by a fling.
For girls, reliable contraception took much of the terror out of making love, and when it fails single motherhood (despite the downsides) is not a path to disgrace, forced adoption or penury.
I am just old enough to remember when that was the case and it was awful. So was the horrible belief of my grandmother’s generation that once a girl wasn’t a virgin it didn’t matter who ‘had’ her, willingly or not. The expression, if you want something to shudder at, was: ‘What’s a slice off a cut loaf?’
So let’s not go back there. We own our bodies, and have a right to enjoy sex. At its best it is generously loving; at its very best faithful; if you’re lucky and work at it, a delight for life. But on occasion, OK, having sex is just a mistake.
And that’s fine to accept. But a pendulum swings, sometimes too far.
I raise those ghosts from the past for a reason, because it may be that what we have now is a backlash, amplified by tawdry reality shows and facilitated by the internet. What Dawn French condemns is the decadent extreme that seems to have too many of our young people in its grip.
Take the scenes on the streets of Manchester and Birmingham this week, where a new crop of students were ‘enjoying’ Freshers’ Week by drinking themselves into a stupor, groping and fondling each other, or vomiting and urinating in the street.
A young woman leans over a railing in Birmingham as thousands of new students celebrate their university start with boozy nights out
Speaking on the ladette culture, French asked: ‘Is that what women threw themselves in front of horses for?’
It’s the shrugging hook-up culture, the normalisation of the one-night stand and the giggling ‘walk of shame’ in last night’s crumpled clothes.
It’s the popularity of Tinder, an online ‘dating’ app that has negated the need for chat-up lines and instead fuelled the growing expectation that young women will ‘put out’ on the first meeting.
It isn’t just the annual humiliation of girls behaving badly in ‘S**galuf’ and elsewhere but all year. We see young women lying shrieking, knickers around their ankles, offering sex acts to strangers and risking the kind of rape which — as various judges have been slammed for pointing out — is difficult to prosecute because the girl was too drunk to remember.
But even if everything is consensual on those wild nights, as French points out there is little joy or real human connection, none of the mystery and magic of lovemaking.
Some wild couplings are of no more significance than a quick game of ping-pong. Except that when playing ping-pong you don’t lose your dignity, catch anything nasty or get slut-shamed by strangers.
‘I don’t believe that you feel great about yourself the day after that. I don’t think boys do particularly either,’ French said. ‘Is that what women threw themselves in front of horses for? For this? For girls to be as low as those awful boys? What have we done? How did we go wrong? They have mothers who love them.
Worse for wear: This young woman was pictured in Manchester where witnesses described seeing people urinating in the street and passing out being sick as Freshers’ week kicked off
Four students were spotted embracing on the streets of Birmingham as the city’s university held their first Freshers Fest night
‘What’s happened that they don’t value their body or that they don’t mind any of this?’
That’s the question — and not just for mothers. French has spoken before of her own adored father, who committed suicide when she was 19, but who, as she was growing up, always made her feel pretty, and special — a prize to be won by some very lucky man.
All girls deserve to be given that idea of themselves, and it is the job of both parents to do that, to instill in their daughters a sense of dignity, of the need to care for themselves, of their self-worth.
The truth is that there is something painfully humble and self-loathing about girls who turn to extreme promiscuity: they’re not after pleasure, but validation. And that isn’t what you get from tipsy, leering, clumsy boys you don’t even know, too immature to be loving or gentle and too uneasy with their own bodies to understand restraint.
No normal loving parent wants their daughter’s — or indeed their son’s — nights out and holidays to be nothing but joyless, impersonal and frankly unhygienic s**g-fests. So why do they find it difficult to guide so many away from this trend? We can, I suppose, blame the wider culture and the fictions paraded before us about how life should be: all the way from the sophisticated libertines of Sex And The City (who, apart from Samantha, at least persuaded themselves that they were looking for love) to the crudity of Geordie Shore, Love Island, Big Brother, Ex On The Beach and the rest.
This young lady appeared to have fallen asleep while leaning on a friend in Manchester
Revellers were spotted taking the weight off their feet during Freshers’ Week in Manchester
We CAN observe that soap operas and dramas can only keep their plots going by constantly making and breaking connections at ever faster speed, and that unimaginative writers find it simplest to make those connections sexual.
(I know a sexual health nurse who enjoys making what she calls ‘chlamydia maps’ of the leading soaps.)
Nor is it something the middle classes can look down on. Those Freshers’ Week scenes prove that.
Even The Archers has just had Oxford student Phoebe throwing up morning-after pills after an unenjoyable tumble with a Bulgarian fruit-picker she took a fancy to.
Then we have celebrities, bragging about hundreds of one-nighters and, in the case of the appalling Russell Brand this week, having the nerve to call themselves life gurus as a result of their experiences.
And let’s not forget the well-regarded woman journalists now in their 30s reminiscing, possibly rather exaggeratedly, about their wild 20s of heavy drinking, drugs, random sex and terminations, and claiming this has led them to the broad sunlit uplands of marriage and prosperity.
The reality for many who ape them is addiction, depression, infections and infertility.
Big business has a case to answer, too: at a time when girls are overtaking boys academically and young women are making strides in science, politics and business, advertising — at all levels — is reinforcing the message that all women should aim for is being irresistibly ‘hot’.
It isn’t. It’s time for the pendulum to swing back a bit.