23-07-2025
Do we have to bear all this semi-nudity? Just cover up!
A young woman has been giving vent to her outrage in Margaret Thatcher's home town of Grantham (of all places). Georgia Toomey was leaving a gym in crotch-grippingly tight shorts, a sports bra with much cleavage and a bare midriff (though, to be fair, no visible navel). Arriving at Wetherspoons she was ordered to 'cover up' with her light zip jacket because it was a 'family-friendly pub'. Cue flesh-rich pictures and her plaint: 'She looked me up and down like a piece of dirt. It makes me feel like I should be covering up, but I shouldn't be.'
Yes, you should, so hurrah for Spoons and the spirit of Grantham. The seasonal outbreak of urban beachwear does not beautify our land: find the right media-psychologist and you could probably classify it as a depressant of national 'mental health', provoking either disgust or creepily inappropriate judgment (online, people are already checking out her 'thigh gap').
This plague of public semi-nudity grows year on year. I tried for a while to consider it liberating, a Garden of Eden resistance to imported cover-up cultures which presume that an inch of female face or hair gives men a free pass for lechery. But I keep swerving to the other extreme, wishing extreme skin-shows would stay by beach and pool. Shirtless building workers have an excuse, though not for unlovely trouser slippage at the stern. If office workers of either sex feel comfortable in tidy Bermuda shorts, and women let a bit more thigh and shoulder out, fine. Ideally the old rule works: not both at once.
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But it's far beyond that. The close-up acreage of (mainly pink) flesh in every train, bus and crowd is a rude invasion, a scornful up-yours to anyone forced into sweaty proximity. It's not even cooler to expose great slabs of flesh: loose, blowing cotton does the job perfectly. And note, this is not just a youthful or downmarket habit. In a theatre stall the other day I sat behind a lady of boomer years who had opted for a backless spaghetti-strap dress. Fine in a ballroom but why, close up, should anyone pay £120 to stare past wrinkled, mole-dotted old flesh for two long hours? I only just resisted an impulse to write PUT IT AWAY on her well-padded backbone with my critic's rollerball.
Human skin is a marvel: durable, nuanced and generally self-repairing. Lovers revel in sharing it, infants are comforted by skin-on-skin. But in a post-modesty culture, why aggravate our national troubles with strangers' epidermal acreage? Elizabethan sumptuary laws are gone, and the 19th-century statute about outraging public decency only gets hauled out for the most blatant sexual displays or extreme political T-shirts. There is no legal redress. So re-dress, everyone. Please!
