Don’t take such glee in sexy schoolgirl fantasies
There was nothing sexy about my school uniform. For five fashion-free years, my classmates and I wore frumpy royal blue skirts — measured regularly to check that we weren't showing too much leg — and polyester jumpers so static that hair-balls would accumulate under our arms.
Forget condoms: never underestimate the contraceptive powers of Chewbacca pits. Combined with spotty skin, greasy hair and an addiction to Impulse's O2, abstinence wasn't just a choice, it was the only option.
So the fetishtic fixation on fully fledged females trussed up as jailbait has always struck me as strange.
The most excruciating scene I have seen on the stage this year was just such a fantasy. In Nick Payne's Wanderlust, Joy — a clever fortysomething doctor played by the wonderful Pippa Haywood — dressed up as a schoolgirl for her teacher husband, Alan. Yes, the ultimate fantasy of a man entrusted with educating the under-18s was essentially Britney Spears in Baby One More Time.
But where this idea clearly crossed over into the sinister is the Glee Gone Wild shoot in the US edition of GQ. The spread features exceptionally tawdry photos of two exceptionally talented actresses, Dianna Agron and Lea Michele. Oh, and Glee's male lead Cory Monteith modelling coats.
Since they don't wear uniforms on the show, instead we see Michele in her scanties and school socks sucking on a lollipop as she leans against a locker, her back arched in that classic "booty out, breasts up" porn pose. Agron — who looks uncomfortable throughout — is shot in a classroom with a skimpy cheer-leading skirt and pom-poms.
Meanwhile, the cover shows the semi-clad ladies having their bottoms squeezed by the man that they out-act and out-sing in every episode. The pictures — cheesy, dated and lacking any imagination — were taken by "porn-chic" photographer Terry Richardson, a snapper whose favourite subject eems to be his own penis and who has been accused of exploiting young models.
The Glee actresses — who are in their twenties — are not their schoolgirl characters, of course. Moreover, GQ is a magazine for adults and, if papers hadn't so enjoyed printing the photos, most impressionable minds — the young Gleeks — would probably never have seen them. But there remains something disturbing about GQ's readers ogling women dressed up as teens; this is semi-soft porn set in a school — a Lolita fantasy.
Those with Humbert Humbert-esque daydreams are surprisingly well-catered for in our society, though. In a brief moment of looking back at my days of NHS specs through rose-tinted ones, I once went to School Disco. Dante clearly knew nothing. The ninth circle of hell was this club night: a load of boozed-up oldies trying to relive the "best days of their lives" while women dress up as the girl who used to be cruelly taunted as the "school bike".
Sexy schoolgirl is, of course, a fantasy. But getting your partner to emulate a minor is different from asking them to get kitted out in a Princess Leia or Mr Darcy costume. In this year's fully-justified hoo-hah about the sexualisation of children, we never looked the other way: to ask why grown women dressing up as girls are seen as acceptable lust-objects — after all, this too must blur the line between girlhood and womanhood. After "Glee-gate", shouldn't Lolita fantasies be finally put to bed?
