Another Perspective
No Class
Loud, drunken and risqué is the English way.
A certain notorious photograph has been making the rounds in the British press. The photo shows a clearly intoxicated group of (doubtlessly) well-to-do young women, one of whom is frolicking down the streets of Cardiff with her knickers round her ankles, much to the delight of her girlfriends. The reaction of the British public to that image, and countless others like it that have been appearing in the press, has been mixed. Conservative older Britons see the images as representative of their precipitously declining civilization. To them, today’s Britain is as unrecognizable as a foreign country, one where all social order has broken down. Younger, liberal Britons, meanwhile, shrug and say, “So what?”
The phenomenon of what is in Britain called “ladette culture” and here in the U.S. “raunch culture,” is more striking perhaps in the traditionally reserved Britain. If quiet desperation used to be the English way, it is no longer. The former reserved British character is today: “loud, drunken and risqué.”
There are many reasons young, expensively educated (rather than well-educated), middle-class women would want to exhibit such behavior. First and foremost, today’s gal wants to be “one of the guys,” the twenty-something equivalent of the tomboy. If you can be one of the guys as well as one of the gals, that’s twice as good, isn’t it?
Today that means going to strip clubs and climbing up on the dance tables and playing the role of stripper for your friends and co-workers. As one ladette put it in Marie Claire, it’s called “keeping up with your male peers.” Or what another called: “Women having genuine freedom.”
It is mind-boggling how quickly centuries old traditions, mores, and manners fade away. Within one decade all of the old taboos that regulated and instructed the behavior of young, middle-class women have been swept away. In the late 1970s, when my older sister was in school, the female students policed the behavior of their fellow classmates, lest one bad girl give the entire school a “bad reputation.” “Ten years ago, it was unacceptable for women to go out and get absolutely hammered,” one ladette recently told a Canadian magazine. No more. If the moral policing of my sister’s generation was extreme, we have today swung to the opposite extreme. Following a naked lap dance by a male stripper, another ladette waxed philosophically: “This is about equality. Men go out and have a good time. Why can’t it be the same for women?”
I doubt if running drunkenly amok through the streets with one’s panties round one’s ankles is the sort of equality Susan B. Anthony had in mind when she began publishing The Revolution, but let it go. Likewise one British poll found that 78 percent of young women preferred their bachelorette or hen parties to be “loud, drunken and risqué.” It is not enough to act the fool. Everyone — whether he wants to or not — must be witness to it.
There is a very simple-minded logic going on here. Young men do idiotic things, therefore in order to prove that I am no less idiotic than they are I must do the same. Only they do not consider their behavior idiotic. Certainly, the young lady parading through the city streets with her panties round her ankles and throwing up in the back alleys finds nothing wrong with her behavior. She is just having a good time. Like the guys.
IF TODAY’S YOUNG people behave with any restraint and decency it is less because they are afraid of damaging their social reputation — for damaging one’s reputation can be a way to be noticed and to increase one’s popularity — and more out of fear of damaging one’s job prospects. (Imagine the career prospects of the young British lad photographed urinating last month on a WWI war memorial.) Damaged job prospects are a genuine cause for concern. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard human resources types tell young people that they should watch their behavior since cell phone photos may very well end up on one’s Facebook page, and potential employers will look at your Facebook page. Budding attorneys are constantly warned to safeguard their reputation, not because a good reputation is in itself a good thing to have, but because a bad reputation may harm your law career.
Society, as usual, can be counted on to send mixed messages. Rather than condoning raunchy behavior, some women intellectuals and educators praise it: “There are aspects of ladette behaviors that should be celebrated,” says educational researcher Carolyn Jackson, author of Lads and Ladettes in School, “like women and girls’ increased assertiveness and confidence. They aren’t afraid to challenge gender stereotypes.” Every time I begin to think conservatives are wrong to launch blanket attacks on intellectuals, I read a statement like Ms. Jackson’s and want to say: pass the blankets.
Anytime you try to make over society in its entirety there is bound to be a reaction. And while reactions are seldom beautiful things, they are wholly predictable. Our drink-besotted daughters parading half naked through the streets are, in a strange way, a reaction to emasculating feminism and political correctness. Fortunately, reactionary periods fade. And when it does let us hope that young women will stop emulating young men, or if they must, they emulate young men with some class.
About the Author
Christopher Orlet writes from St. Louis.
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Pingback| 11.19.09 @ 6:10AM
Twitter Trackbacks for The American Spectator : No Class [spectator.org] on Topsy.co links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
Appleby| 11.19.09 @ 6:53AM
I have always wondered why so-called *liberated* young women pick the lowest, meanest, most brutish of men as their role models -- or, as my granny would have said (and it is even more trenchant today) to Ape.
Backlash goes by generations, though, and I look forward to the children of these *ladettes* trying to establish a public career and desperately hoping the press will not unearth the photos of their drunken young mother, panties at half mast, vomiting in the street in front of Buckingham Palace.
