Miley, Madonna, Britney and...Marie Lloyd...?

October 7^th – The thing is, it’s like sex; everyone who does it for the first time thinks they’re the ones invented it. What we have to consider in many (most…all) of the things we do is that there’s nothing new under the sun.

Miley Cyrus was much in the news last year (Really, Peter? Thank goodness you were here to alert us to that little known fact) because of her antics…twerking, I believe the phrase is. By doing this…thing, whatever it was, was Ms. Cyrus trying to be seen to be relevant, in control and cutting edge? Or is it just that to gain attention these days you have to be more…I don’t know…risqué than those who went before? I’ll give you a f’rinstance.

You remember, back in the day, when Madonna kissed Britney in 2003, the shock-horror that followed it (The MailOnline (?) said it was a French kiss though how they’d know that is beyond me; probably the same way they knew Mr. Milliband’s dad hated Briton). Anyway, that kiss: the use of words like uproar and stunned and shocked were standard fodder in the following morning’s press reports. But all of the reports filed, by the majority of the male journalists, were tinged with the sort of language that titillated the readership; it was the kind of reportage that could only have been produced by having had one hand on their pen and the other on their cock.

So, now, go back even further to the time of the first pre-watershed woman/woman kiss in Brookside in 1994. After that little episode the programme faced a storm of criticism from viewers and the scene was dropped from the omnibus edition aired on the Sunday…censorship by any other name, I’d say but that’s another story.

Thing is, for pop stylists like Ms. Cyrus and Ms Gaga to lasso the limelight from their predecessors they have to go a stage further, be more outrageous, more in your face, and so subtlety and coquetry are abandoned; simulated sex with anyone and anything on stage now becomes the modus operandi. When Madonna simulated masturbation in her Blonde Ambition Tour in 1990 it set the bar for others to jump. What’s next up from masturbation on stage…? Well, I guess its simulating doggie-style, heterosexual sex on stage. The next step from that? Well, hello Live Porn…then…with multiple partners…? Thing is, girls, you’re late; it’s been done by Valeria Messalina…in 30AD…sorry, and, in honesty, it does nothing for the furtherance of women’s issues at all really, as Marie Lloyd, who died this day in 1922, found out in 1895.

Ms. Lloyd was a 19^th century music hall performer of international standing. Captivating audiences in Great Briton and the USA as well as South Africa, France, Belgium and Australia, she had a way with a song that was at one and the same time innocent of indecency and yet laced with innuendo and double entendre. As with the Misses Cyrus and Gaga, Ms. Lloyd’s routine relied on physical suggestion to accompany the lyrics of her ditties which were, as befits the time, devoid of any sexual connotation…but it’s amazing what you can do with a straight face but a loose hip movement and a slight parting of the legs when coupled with a line like wink the other eye. As with others before her, Ms Lloyd found herself being berated by the feminists of the day.

Laura Ormiston Chant, who was as religious as she was feminist, was against music halls per se (the meeting place for prostitutes) and was instrumental in the campaign against them, seeing their continued use as undermining the serious business of female empowerment (there’s that word again).

In an effort to regulate the music hall traditions, and with hearty support from Ms. Chant, the councils made to close them by refusing license renewals. It was Ms. Lloyd who found herself the music hall champion when she was summoned before a council meeting to perform her routine and so confirm, they believed, the routine’s unsuitability and the places it was performed as places of crude entertainment. She performed her routine straight; no gestures, no sly winks, no suggestive hip or leg movements and the council could find nothing amiss. She then performed Alfred Tennyson’s drawing-room ballad, Come Into the Garden, Maude, a favourite with the drawing room classes, but she added winks, leers and nudges, completely transforming the song;

Rudeness is all in the mind.

She said to them before leaving them stunned and unable to justify their earlier stance.

OK. Interesting reading of recent statements for you all.

The inquest about what has been described as selected female empowerment being shown before the TV watershed is now being lumped in with calls for an internet pornography crackdown: my, how things change and yet remain exactly the same.