They do not belong to youth alone.
Generally speaking they are certainly not the sole property of teenagers nor do
they belong to any distinct social class though some I’d point out are the
almost exclusive property of one particular social class or another. Therefore
unlike the individual adept to whom I refer in the title, the people of whom I
speak here are broad social groups, sometimes within social classes,
occasionally almost entire social classes themselves that take up the habit or
fashion. Something that’s so pronounced,
so observable that it might almost be described as a social fact, a
sociological phenomenon.
Let’s therefore take a look at some of the
habits and fashions of these times. The growing, ever accelerating fashion
among men, mostly between the ages of 18-40 for individual self-adornment took
off from the early 1990’s. However it has also taken hold among those who are
older, even in their sixties and seventies! The phenomenon is predominantly an
underclass, working and lower middle class pre-occupation. In this there is a
clear and direct correlation with the demise of traditional male roles in an
industrial society that were an outcome of Margaret Thatcher’s economic
policies of the 1980’s which brought about a severe decline across the whole
spectrum of industrial production from mining, shipbuilding and heavy
engineering to manufacturing and the building trades. These were replaced by
the services and financial sector. More importantly however large communities
of the industrial working class along with a communal philosophy were replaced
by a new philosophy of personal individualism. It is from within this context
that the growing phenomenon of individual self-adornment should be viewed.
The nature of this individual
self-adornment is now visible for all to see and consists of the new general
fashion of men in the social classes referred to above wearing earrings and
being engraved with tattoos. The fashion for both is now commonplace so that
individual self-adornment is no longer an individual attribute but a social
characteristic. It’s something new. Something not previously observed. There
are many reasons that might account for this but the most plausible to my mind
revolves round the issue of identity. Alongside the demise of industrial
occupations and communities has come that of old certainties. Society has
evolved as a shiftless, amorphous and uncertain entity, particularly in the
realm of employment, and with it has come an uneasy sense of individualism. With
past certainties doomed and behind them among which is the breakup of
traditional family structures and the stability they engendered, young people
were and are faced with a growing identity crisis. The spirit of community in
Britain is dead. The spirit of individualism alive and kicking. It’s new
manifestation cannot be communal, with the prime exception of support for a
football team. It has to be individual and personal. Hence the explosion of the
fashion for personal bodily adornment.
Stud earrings for men. Also a generalised
habit in the gay community. Tattoos for men and women. Arms, legs, faces and
heads, and for many middle aged ladies a rose tattooed above the bottom crease.
One can only think that large numbers of husbands don’t find the irony
distasteful! In recent years this search for identity has become a copycat
habit. In the hands of skilled practitioners it has become a skilled art form
and mighty expensive. Here I leave the subject with one simple thought. Those
who’ve adorned themselves in their need to establish identity might just as
easily have found self-adornment in mind as much as body through education,
travel and self-awareness. Tattoos and earrings are a concerted attempt at visible
display Educated men and woman can equally display their new identity
to others through their intelligence and a caring spirit.
* * * * *
Another new social fashion among young men
and women not seen as a social fact until recently is alcohol abuse, drunken
and anti-social behaviour openly and publically on the streets of towns across
Britain. As a mass phenomenon it’s widespread and has spilled over into the
package holiday resorts of south and east Europe as a vile and distasteful
attribute of uncontrolled individualism. For the Europeans this expression of
our youth is also something new. The fashion for this conduct home and abroad
undoubtedly has its origin in the removal of restrictions which licensed the
sale of alcohol by the New Labour Government of Tony Blair.
Pubs, clubs and bars could now sell alcohol
round the clock, a fact exploited by manufacturers and retailers through the
medium of price reduction. It meant unlimited alcohol being available to youths
and adults 24/7, the former entirely incapable of dealing with the danger now
put on a plate.
The streets of city centres on Friday and
Saturday nights are a public forum for uncontrolled behaviour that quite
frankly is needless. Young people going out to have a drink and enjoy
themselves become prey to other emotions that have nothing to do with pleasure.
In the late hours of night too many of them become victim to their own hopeless
ineptitude. To an uncontrolled individualism that has its psychological seeds
in a violent, turbulent family life. They become the flotsam and jetsam of
recent history. Products of rapid and
violent social change over which they have no understanding and little control.
Their conduct is an expression of the new individualism. Bad enough for the
lads but entirely new and particularly disturbing among women and girls. A kind
of wholesale liberation of female individualism in public displays of lewdness
and foul-mouthed verbiage that was once though unladylike.
It’s part of the new social fashion for an
individualism lacking traditional values and personal control. And with a
future that may run in tandem with anger and aggression and entirely more
sinister modes of personal conduct
* * * * *
I now want to touch on another notable though
somewhat sordid fashion of recent times and that is the gruesome, stunningly
embarrassing phenomenon of Hen Parties. Many of us have seen their
participants. A dozen or more scantily clad ladies if you can call them that staggering
out of their hotel onto the street wearing a furry red antennae headdress, ultra
short bum revealing skirts with their fat legs and thighs encased in fishnet
stockings perched on four inch stilettos and large L Plates pinned to the backs
of their carefully contrived bulging blouses. Don’t worry, it’s only a
suggestion. Clearly they’re no longer learners by any means, the majority more
like instructors, married or not, capable of giving just about any man a
serious refresher course after six vodka tonics. Sorry, I forgot to mention the
balloons. In the case of these randy adventurettes most important for buoyancy!
