Exposed midriffs are everywhere on thin girls and fat ones on Cress and on girls from dull suburbs and sink estates and
Exposed midriffs are everywhere, on thin girls and fat ones, on Cress and on girls from dull suburbs and sink estates, and on Coronation Street’s Rosie Webster. And every girl on those Saturday-morning TV shows for tinies has her tum showing.What are men supposed to make of it? They don’t seem to have had much say. But the fact is that men are sensitive creatures and a lot of them have been as shocked and confused by exposed midriffs as Ruskin was by his wife’s pubic hair. Like its concomitants, the revealed pants waistband or the visible thong, it’s too much information at once.
Why are fat girls showing their blubber? Why are pale fat girls doing it?You hear it all the time – these David Ginola-ish outbursts from middle-aged taxi drivers and likely lads. Only Britney should do it (or some other tanned, sculpted professional virgin), they say. But the underage beauty underclass seem to revel in inferior flesh texture. “It’s a bit of a right,” says the social columnist Simon Mills. “A bit of a girl thing.” Whatever, men are clearly rattled, and no good can come of it.Fascinatingly, criticism makes no difference at all. All those girlies, the ones we’re told are crippled by body dysmorphia, taunted by celebrity perfection, borderline anorexics and bulimics, all that, don’t seem to give a toss. They put on their uniform of low-rise jeans, trainers, short-waist long-sleeve Ts, completely covered except for those few inches – it’s all they’ve worn for the last two years – and go off to school or work looking…
what exactly?D’you remember schoolgirls in massive clumpy platforms in the Seventies? Perhaps not. But let me tell you, it was about as far from Jerry Hall or Marie Helvin in their Manolos as you could possibly imagine. Their bare, corned-beef legs, glowing violet in the British winter, said, this is what we wear and we’re all in it together It was peer- group solidarity. It was defiance, of chic, of the beauty myth, of growing up and having boyfriends, the lot. Those shoes, that funny bit of flesh exposure, were The Opposite of Sex; when those girls got properly launched into sex, they started dressing differently, more flatteringly.The midriff thing, by contrast, so different from the precisely calculated crop-tops that came earlier, is, according to the dress-code historian Nick Foulkes, “cod sex – adolescent panto sex like Tatu, that baby porn-star look…” But isn’t it also just another way of saying, I don’t care what you think? Particularly if you think I’m plain and blubbery.Of course, men have been told officially for years that the ideal girl is a boy with breasts And that women simply don’t have stomachs. So, seeing this new area, this artless gateway to heaven, is deeply confusing.
This is how a real woman looks, say the defiant ones – can you cope? Is the bare midriff, so near to other crucial areas, an open invitation to wandering hands – a sort of B-list erogenous zone – or just a new kind of comfort for plain girls, a 1990s “be comfortable in your skin, be happy with who you are” thing?It’s certainly a thoroughly mixed message Whatever it is, it demands a new etiquette. How much stomach to show, by whom, to whom, and on what occasions. Like the sumptuary laws or the rules of the Royal Enclosure, the whole thing has to be regulated.The first requirement, obviously, is that men should be protected from embarrassment and upset, and from being caught staring That means absolutely not in the office, it’s distracting. And not in what remains of the Victorian Social Season, because it’s profoundly juvenile to do a Jean Shrimpton-at-the-1965-Melbourne-Races number, in 2003. The Queen’s got enough to upset her already.The world of All Bar One, Po Na Na and Pitcher & Piano is different.
