BODY LANGUAGE
Julie Burchill
If there’s one type of broad I can’t stand, it’s what I call You’re-Not-Going-Out-Dressed-Like-That feminists: older women, past the first bloom of youthful beauty perhaps, who instead of concentrating their fury on patriarchy and its evils make a second career out of attacking younger women, usually stunners or starlets of some persuasion.
It’s half catfight (albeit the other side isn’t lifting a finger, either for fear of breaking a nail or because they don’t give a damn what grandma thinks) and it’s half sucking up to daddy (in the form of the newspapers who pay them to write their swill), and it’s wholly sad and pitiable.
We can always rely on that trusty killjoy Germaine Greer, for instance, to put the boot in whenever some perky adolescent gets her cleavage out. Just the other day (in the Daily Mail, of course) Dr Greer was getting her blue stockings in a right twist as she agonised over the “skimpily dressed” female contestants subjecting themselves to the “pimp TV” of, ahem, Blind Date. (It seems almost cruel to point out that Greer herself, as a fine young thing, once posed for a porn magazine stark naked, with her ankles behind her ears and the camera pointing all the way to Nebraska, but I will anyway, in the interests of truth and justice.)
Well, I too am in the autumn of my life, but though I certainly wouldn’t seek it out I always feel quite cheered up when I see a photo of a famous youngster wearing very little in a public place. It isn’t the “whoooah!” factor either, as I haven’t been queer since Methusalah was a pup. No: it’s more the “ahhh!” factor the recognition that, between the ages of 12 and 17, when I had a handspan waist and legs up to my eyebrows, I, too, spent a good deal of my leisure hours dressed like a suck-artiste in a Tijuana pony-show. (Every Friday evening I would parade out to Raquel’s Disco wearing tiny size six hotpants, a glittery halter-top that might have been more at home as a lariat and enough lipstick to sink the QE2, and then spend the entire night cringing in the toilets during the slow usually Stylistics songs, because “those boys over there are looking at me!”)
And there’s something both sweet they don’t know what they look like! and bittersweet they won’t look like that for long! about such girlish display.
As we get older, none of us can stay up three nights in a row and still look cute, or go on the smaller rides at theme parks. But it is madness to begrudge those who still can. And so we come to Britney Spears’s trousers. Britney! Don’t get me started. Like my esteemed colleague and very feminist friend, Elizabeth Wurtzel, I love everything about Britney. I love the fact that her mother spelt her name wrong that was the first perfect thing about her. I love the fact that she was a Mouseketeer and that she’s a virgin and that her records are created by Swedes and that she gets loads of po-faced fake-feminists steaming with rage for some reason or another.
I like the way that she refuses to have any truck with any virgin-or-whore stereotypes, how her Christianity sits perfectly happily alongside her breasts. Bible in one hand, bottle in the other she’s often photographed staggering out of some nightclub with her minders chasing after her and I like to imagine her having to go home to Louisiana and explain it all to her mother (“my best friend”).
It’s a global-fame version of what we all went through in our teens with our mothers, and it’s charming.
She’s always surprising and, perfectly, she always seems surprised. The best ever Britney song was Oops! … I did it again partly because it was the first number one single in ages to sound like a Brian Rix farce but also because it summed up Britney’s persona so well. She’s a gorgeous sexy klutz, just like Marilyn, who always seems slightly amazed by what she’s wearing.
Photographed in Those Trousers low enough to show that Britney favours the Brazilian wax at a party to launch her boyfriend’s new record, gloriously uncoiffed and obviously made up by a short-sighted chum, she seemed almost pop-eyed with shock at her own audacity.
Britney’s pop alter ego, Christina Aguilera, also mightily fond of trousers with 5cm zip flies, wouldn’t have looked like that. She would have sneered and leered and preened at the camera, wearing one of those do’s that make it look as though Cher crawled on to her head and died.
Christina, the cow, started off her career ridiculing Britney’s chastity and ever since has seemed bent on positioning herself as the anti-Britney, no matter what contortions she has to get into to do so. Even her own grandmother accused her of dressing like a prostitute.
In the end, Britney proves that evil is in the eye of the beholder; she’s like one of those tiny girls who get themselves up in ra-ra skirts and crop tops. Only a sicko would blame them rather than the perverts who fancy them for the effect they have.
You can imagine Christina looking at herself in the mirror before she goes out to face the flashbulbs and just see her rodenty little face crease up in a totally corrupt grin as she imagines what every male between the ages of eight and 80 is going to want to do to her.
In a way, that’s good, too; she knows she’s got it going on. But you can imagine Britney putting on Those Trousers, blinking almost unbelievingly into the mirror, then thinking, “Gosh darn, but I look hot tonight!” before skipping off to outrage a generation.
Oops, she did it again! But anyway, the girl can’t help it.