In Ireland, the current fashion for young women is to dress as if they are stepping on to the beach at Copacabana, not into the squall on O'Connell Bridge. Belly tops, mini-skirts, boob tubes, thongs looping around their ribs, trousers sliding below the hips. There is so much bum cleavage on view on Grafton St these days it would embarrass a plumber.
The trend seems untroubled by climate; winter encroaches, the clothes recede. Nor is much consideration given to whether a particular body shape is advisable to reveal. This is the age of obesity, but it seems that the fatter we get, the more we want to show it off. So, many Irish women now dress to distress, the flesh squeezed out the middle for that "muffin top" look. Tummies are on parade; flesh cascades over belt buckles, thighs collide like continents. What's in this season? A style that suggests someone has tried to stuff a bouncy castle into a bikini.
Besides, Irish skin should be taken out only for special occasions. It takes fright when exposed to the elements, becomes pink and blotchy in anything less than 20 degrees. In the Mediterranean, those beautiful women reveal skin that has been kissed by the sun and ripened by the heat. Irish skin looks like it has been smacked by hail, as if a person has just been taken off a hook in a meat fridge. Nevertheless, some cling to the belief that the best way to present such a package is to wrap it in a micro-mini and tie it with a thong.
This public exhibition of flesh is desperately confusing for men, who want to look, but don't think they're supposed to look, but maybe they are . . . and they get awfully bothered by the messages it sends out about modern women. There is a generation, you understand, which was raised in the feminist age, taught not to leer, but to respect; who were raised with the idea that women did not wish to be viewed as sexual objects. But here we are in the post-feminist age, and all that ideology seems to have been strangled by the arrival of the thong. A new generation of young women revels in an ideological dichotomy, accepting their hard-won freedom from gender stereotype, but using that freedom to objectify themselves.
And you can bet this is precisely what a guy's thinking at the moment he gets caught staring at a woman's bum cleavage.