When we Acted Out in high school, Sister used to warn us that what we were doing that day would go on our permanent record. Once we grew up, we understood that it not only went on our record, it went on the record of our children. Today this is even more true. Pity that it will take the drunken fools a generation to realize that they are laying the foundation today for a lifetime of generational regret.
LaneyB| 11.19.09 @ 6:59AM
In George Gilder’s mid nineteen seventies book, “Sexual Suicide,” he clearly proved that men look to women to civilize them. One need not recite proofs of this theory; one only needs to casually glance at a kindergarten class to see boys behaving and playing singularly and then glance at the girls creating order, priorities and conversation. This type of separation by maturity and the long-term concept of delayed gratification for the good of the group as grasped early by girls is what distinguishes mammals from lower forms of life.
What happens between that female biologically determined behavior in childhood where propriety and behavior constraints rule and then women behaving as wildly as immature boys s indicative of a society that refuses to acknowledge the value of women behaving responsibly. Freedom to behave badly is no freedom at all.
As the envelope is pushed ever farther toward social chaos by media outlets and the entertainment industries, ever in search of the outrageous to capture market share, young women are encouraged to deny their biology in favor of fifteen minutes of fame, but and up attaching a stain to their names forever.
One wonders what generation of parents have permitted their daughters to destroy themselves. In the end, a society gets what it raises, and parental neglect does not always come in the form of denying food and shelter. It is abuse of children when the rules of decorum and self-protection are not taught early and continually.
Stuart Koehl| 11.19.09 @ 7:16AM
Everybody thinks good manners, politeness and respectability are the "traditonal" English way. In reality, English civility is a relatively new phenomenon, a product of the post-Edwardian period in which the bourgeois mannerism adopted by the Royal Family became a model for society in general. That, in turn, depended upon a number of factors, including the Weslyan religious revival and Victorian moralism.
Before then, the English were known for two things: extreme violence and xenophobia. In Georgian England, and in most periods preceding it, England was murder capital of Europe. Its people delighted not only in killing each other, but in blood sports generally, including bear baiting, cock- and dog-fighting, and monumental bare knuckles brawls. Intra-village football games then as now were opportunities for mass mayhem. English sexual morality was not much better, and well into the Victorian era London had more brothels than churches.
English violence was so notorious that international observers down the centuries noted it and attributed British success in warfare to the blood lust of the English people.
The English were also notable for their disdain of foreigners of all types, including other Britons. The true Englishman thought himself superior to all other men--including other Englishmen--and, indulging in that characteristic English blood lust, was constantly willing to prove it with his fists, or any other weapon that came to hand. Dr. Samuel Johnson put down English superiority to the Englishman's traditional "want of subordination".
So, what are we seeing in England, today? I would hold it is a disintegration of the post-Victorian veneer brought about by the relentless secularization of English society (removing the moral prop) and a reaction against the deadening, multiculturalist political correctness that dominates British civil and political discourse.
Once both have burned away, expect a more raw, visceral but in many ways more assertive and dynamic England, the kind of country that could, in the blink of an eye, become the terror of Europe or the conqueror of the known world. Because the kind of fillibustering free-booters who built the Empire were not the mild-manner gentlemen of drawing room comedies.
Alice Moore| 11.19.09 @ 8:08AM
I agree with your comments, Stuart Koehl. People's perceptions of England seem to be stuck on Masterpiece Theater.
A family member of mine went to England in the 1960s. She was struck by a public rudeness that would be unacceptable in the US. There was massive drinking that one associates with the Irish and the Russians. As a caveat this was in London.
I have nothing against the UK or England. They have contributed mightily to the well being of the world. There is the Magna Carta all the way to laws that protect buyer and seller.
The writer of this article writes as if this type of behavior is a brand new phenomenon. One only has to read history of medieval times to the modern era. In Tudor times promiscuity was common in all classes. The royal classes only insisted on adherence to superficial form. Cardinal Woolsey had a mistress and lived in luxury. Imagine the private reaction to any bull of his that extolled the virtues of celibacy and poverty. Katherine Swynford, the royal Lucy, was condemned not because she was a mistress to the married John of Gaunt, only that she did not carry on with discretion.
As one pundit put it with the English there is the Anglo and the SAXON side.
BTW I am of English ancestry; no projected self loathing on my part.
Kerry| 11.19.09 @ 9:12AM
haven't the Brits always been a bit brutish? I think the Irish would support that notion. I know there are good people everywhere, and yes, they did contribute to the world. But it seems like that was a good while ago. Humility and good manners have been replaced by coarseness and selfishness.
I also think that marxism/socialism has in effect disintegrated families and the social structure in general. It has fouled the dignity and respect for humans in general, from cradle to grave.
Melvin| 11.19.09 @ 8:06AM
Oh pish posh! there is absolutely no excuse whatsoever for Englishman or Englishwomen to make utter asses of themselves in public.
These very same women who parade their personal wares around town like trollops during one of their drinking binges, then go home sober up put on their business suits and demand respect in the workplace.
To hell with P/C. " Women if you are going to act like a trollop then you'll be treated as a trollop 24/7."
Public decency and respect cannot be turned on and off at will.
