When I was in the sixth form at St Paul’s girls’ school in London in the 1980s there was, famously, a section of the notice board in the staff room not for info about lacrosse or further maths, not for the latest league tables (the school was invariably top), but reserved for something even scarier: fashion pages torn from Vogue magazine showing teenage models . . . who were currently pupils at the school.

The message was clear. Not only did you have to be clever, in the sense of having reams of As, a grade 8 in cello and an offer from Oxbridge. You also had look as unlike an 18th-century bluestocking (check out the portraits in the new exhibition Brilliant Women at the National Portrait Gallery) as it is possible to look and instead resemble a top model. No pressure, then.

In the 18th century, of course, girls received a bare fraction of the education of boys and were taught only “accomplishments” such as modesty, piano, obedience and needlework. They had few outlets for their creative or intellectual urges.

And now, nearly 200 years on, an education expert has just warned us that girls’ education has progressed so far in the opposite direction that schools and parents risk creating a generation of “brittle, high-achieving” teenage girls who are “unable to cope with failure” and who fall apart if they can’t live up to their own impossibly high expectations of themselves.

Professor Guy Claxton of the graduate school of education at Bristol University says that the lush photographs of hair-flicking girls clutching scraps of paper confirming their 12 A*s at GCSE and their five As at A-level (in all newspapers, twice a year) are contributing to a damaging cult of perfectionism in young females.

“It’s often the most highly successful students who are most prone to fall apart when they meet failure, especially girls. Bright girls go to pieces,” Claxton told the annual conference of the Association of School and College Leaders.

However, what the professor was also saying is that these annual images of super-achieving femininity are obscuring the real picture. Yes, girls do very well – but only up to a certain point, because after the age of 14 or so what females want to do above all is conform – even if, in the case of super-pushy private schools, that means getting strings of As and modelling for magazines.

And after that . . . well, women get proportionately fewer firsts than men and they don’t dominate the highest echelons of any profession. Why is this? One girl I spoke to last week, an 18-year-old in the sixth form at Cheltenham Ladies’ college – and a grade 8 violinist by the age of 12 – confirms Claxton’s hunch that the fear of failure keeps girls focused on the things they’re already good at so they seldom try anything new. “I only ever get up and perform if I know I’m going to play well,” she told me. “I don’t want to let down other people as well as myself.” It’s a strange problem, but it’s a problem nonetheless. If young women have a go only at what they know they’re going to do well, that means they are still aiming low rather than high – despite all the As – and their ambitions are pitched lower than those of risk-taking boys.

So while there are more gifted and talented girls than boys in the age range of 2-14, by the time they hit secondary school they start rating social acceptance above academic prowess. And once they hit adulthood there are many more gifted men than there are gifted women.

And, hey, it’s not because they’re dumber. It’s because girls are not heaped with praise for challenging orthodoxies and conventions in the same way that boys are. They are rewarded with suspicion.

When our daughters’ foremothers in the 18th and 19th centuries tried to demand an intellectual life beyond the hearth and generally to assert their rights, William Hazlitt growled: “I have an utter aversion to bluestockings. I do not care a fig for any woman that knows even what an author means.”

It’s quite sobering to realise that all these years later when a boy shows initiative and drive he’s praised for showing leadership, but when a girl does she’s still usually criticised for being bossy (and I speak from personal experience).

Even if she becomes one of those hothouse schoolgirls, she’s quite likely to fall apart after triumphing in her exams. So it’s time we stopped praising our daughters for being good little girls, for being so pretty, sweet and clever. This is clearly leading to a self-defeating cult of perfectionism and low achievement.

We should instead praise girls for breaking rules and hitting each other, for climbing trees, kicking balls, for excelling at the subjects they’re genuinely interested in, for lying unwashed and farting in midden-like bedrooms, for reading the ghosted biographies of footballers, for doing their own thing.

In other words, we should praise them and celebrate them for being more like boys.

Bishop ordered out of pulpit over affair . . . top copper freezes to death as rumour mill swirls . . . New York’s Mr Clean is habitué of Emperors Club hookers . . . and all in one week. Are we seeing a trend here?

No disrespect intended – de mortuis etc – but it does seem to be that, in general, married men who are held up as icons of moral rectitude can’t take the pressure of being publicly noble and without stain in these puritanical times when censure is reserved not for divorce, but for adultery.

So in private it seems that these caped moral crusader types can’t wait to take off the Batman tights and the codpiece and find a release for their dark desires. It’s not a pretty sight but I find it hard to judge them.

However, there is something bothering me and it relates to the Emperors Club vice ring which was, face it, the only bright spot in an otherwise dark week. What on earth do these gorgeous girls do that’s worth 2,000 bucks an hour?

I mentally go through the permutations, spinning them out for as long as seems humanly possible: okay, so she might do that or even that . . . but would it really take a whole hour? Then I lie back exhausted with images of lap dancing and lingerie swirling nightmarishly around my brain.

Maybe I just have to accept that there’s an entire medley of tricks that I know nothing about. And what about the gold-plated night of “fantasy sex” available from the Emperors Club girls? What is “fantasy sex” exactly? Until I am told in detail by someone who knows, I will continue to brood and assume that for the vast majority of men fantasy sex is the sex they have in their heads.

For the rest, fantasy sex is the same as any sex – the only difference being, I suspect, that the woman you’re having fantasy sex with is not your wife.

www.racheljohnson.co.uk

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