Uncle Norman likes to talk about the year the mini-skirt was born. (The name has been changed to protect him.) It was 1965 and he was a law student living in Chelsea. And when the skirt arrived, he took a year off university, and spent it on the No. 22 bus on the King’s Road, following women up the stairs. At this point in the anecdote Uncle Norman usually closes his eyes.
I mention Uncle Norman’s contribution to social history because mini-skirts are in the news again, this time in Italy, which I always thought was a place where men liked women. But if this was ever true, and it probably wasn’t, it is now obvious that this amazing, never-to-be-repeated liking of women was, like the Enlightenment, a blip. A man called Luigi Bobbio, who sounds like a moron, is the mayor of a town called Castellammari di Stabia, just south of Naples. And he obviously has issues with women he’s too grief-struck to hide, because he has made the council ban mini-skirts, along with lying on benches, playing volleyball and touching yourself. (OK, these last two are pending.) Poor Castellammari di Stabia! Poor town!
Bobbio has also banned men going topless, but I don’t really care about that. I hate watching topless men eat spaghetti and it’s nudity. A mini-skirt is not nudity and, although I can rarely be bothered to defend anything fashion cares about, wearing a mini-skirt is a choice and if we can’t defend mini-choices, how can we defend anything? Bobbio, incidentally, is a member of the People of Freedom Party, so he is not only a moron, but a man who can’t read his own leaflets, which say freedom. He has never noticed that his party leader, Silvio Berlusconi, spends his time stuffing as many euros into young girls’ mouths as will fit behind the gloss. I will ignore the recesses of Bobbio’s crazed mind here, stating only that I would be very surprised if a woman has ever loved him in the naked, screaming sense of the word. It is enough to say that women who wear mini-skirts will now be fined in the town, and there will be an extra fine for exposing your tits.
So the mini-skirts of Castellammari di Stabia will have to hire Uncle Norman to represent them. He could start off with the observation that Castellammari di Stabia is now considered to be the mini-skirt and tits capital of the universe. What a PR own goal. ‘Think Castellammari di Stabia. Think tits.’ Brilliant.
Now this is the bit where I am supposed to go off like a human wind-up toy. I am supposed to put on my black (I’m in mourning!), left-wing, femo-fascist-costume and, now dressed as an angry crow, write I Hate Men on the mirror. I am supposed to fantasise about having Bobbio murdered by my mates in the Ukrainian mafia, or shagged to death by Julie Burchill, who is always happy to be used as a weapon. I am supposed to rant about how men try to control women with clothing when they get bored of trying to control them with low wages, or genital mutilation, or pornography, or advertising, or babies. I might rummage in my anecdote drawer and pull out my recent trip to Morocco, where half the female population is bound up like a suppurating wound, and the other gets perved over, in a sort of national perving competition. (Both are then invited to buy overpriced rugs, which I think I find more offensive than anything else.) I might talk about the Long Road to Auschwitz, always a Jew’s secret weapon when slagging off the pet social engineering projects of sexually repressed sadists. Today you’ll burn mini-skirts, Bobbio; tomorrow it’s the Jews. And we have zips! And all this is true.
But what I really want to say is — if you want to abolish sluts as a phenomenon, don’t ban the mini-skirt, Bobbio. You’re barking up the wrong skirt. If you want women who like sex to be shamed and deprived of their wages, persecute the women who dress like Maggie Smith in Downton Abbey — get the skirt police to measure the hem, because these are the sex monsters you fear. Whereas the mini-skirt is the uniform of the shy woman, who acts depraved because she isn’t. Everything I have ever known about women screams that hiding inside anyone wearing a mini-skirt, you’ll find a big, fat, shimmering prig.
And it won’t work. Remember how the US teenage virginity movement caused an epidemic of STDs and small children? I predict that Castellammari di Stabia will become a seething mass of sexual immorality, probably by lunchtime.