Opinion

Anita Robinson: I'm afraid feminine modesty has gone out of fashion

The 21-year-old was not allowed to travel on the plane over her "inappropriate dress"
The 21-year-old was not allowed to travel on the plane over her "inappropriate dress" The 21-year-old was not allowed to travel on the plane over her "inappropriate dress"

A whole furore broke out last week when a 21-year-old girl boarded a holiday flight wearing just a skimpy bra-like top and baggy trousers.

Cabin crew took exception to her ‘inappropriate dress’, asked her to cover up and when she refused, turned her off the plane.

The tabloid press had a field day collating public opinion on the matter and I found myself on the wrong side of the generation gap.

What constitutes ‘appropriate dress’? There used to be rules about that sort of thing, a strangulating code of ethics governed by custom and practice which was social death to defy – hats for church, black for funerals, modest coverage at all times for women, (only trollops and female film stars showed cleavage); ties for men for every occasion and location bar the beach. As an early teen, I vividly recall a cinema poster advertising the film ‘Butterfield 8’. It featured a generously-endowed Elizabeth Taylor and her seven-eights exposed ample bosom, which, by the following day, had been painstakingly inked over by some scandalised moral guardian.

It was unfortunate that the cusp of my adolescence coincided with the early sixties when the first seismic reverberations of the youthquake hadn’t yet spread to parochial little Norn Iron. I was whisked off to be fitted with the requisite underpinnings of womanhood, which were disappointingly utilitarian in design but did the job efficiently. Secretly and with my own money, I went to Littlewoods and bought what I considered the more glamorous option of a circle-stitched bra, which created a curiously conical silhouette, aggressively pointed as a pair of Bren guns – though inadvertent collision with anything resulted in a deep dent in my confidence.

This was my first skirmish in the endless conflict between mother and daughter. However with the mid-sixties advent of Twiggy, busts mysteriously deflated, but the battleground merely moved southwards as hemlines inexorably rose. In what I call ‘the yo-yo years’, I (inexpertly) turned my hems up and my mother (expertly and sometimes overnight) let them down again. Modesty was ingrained in my generation. As a resident student sharing a dormitory at teacher-training college, I was fascinated by the speed and skill of ex-boarding school girls who could dress and undress under a dressing-gown without revealing an inch of flesh. We were grown women aged 18 or 19. A couple of years later, myself and a colleague, both of us very green and newly-appointed teachers, were invited to the principal’s office to be informed that the length of our skirts (mine a mere maternally-approved inch above the knee,) was causing consternation to the parish priest. I never told my mother.

The term ‘body image’ hadn’t been invented then. We had adolesced in misery about our weight, shape, hair and complexion. Praise for one’s looks bred vanity, so we were rarely complimented. “You’ll do,” was our highest, grudgingly-given accolade. What it bred in us was self-consciousness, uncertainty, false shame and hang-ups about various bits of our bodies.

This selfie-obsessed generation of young women may have as many subliminal doubts as we did, but in this age of so-called equality, have adopted the morals and manners of the so-called ‘celebrities’ they worship as role-models. Something within me finds it distasteful that standards of feminine dignity and modesty have, to a great extent, gone out of fashion. We’ve all seen them at the airport – ‘ladettes’, already in their skimpy holiday garb, already shrill, foul-mouthed, three-quarters intoxicated and making exhibitions of themselves with not a thought for their self-worth. What their male peers make of them is a mystery. What I suspect has not changed is, ‘men put the value on you that you put on yourself’.

I’ll leave the last word to that natural philosopher and moral arbiter, my auntie Mollie, who used to remark as I sallied forth in an outfit she disapproved of: “Holymacoat! You’ve not on you what would tighten the handle of a spade. Mark my words girl - it’s never a good idea to put all your goods in the shop window.”