The lamb and the lion

“Mutton dressed as lamb.” God, I hate that particular put-down!

That one succinct censure sums up the whole sexist catastrophe, it seems to me.

It’s reserved especially for the woman who has tried to squeeze herself into the beauty conundrum and has failed. Sure, her nails are perfect, her hair sublime, her make up flawless, her clothes tailored, her accessories just so. But she has failed. The tone of her outfit is too “girlie” for the woman in question. She is too old to “get away” with something about her appearance. Perhaps her hemline is a little high, her cleavage too low, a bow where there should not be a bow, a flounce that should not flounce.

I hate this jab because it said by women about women. We are sentinels at the gates of our own humiliation. Nor is it even said by women to women. It is whispered behind hands, said behind backs. I can visualise the victim now, walking away from the “perps”, ears burning as she is conspired against, to detonate all her effort into fragments with those four words.

The reproach “mutton dressed as lamb” popped into my head when I was writing about the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty last week, a campaign that is trying to expand our view of beauty.

But that scornful criticism puts us right back in the tiny beauty box and humiliates us for trying.

Expectations of women at work and at home are enormous and on top of this we are meant to try to look exactly “right” all the time: sexy when sexy is wanted, professional when that is the go, motherly, creative, no-nonsense. And, because we try to comply, we can fail. If we had not tried, we could shrug off a snide remark. We are – and always are – damned if we do and damned if we do not.

Virginia Woolf captures the agony of that failure indelibly in her short story, The New Dress, from which i have selected some of its many evocative images ...

“Mabel had her first serious suspicion that something was wrong as she took her cloak off and Mrs Barnet, while handing her the mirror and touching the brushes and thus drawing her attention, perhaps rather markedly, to all the appliances for tidying and improving hair, complexion, clothes, which existed on the dressing table, confirmed the suspicion – that it was not right, not quite right, which growing stronger as she went upstairs and springing at her, with conviction as she greeted Clarissa Dalloway, she went straight to the far end of the room, to a shaded corner where a looking-glass hung and looked. No! It was not RIGHT...”

“But she dared not look in the glass. She could not face the whole horror – the pale yellow, idiotically old-fashioned silk dress with its long skirt and its high sleeves and its waist and all the things that looked so charming in the fashion book but not on her, not among all these ordinary people. She felt like a dressmaker’s dummy standing there, for young people to stick pins into.”

And, just finally, I hate this denigration because it tells us so firmly that women are for the pleasure of the viewer when they are young but must be invisible when they are not. They may be wiser, smarter, more masterful and balanced and insightful that their younger counterparts but they must blend artfully into nothingness, or be condemned if they do not.

Let’s put an end to sexist put-downs, whether we say them to ourselves or about others.

Do you agree? Write and tell me your views.

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