So what do I see? Blow-up dolls – hundreds of them. All Kim Kardashian look-alikes, with their padded chests and hair and eyelashes stuck on with glue. I see cleavage and thighs and – as she downs her fourth vodka – other bits I really don’t want to see, not least because my mates can see them too.
They’re funny these girls. Smart, too. But they look and smell like sweaty sausages sprayed with perfume, and they’re deck-stained to the ankles. I wouldn’t mind a kiss, but those lips look as inflated as jumping castles. And, God, the nails – terrifying talons that could do some serious damage down below.
Of course, I’m not a 25-year-old male. But if I’d said all that as a mid-thirties woman, you delicious young things would yell “Get lost Grandma!” But stay with me for a minute – I’ll shout a round of mojitos – because I’ve asked these boys and, truly, that’s what they think. Well the nice ones; the jerks will take what they can get.
Yes, they do love a molten leg and a short skirt, but those tart trotters you can’t even walk in even when sober need to go. Ditto the hair extensions. Seriously, guys want freshly washed, soft and beachy. You know the chick Zac Effron falls in love with in The Lucky One? The blonde in denim shorts and gumboots? The one who loves her dogs? Her.
They like personality and originality but not fierce. Yes, you might like fierce, your girlfriends like fierce, and you’ve been raised on Rhianna’s brand of scowly sexual liberation, but the guys? They like Pippa Middleton’s bum – even though they’ve never seen her bum, only the outline of it, in a bridesmaid’s dress, no less.
Writer A.A. Gill reckons if you asked men what they’d like to see women wearing, they’d say, “me”, “sweat”, “a smile”, “baby oil”, and “chocolate sauce”. But in truth, he argues, they prefer painted red toenails, women in men’s shirts, tanned legs in cowboy boots and, wait, a girl who walks confidently. “The cantilevered – tits and knickerless -micro dress thing is a gawp and a guffaw,” he writes, “but it isn’t what most men want their girlfriends to wear – that’s not about respecting you (sorry), it’s about what his mates will think of him.”
If you’re any sort of feminist, here’s where you shout, “Who cares what men think? As if we dress for them!” And no, you shouldn’t. But surely gallivanting about like Barbies at a Hugh Hefner pool party, your self-worth as deep as your spray tan and barely a bra strap to distinguish you from your friends, is as big a tragedy to your smarts and imagination.
Come on girls, you’re 20. You’re not supposed to conform to some tired template of flesh, tramp-stamp and silicone. You can annoy your parents with something better than that. They were Goths, punks, hippies, and mods, and Dr Martens. Go on, grab a pair. They’re so much comfier than anything you’re wearing – whether the boys like them or not.
