“Don’t dress like you’re for sale”

IT’S the last night of our weekend-break in Amsterdam.

Today, my friend and I have walked backwards and forwards past the museums, ignoring their reproach as we browsed in and out of shops. Now we’re heading back to our hotel through the red-light district.

I look at the prostitutes, smiling from their booths as I pass by, and contemplate the oldest profession in the world. I think the thoughts that I thought I’d think before coming here: that prostitution, like oxygen, is always there but you never see it — not where I live, anyway.

I think about what it might feel like to rent my body out to a stranger. I think that some of the girls look about 16 and hope the booths are warm.

And then my thinking hops sideways; I think these girls in the windows look oddly familiar. Their pretty breasts and bottoms bounce pertly out of cropped-tops, corsets and micro-shorts. Belly-button piercings wink out of firm flesh in the red light. Fake-tanned legs are elongated by six-inch heels and eyes are drawn huge and black. This generic look, flagging up sexual availability, is so familiar to me that I haven’t noticed its finer details until this moment, when the thought “these girls would fit right in in Ireland” arrives like a surprise visitor. This look — this “underwear as outerwear” look, is the one to which our teenage girls — often very young — routinely aspire.

When you’re an adult in the business of selling your sexual parts, it makes perfect sense to advertise them — why not flag them up big and bold? Here in the red-light district, it’s easy to see what function this look fulfils. Operating on the principle of ‘it does exactly what it says on the tin’, it does the job very well.

But when the look is taken out of this context, it metamorphoses into something more complicated — more conflicted. It’s hard to know what to make of it.

When my daughters first began to go clubbing, wearing clothes of which the overall effect was: ‘in yer face’, I sensed it might be best to avoid any discussion that might bedevil itself with words such as ‘empowerment’, ‘freedom’, ‘equality’ or “you’re not going out like that”.

Instead, I asked them if I could demonstrate something.

“Demonstrate what?” they said.

“The look you’re pulling off, when you go out.”

“Don’t be weird,” they said.

“Humour me.”

“Oh for god’s sake,” they said.

But in spite of themselves they looked interested. “Come on,” I said, “it’ll be a laugh.”

Ten minutes later, I stand in the kitchen, wearing my daughter’s rose-print corset belly-top, out of which my breasts all but spill, and her miniscule black skirt. My arms, legs and shoulders are bare. I stand six inches higher in killer heels. I’ve applied drag-queen quantities of make-up, complete with foundation tide-marks along my jaw-line and I’ve puffed-up my hair.

It is a wholly unforgiving look.

Both my daughters are silent. Both look slightly… pained. My youngest looks particularly disturbed. She says, “don’t get me wrong…” but trails off.

“What?” I say.

“Nothing…”

“No, tell me, what?”

“I can see your arse-cheeks.”

I ask my eldest daughter what she thinks of my look.

“I dunno,” she says, wincing from behind her laptop, “it would look better with a cardigan or something… it looks kind of…” she trails off.

“What?”

“Wrong… and… I dunno…”

“What?”

“…and it’s not just because you’re old.”

On the issue of freedom, empowerment and equality — specifically how women dress — my feeling is that women should wear what they want but, before young girls go about deciding what they want to wear when they go clubbing, it might be interesting for them to consider this: there’s as much chance of catching a teenage boy shivering in “underwear as outerwear” outside a nightclub in Ireland, as there is of finding a boy wearing a burka in Kabul.

Bottom line: on the issue of freedom, empowerment, equality and dress: girls, just do exactly what the boys do on this one — don’t dress like you’re for sale.