Put them away girls...

When my teenage son asked me to help him get rid of all the pornographic pop-ups on his PC the other day, I realized something which is becoming increasingly obvious: society is bored of in-your-face sex. Bored of Jordan, Jodie and their ridiculous topless ilk; bored of live sex shows in foam plastered Ibizan nightclubs; bored of starlet slut dresses slashed to the thigh and slit to the waist; and, frankly as my son also pointed out, totally bored with video clips of Paris Hilton’s nocturnal activities dropping – ping! - into his inbox. Sex has become unerotic, unappealing and, well, unsexy.

Every event I try to avoid but end up having to go to for one reason or the other, is filled with a room full of women dressed like they are ready for bed (and I don’t mean stripy PJ’s). Pushed-up cleavages served on a bed of Wonderbras, see-through skirts revealing tacky white thongs, the list of clothing disasters reads like an Ann Summers mail order catalogue. The saddest thing is that most of them just look like the cabaret girls that they all criticize and are all over fourty. Well, enough is enough. Far from turning us on, this constant sexual bombardment has actually succeeded in turning us off. According to a survey in a UK woman’s magazine, one in four women now prefer cleaning to lovemaking, and married women now have less sex than their 1950’s counterparts. Everyone else may be flaunting it, but that hasn’t made us feel like getting it.
Thank goodness, then, that the tide is finally turning. At the catwalk shows I attended at the beginning of the year for the current season, as if by magic, the whole fashion world agreed with the divine and demure looks of past decades. Cue tight below the knee pencil skirts, jackets with nipped in waists, the Hitchcock heroines of the 50’s and the anointing of a new erogenous zone: the ankle. What the Yuppies were to the 80’s the Yuffies are to today. That is young, urban females: the latest demographic to be discovered by the marketing men, whose aspiration is to be born again as virgins – they reckon that they only have to abstain from sleeping with men for a year to qualify. Even J.Lo, the woman who turned the world with her bottom in the past, turned up at New York fashion week dressed like Mary Jane this year.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s not sex itself that’s the problem. It’s how it’s sold to us. We don’t want everything to be given away on the packaging. We want frisson, we want suggestion, atmosphere, tension and flirting. It’s no coincidence that the most fun you can have in London right now is speed-dating in the dark, or that the sexiest film we have seen in years was the one where Bill Murray whispered something in Johanssen's ear. We don’t know what he said, but we can imagine.
‘Sexiness is a complicated thing, but it’s private, too,’ said the very clever Miuccia Prada. Privacy is way more interesting than the declared and obvious and if you want to know what is going to happen next in the fashion world, you would do well to listen to her.
So, girls, leave the mini skirts and nipple revealing t-shirts to the teenagers and put your designer thongs to the back of the drawer. From now on, the lady is no longer a tramp. Instead, she’s after the thrill of the chaste…