Dancing a single vortex which grows and dwindles

BACKWARD EVOLUTION

Thirty-five years on from the publication of ‘A Girl Like I’, Rosemary McLeod has gyred back to prudery via promiscuity and prurience. Like many of those who were challenged by the liberality of the late 1960s and 1970s, she appears to have grown crabby and judgmental.

Typical is one of her recent articles on the Wellington’s newest strip club The Calendar Club where she really lays into the young girls who might gyrate and lap-dance under its strobes [‘There’s No Stopping the March of Progress’, Dominion Post, 01/12/2011]:

‘The patrons will, of course, be men. The young women working there will, just as naturally, require decent central heating to prevent that untoward side-effect of going about half-naked, which is goose-bumps. I have heard that goose-bumps are a turnoff.

‘Industry being thin on the ground in this town, we're adapting, like Darwin's finches. The sex trade which I call light industry provides wholesome work for female school-leavers who'd otherwise be under their parents' feet all day, and will encourage them to keep fit, which can only be healthy.

‘There is, as yet, no formal qualification required, so there's no need for them to lift their sights to say bookish heights. As for the job description, it's as old as time, like the style of the planned decor. The staff there will be work for 80, we're told won't get paid any extra for exams they may have passed, and investors have never followed The World of Interiors; they rely on instinctive knowledge of what constitutes a sure thing.

Now from someone who engaged it seems in more than a fair share of bunga bunga, rumpo rumpo and diggly in her time, with All and particularly Sundry, and wrote a book about it, Rosemary’s comments may seem a bit harsh and hoity toity.

She seems to regard it as a Big Step Backwards that the girls are being paid for a fraction of what the 1960-70 Pill Generation happily shared gratis. Though I am no supporter of sleaze, there is some irony in her puritanical insights into what constitutes Progress.

Who knows - one of the Calendar Girls might go to write a book about her experiences and become a celebrity journalist!

Actually [and this is just between you and I] I am available for parties – no gold coins - notes only in my lycra thong.