Bob| 11.19.09 @ 9:11AM
My Mother said a few years ago that Women finally succeed in being just like Men...at their worst.
Padoux| 11.19.09 @ 10:20AM
As a 63 year old male I have never engaged in the conduct of the women or men discussed in this article. My friends as a youg man did not either. My parents would have not tolerated such behavior. So it is by far not all men who engage in such vulgar, common behavior, let alone women who now appear hell bent on losing any claim to respect. It merely mirrors the crass coarseness & vulgarity of modern western culture that trvializes sex, & disdains self restraint. We condemn politicians who engage in such behavior but they like all of us are product of this culture. You got an itch? Scratch it. Abuse alcohol, take drugs, get a tattoo, go to strip clubs, spout obscentiy as punctuation for you speech, you' real "cool" man. Class & dignity are becoming rare. Crticize all these things & you are a prude, well I'm guilty by that silly definition.
Matt| 11.19.09 @ 10:29AM
Wait a minute...I thought Britain was being overtaken and subverted by the Muslims. Don't they have great prohibitions against alcohol and female nudity?
Maybe there is yet hope.
http:/conversationsaroundawoodstove.blogspot.com
Becky| 11.19.09 @ 10:41AM
I think that women in the free world generally behave a lot alike. I think you can find American women similarily engaged.
Chris| 11.19.09 @ 1:47PM
Indeed, and American Spring Break parties are an obvious example. And let's not forget the men who behave similarly.
Jack Neidlinger| 11.19.09 @ 10:51AM
It is hard to imagine that this socialist cesspool was once the master of the entire civilized world.
Secularism and socialism breed rot!! Beware America, your leaders are leading you down the same path.
Doctor Right| 11.19.09 @ 11:04AM
The inevitable result of runaway socialism is the decline of standards and moral behavior.
Why?
Because socialist societies are ultimately hedonistic at theiur core. God has been pushed aside by the state. Individual citizens, lacking the influence of God and Church that inculcate morals, inevitably worship at the altar of self. This is described by libertines as "freedom", but any Preacher worth his salt will tell you that it's nothing more than an embrace of sinful lifestyles.
Britain was once a mighty nation that ruled 2/5 of the world. She was damaged by WWI and WWII, but the biggest damage to this once-great Empire has been done by the socialism they began to embrace in 1945.
Worst part? If Obama, Pelosi, and Reid have their way, it's coming soon to a neighborhood near you and me.
Margie| 11.19.09 @ 3:12PM
"This is described by libertines as "freedom.""
Exactly. It isn't freedom or free-ing in any way. It actually enslaves you. The "anything goes" lawless society (anywhere), is indeed a result of the rejection of God and His principles, without which there is no real freedom at all.
Patrick| 11.19.09 @ 9:55PM
Ahh...sorry to shock you Doc, but it's already here, and you have LBJ to thank.
Think not? Well, perhaps you don't have to walk outside and get assaulted by crack dealers looking for a sale, but I do.
Seek| 11.19.09 @ 11:26AM
Anyone who believes "socialism" or "secularism" are the reasons for Women Behaving Badly in the UK has rocks in the head, Jack. Louts always have been part of the British experience, and always will. Read Bloomsbury wit Burgo Partridge's classic book of 50 years ago, "A History of Orgies." The stuff happening today is tame compared to the pre-socialist days of yore. Children of the Monarchy were the bloody worst of all.
Red State Cultural Warriors in the US are idiots.
Doctor Right| 11.19.09 @ 12:41PM
Ignorance of history has always been with us, too...
Tim| 11.19.09 @ 11:42AM
The USA has some world class louts. Let's make drunken debauchery an olympic sport and see who takes the gold.
At the medal ceremony one guy will be vomiting, another will have fallen right over, while the third will be behind the podium taking a piss.
MikeN| 11.19.09 @ 11:47AM
condoning and praise mean the same thing.
JamesJ| 11.19.09 @ 3:33PM
Damn, if only I was 25 years younger
kingsmill| 11.19.09 @ 6:09PM
Dave Davies of the Kinks said it loud and clear: .
"All the stories have been told
Of kings and days of old,
But there's no England now.
All the wars that were won and lost
Somehow don't seem to matter very much anymore. ..
Now another leader says
Break their hearts and break some heads.
Is there nothing we can say or do?
Blame the future on the past,
Always lost in blood and guts.
And when they're gone, it's me and you.
Living on a thin line,
Tell me now, what are we supposed to do?
Living on a thin line,
Tell me now, what are we supposed to do?
Living on a thin line."
Pingback| 11.20.09 @ 12:35AM
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Yosemeti Sam| 11.20.09 @ 9:17AM
"... It is mind-boggling how quickly centuries old traditions, mores, and manners fade away...."
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Richard Baker| 11.20.09 @ 8:15PM
These "English" strumpets masquerading as "women" have drunk deeply from the cup of angry feminism. Did you ever notice that "feminists" seem to always want to mimic or ape the very worst in men?
Pingback| 11.21.09 @ 1:12AM
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