For the more upmarket parties they may be
seen getting out of a stretch limo and piling into a City Centre bar but for most
it’s a walk to a pub for a well-planned last night as a single girl for the
bride of the morrow. Her last night as a single woman with her friends all
around her, all play acting at being randy bitches or are they? I mean only
play acting! The pub specializes in such antics. They’ve become routine. Almost
a drag. Well not quite if you know what I mean. It’s well known for catering
for such sexually explicit heat-fests with dirty suggestive language galore and
an experienced male stripper with bulging pectorals and tight leather pants to
put the whole atmosphere on a Bunsen burner and titillate the Hens to a frenzy
if not the Queen of the Night who they might heavily prompt, if she’s foolish
enough to comply, to do something on her knees in front of the stripper with her
head covered by a towel that she might have serious cause to regret later!
Most Hen Parties are lewd but then there
are distinct levels of lewdness. What a Hen Party is not is sedate. They are explicit expressions of licentiousness
among and between women for the purpose of giving their friend, a soon to be
bride, a memorably bawdy send-off that will accompany her into the world of
domesticity. A reminder of the loss of freedom. An experience of the last
chance saloon of eternal pleasure!
As a social phenomenon Hen Parties date
back no further than three decades and as a serious fashion probably closer to
two. There are specific areas of the United Kingdom that are famous well
established venues such as the north-east of England with its center in Newcastle.
In fact the pubs and bars of whole sections of the city are given over to such
jollification. This gives us a clue into the character of these events and the
social class of their participants. There’s no denying it. Hen Parties are the
prerogative of working class and lower middle class women. They are most
definitely not a self-expression of middle class femininity. Their aim,
essentially, is to achieve a sexual communality at the most basic and common of
levels. True, they’re basically meant to be fun. A sexually frivolous send off.
But copious amounts of alcohol having been consumed they can fall off the sharp
end of the spectrum of naughtiness.
Working class Hen Parties are full of
working class values and behavioral norms. Different today to what they once
were thirty years back they now contain the individualism and a sexually
liberated mentality that saw its first spark in the sixties but only bloomed
thirty years later. Even so there’s a real contradiction at work here. This
particular rite of passage has now achieved the status of fashion but it’s a
rite celebrating an essentially ancient tradition and just as important, mass
phenomenon though it may be it’s also a highly lucrative business.
That said there’s still something
deliciously sordid about them. Women young and old dressed up in a kind of perverse
desperation… only too often looking and acting like tarts in a public display
that comes close to the ludicrous to any outside observer. Looked at
dispassionately, as an increasingly fashionable and popular ritual, this new
form of self-expression is part of a generalised shift of working class female
identity. Of a sexually liberated identity perhaps that could only emerge in
the new post-industrial Britain.
Most men are happy taking a peep at a Hen
Party on the move but they’re not allowed in. Sorry, didn’t you know they’re
restricted!
* * * * *
Finally one of the new fashions I wish to
consider is that of obesity. I’m talking female obesity. Grossly fat women.
Today they appear before our eyes just about everywhere. We’ve become familiar
with oversized, overweight women in recent decades and now it’s a sight that we
live with. Something that’s relatively new. A condition we might have seen only
occasionally in the four decades following the Second World War. Today we see
it on a regular basis. Again it’s an underclass, working and lower middle class
phenomenon. In some cases its cause is physical. A medical disorder of one kind
or another. In other cases its cause lies in psychological factors. An eating disorder
perhaps. Even so there’s no getting away from the fact that both men and women
eat far more these days than they did four, five or six decades back.
Consider the circumstances. Twenty years
ago few people regularly snacked out on the streets or drank coffee likewise. Now
it’s a habit adopted by millions. The lunchtime snack has become fashionable,
served by the newly created availability of a wide variety of comestibles provided
by supermarkets, sandwich and baguette bars and cafes. Weightwatcher type pasta
and salad snacks have become highly fashionable along with the continental
baguette. In short people are eating more because it’s only in recent decades
that snack type meals have become so readily available. Without it the new
eating out habit would barely exist and less food be consumed. It is therefore safe
to assume that the new commercially fed availability of pre-prepared food is
responsible in most cases for overconsumption and obesity.
True, other factors such as those outlined
above may come into play. However the cause of obesity plainly lies in
over-eating but then it’s not as straightforward as that. In large part the
growing wave of obesity ties in with eating food containing excessive fat and
the participants of the habit taking little to no exercise. To put matters
plainly the fat isn’t burnt off and has nowhere to go except circulate within
the body of the consumer so a habit of years results in the obesity we witness
today. And alas, equally serious is the fact that it has increasingly become visible
in children.
This is a working class, underclass
phenomenon among whom eating fast foods in burger or chicken restaurant chains
became fashionable from the 1980’s and has now evolved into a tidal wave of quick
and easy consumption. It became fashionable. Relieved women of the burden of
cooking, turning consumption into an equitable outdoors social affair rather
than the traditional shared experience of eating at home. A new commercial
tradition therefore replaced that of family, much in line with the
fragmentation of old communal values of a former industrial society. More
broadly it became part of a new less active culture, that of consuming rather
than doing.
Readily available consumption in the shape
of food with a higher fat content, coupled with the changing less active
character of work has slowly but surely led to the fashion for obesity that’s
with us today and it will take far more than the strictures of celebrity chefs
to free a fair volume of the population, especially women, from the excess fat
they carry. It will take a revolution more than anything. A situation where working
class women don’t much like how they look and the discomfort of the weight that
they carry, start getting hard- nosed about their condition and become
determined to change it. Eat less and healthier, start taking exercise in any
spare time that they have, regain their confidence and begin looking lovely all
over again.
Tattoos, earrings and Hen Parties are
fashions that are silly. Obesity is a fashion that’s harmful. All of these will
eventually pass, when people start respecting themselves once again.
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