Tough Old Birds!!!

My generation are tough.   Our parents had just come through a world war and if we had told them we were umhappy at school they would have told us we were lucky that we weren’t being taught in German.   Girls had a very differnet life then.  We were quite restricted – no wearng jeans in public, no getting a mortgage without a male guarantor, no birth control without a wedding ring – although logically that didn’t make much sense and you could buy a wedding ring, that that turned your finger green, for a few shillings in Woolworths!   We were made of pretty stern stuff.  We followed in the footsteps of rhe Pankhursts and we aspired to go to Greenham common (if you don’t know  look it up!) and to burn our bras not flaunt them as a Victoria’s Secret model.    We didn’t know what a  ’celebrity’ was – not sure I know now except that if I ever pick up a copy of Hello it is full of identical looking women who are famous for baing famous and completely unknown to me.   It is a mystery why in this day and age, when we have had women prime ministers, have women consultants, CEOs, pilots, engineers – anything you like and yet so many young women want to be ‘influencers’  – I believe that they can  earn a fortune displaying their pillow lips, ample breasts and hair extensions on Tik Tok selling yet another wonder cream that will make you look like them in a matter of moments.   However I do find it depressing that there are women today whose ambition only extends to showing other young women (and probably men) how to create the perfect eyebrow.  If only, you might think, AI could invent a filter to make all of us look perfect – but does everyone one want to look like a clone of everyone else?    Howver if they could invent a way to inject people with common sense how much happier we would be.  

Men often get a bad rap these days as women complain how badly they have been treated.   Of course any assault is terrible and rape is a dreadful crime, but dressing in ultra revealing clothes, having one too many drinks and going up to man’s room in the early hours of the morning because he has offered you a job is just plain foolish.   Sometimes I don’t think it would do any good if a man asked a woman to sign a consent form as in the cold light of day they would claim they were coerced.   We were taught to spot a red flag – and pass the word on.   NSIT was a well known acronym that stood for Not Safe In Taxis!   And as for up-skirting – something I have read about but thankfully have no experience of – that could never have happened in our day.   For one thing trying to take a photograph surreptitiously with a box Brownie would have been virtually impossible   Added to which we wore thick navy wool over knickers and I never knew why but they certainly wouldn’t have made for a sexy photo

One of the chief executive of a hospital told me not that long ago that they had had to change their way of working in A & E because the old are too stoic.   Young people come in with a paper cut and demand pain killers and immediate admission and the old come in with a broken limb apolgising for being a nuisance.

We were brought up tough, we ate what we were given, we sat still in church, we didn’t answer back.   Of course we rebelled as we got older but life was so very different.   My grandchildren find it difficult to believe that people went to prison for homosexuality.   We weren’t vaccinated for much – I certainly had measles, chicken pox, mumps, German measles, hepatitis and scarlet fever, but we were vaccinated against smallpox as that still existed and we had some of the first vaccines against polio.  And there were plenty of things/words that we didn’t know:   Lupus, non-binary, dyslexia, anorexia, ADHD, autism, trans, the list could go on and on.  

Teenagers had only just been invented so that was fun, although early teenage years were blighted by fashion and make up designed for middle aged women.   Of course we managed to misbehave but with any luck without it being splashed all over the newspapers

We didn’t have a fit of the vapours if a man whistled at us or pinched our bum and if we had told our parents that we needed therapy thay would have told us to pull ourselves together.   I had never heard of anyone having therapy and mental health was never discussed.   We did know about criminals who were diagnosed by a psychiatrist as being insane and then incarcerated in Broadmoor.   David Sullivan has been in the press recently for inappropriate sexual advances to young girls but as he had made his money through soft porn even the most naïve girls must have realised that when he wanted to ‘interview; them this was hardly likely to be an invitation to a vicarage tea party.

If I had any wish for the future it would be that if women want equality they learn to look after themselves by using their brains and accepting the fact that men tend to be stronger physically so it is better to think and not to get into awkward situations in the first place.