“Pretty is out of fashion, it’s all about being hot”

HOME, 2pm. My mother is in the conservatory, in combative form.

She is reading a newspaper article about “how life is more difficult for teenage girls now” and cannot agree with a word of the argument put forward in it.

My daughters lie at my mother’s feet, draped across each other in front of the wood-burning stove, overwhelmed by the rigours of the first stage of their recovery from a night out.

They have risen at noon, drunk pints of water, swallowed Nurofen and said, “Morning, Granny”. After this, they made a nest of cushions, in which they now lie perfectly still, their limbs flung about them with such abandon that they might have been dropped on the floor from a great height, and suffered concussion.

I fold their washing while my husband feeds the stove with logs he’s been chopping since dawn.

My mother looks at me, where I am hunched over the laundry basket, into which a stream of teenage underwear far nicer than mine, pours from my fingers. Then she looks at my husband loading logs, so as to keep his daughters warm. After this, she peers over her specs and down at my daughters.

I feel that as a family, we have provided my mother with all she needs to furnish her argument.

“I mean it says here that teenage girls are suffering like never before,” she says. “What with having to live in a hyper-sexualised world, their self-esteem is at an all-time low and… let me find it… oh yes, here it is… ‘teenage girls are overwhelmed by having too many options’.”

She puts the article aside.

“Too many options?” she huffs. “I’d have been thrilled to have had more than one. I mean in the fifties the only option a teenage girl had was to wear her mother’s clothes, learn how to make a cheese soufflé, and then get married, and it didn’t matter a fig what brains you had.”

“Hyper-sexualisation isn’t an imaginary concept…” I interrupt.

“Try wearing a calf-length dress like the one my mother put me in at 16. With a mid-heel. When you’re four foot eleven. I mean it’s cruel.” She picks up the paper again and after a while, asks, “what exactly do they mean by the term ‘hot’?”

“Full-on sexy,” I say. “It’s not enough to be pretty anymore. Even the word ‘pretty’ has fallen out of fashion. Now it’s all about being hot.”

“Well,” she says looking fondly down at the girls. “They certainly pulled ‘hot’ off last night. I mean good god! That was really something to look at twice. And it didn’t seem to me as if they were suffering. It looked like they were having the time of their life.”

“But the fact remains, Mum, what with porn being so mainstream now, it’s affecting…”

“Porn?” she puffs. “We could have done with a bit of porn. At least then we’d have known the facts of life. I mean when girls got their periods in my day, they thought they were dying of some terrible disease. I remember being sent to the school matron and told to ask for a sanitary towel and being given this thing the size of a mattress. A mattress.”

My youngest daughter rouses herself suddenly. “For God’s sake, Granny,” she protests, before settling into a doze again. “There we’d go,” Mum continues, “trudging along the corridor to matron, month after month, with our heads hanging in shame…”

She looks at me over her specs. “I’m sorry,” she says, tapping the newspaper briskly, “but I cannot find any evidence in this house to support this argument.”

“As a study sample size, two girls hardly…” I say.

My eldest daughter wakes up, looks about groggily. “God, it’s boiling in here,” she says, “oh, hey granny.”

I cannot help but think that if I were to paint my daughters’ portrait now, I’d have to title it: ‘Girls of our Time! Voices of a Generation! A Life Without Care!’

“What have you two been chatting about?” my eldest yawns, before closing her eyes again.

“Oh… this and that,” I say.

She sighs and with a delicate, ‘tragic heroine’ quiver in her voice, says, “life is so much harder with a hangover”.

And I dare not look at mum.