WHEN IT COMES to breaking hearts, men are mere amateurs compared to little girls. The sum total of male cruelty I have suffered in my entire life would measure but a fraction of the pain inflicted by female hands in one terrible school year.
Even 25 years on, I prickle with shame just recalling the secrets I confided in my best friend which, after she dumped me (and it felt like a lover’s rejection), she told her entire gang. What fun they had watching me sit by myself on school outings or following me, catcalling, as I walked home alone.
It sounds deeply pathetic, doesn’t it? But it hurt, God, it hurt. Though at least it made dealing with men seem easy. Their emotional blows, like crude haymaker punches, were obvious a mile off and easily dodged compared to a million precise paper cuts executed with a prissy smile.
And so I was heartened to hear that Madonna has taken the cruelty of little girls as the subject of her first moral fable for children. The English roses of the title are Nicole, Amy, Charlotte and Grace who gang up on a girl called Binah. And why do they do this? Is it because she’s fat or thick or spotty, is a bit of an oddball, has ginger hair or lacks the right trainers?
No, it’s because Binah is “very, very beautiful” and is an “excellent student and very good at sports”. In short, she is too pretty and special. The English roses are beastly to her because they’re jealous. So, as Madonna asked her audience of celebrity children, can you relate?
Well, I can’t. Because girls don’t get bullied or excluded for being too beautiful. Pretty girls in every playground since time began have the most friends, the most tea party and sleepover invites. And, because they hold the most power, they are often the most cruel. “They’re only saying it because you’re so special,” may be soothing to Madonna’s daughter, with her limo and junior couture. But it wasn’t true for me or any other misfit girl who has ever sobbed her heart out in the school loos.
The fact is, for all her loudly acquired spirituality, Madonna still embodies the shallow values of fashion and celebrity. Her heroine had to be beautiful: Madonna has no sympathy with the ugly, the overweight, the geek, the uncool, the loser.
Female beauty, far from being the curse Madonna suggests, is a powerful international currency which transcends class and race. The beautiful earn more than the plain, marry wealthier partners and, since our society equates beauty with goodness, are judged less harshly. Yet Madonna wishes to draw the beautiful into the protective mantle of victimhood.
The English roses finally accept Binah when they discover she has no mother and has to skivvy for her dad. (In reality the reverse would be true. Binah would be Little Miss Popularity until other girls found out: “Eew, she’s poor, she smells.”) And how are the roses rewarded for their saintly act? People start referring to them, too, as “beautiful girls”.
This week, a friend rang to say her daughter was inconsolable: one of her two best friends takes great glee in cutting her out. “Why are you being so horrible to me?” the daughter asked in despair. “Because it’s fun!” came the giggled reply.
And indeed my teenage tormentors were flexing their female power, just as my sons wrestle to test their male strength.
Mothers who want their girls to be compassionate, kind and fair, struggle to undermine a playground value system based on looks. Madonna’s message “be nice to the beautiful and maybe you’ll be beautiful too” only reinforces it. But then that is the order of things from which Madonna has benefited all her life.
Scouts dishonoured
The Scout movement could not have a more unlikely defender than me. Those quasi-paramilitary uniforms, oaths of allegiance to the Queen, grown men in shorts. My youthful self would blanch.
But then my elder son started Beavers, the group for boys too young for Cubs. Because he is a conker-collecting kind of boy, he looks forward to his weekly sessions in the Scout Hall on the second floor of a council block. He loves wearing his woggle, earning badges, raising money for sick animals and reciting Beaver lore, marshalled by his Lodge leader, a young woman known as “Chil”.
Yet the 23rd Camberwell Scouts are in peril. Their 40-year lease for which they paid Southwark council a peppercorn rent has just expired. Now they must find £7,000 a year to keep their hall. Considering Southwark has more children in poverty than almost any other borough in Britain, has a problem with teenage crime and is not exactly bursting with leisure facilities, you might think it would encourage the Scouts.
But no, its image is too white, too middle-class, too male for PC Southwark. Yet, in this scout hut at least, none of the above is true: the membership is racially mixed, mainly working-class and girls can join too.
I found a Daily Mail-esque leader fulminating in my head. Pah! If only they were a trendy youth group teaching skateboarding and grafitti art they’d probably get a huge council grant. I asked one of the leaders why he doesn’t publicise their plight in the local press. “No point,” he said wearily. “They’d only be interested in Scouts if they found someone working here was a perv.”
Cheap as brothel chic
Brothel chic is the look of the moment. Catwalks are full of models in thigh-high dominatrix boots, tiny minis and fishnet tights. Britney Spears, in her desperate bid to be seen as an artiste, dresses ever more like the star of an adult movie. Meanwhile, some genius at Changing Rooms thought it a great wheeze to make over a single mother-of-two’s bedroom as a hooker’s HQ complete with red lamp at the window and framed whore’s drawers.
How ironic then to discover that real-life madam Margaret MacDonald — a convent girl, what else? — ordered her escorts to dress with chic restraint.
One, photographed outside court, looked like a young Leslie Caron. Ms MacDonald, who has two business degrees, speaks ten languages and ran her vice ring like a fund manager, sounds a remarkable woman.
I doubt that brothel chic will be around many seasons. What woman wants to wear clothes which aren’t classy enough for real whores?
