Ladettes on Tour
Go to Faliraki. Or Magaluf. Or Birmingham. Or, in fact, any city centre in Britain on a Saturday night and you will probably be confronted with the peculiar species that is the ladette. She is easily recognisable through her overly revealing clothes, her continuous smoking, drinking, extremely loud swearing, her quest for ’avin a laff, and her active compliance of getting her tits out for the lads.
Welcome to the colourful world of the British ladette — a female strain that has fully embraced equality and come stumbling out the other side in a beer-fuelled haze to prove she is just as up for it as the boys. With British women now drinking more than British men (and any other European nation), the ladettes can are a part of our culture.
But how much has this culture spread into university life and, specifically, the Oxford student’s social scene? Superficially Oxford seems to have escaped the ladette — we apparently have less sex than any other university in Britain, a relatively small amount of people smoke and we girls tend to stick to rosé rather than kegs. But under this respectable façade lies an underworld of distinctly ladette behaviour involving drinking societies, Jamals, and un-ladylike Blues drinking songs.
University hockey player Cerys Evans describes at length drinking initiations (with condoms and bananas), crew dates and having a shortest skirt competition, while the blokes sit quietly, pole dancing, and a goalkeeper arrested on varsity for being drunk and disorderly: “We tend to dominate any social. I suppose we started by trying to keep up with the guys but now we are way ahead and just get respect from the girls.” This is not confined to sport on a university level.
Jennifer Lewis, captain of the Somerville football team, concurred about crew date behaviour: “Some people even use football as an excuse for the socials. I never see them at training but they will be in Jamals without fail.” Girls drinking societies are similarly becoming more commonplace. The queen of Pembroke society, Garbo, claimed that nobody is forced to finish a drink but admitted that it probably would not work to have a teetotaller in the society.
“Only one girl that I can remember has got so battered that she had to be taken away in an ambulance. But we do tend to get really drunk at our socials.” But girls’ drinking is not confined to these organisations. Formal hall is a recognised opportunity to get so wasted that you do not realise how bad the dessert of light lemon parfait is. The only reason some girls I know joined the Law Society was the promise of termly unlimited alcohol.
Whenever we go to their champagne and chocolate events everyone seems to be drinking their membership fees worth in under ten minutes. But there is a definitive difference here to the streets and clubs of Malaga or Cardiff. The Oxford ladette only really comes out at night and, more often than not, appears in the form of a sports team or friendship group. Our antics are confined to drinking and the occasional cigarette, foregoing the obligatory ladette aggressive attitude.
“We still want to be girly and, if we know we are going to be standing on chairs we always wear hotpants under our skirts,” Evans explains. In fact, carrying on the girly line, I have never seen a bitch fight among female Oxford students, while it seems to be a standard element of a night out in my home town of Swansea.
Even when Oxford girls sway a little into boisterous behaviour (rebelliously singing Take That loudly on the street on the way to Park End), scathing looks are more likely to stop than encourage, and the appearance of a cruising police car will result in instant silence rather than a bout of anti-authoritarian swearing.
So we do not have bolshy female behaviour and we do spend a large percentage of our time thinking about/doing/avoiding essays and the library, but I think some of our Oxford ladies can be classified as a subsection of the traditional ladette seen elsewhere. The existence of the Oxford ladette is not a bad thing. It is a fun, girly release from the library and at least you will have an excuse if you get into a fight.
1st Jun 2006