Mr Z was having a crisis of confidence, due to the change of seasons. He thinks summer’s easy when you’re young; you just wear fewer clothes. In middle age all these questions crowd in: are you allowed to wear shorts? Where do you stand on vests? Should you be worrying about your body hair? What if it’s greying? Did society ever land on a decision regarding socks, sandals, toes, men, pedicures and the peculiar pallor below the ankle tan line? It’s a minefield. Better not to get dressed at all.
It was such a stark contrast of the social experience of the genders, that it was almost endearing. Imagine reaching the age of 49 before worrying about how many clothes you’re allowed to take off. Imagine reaching the end of May before the sock-and-sandal question breaks into your consciousness.
My experience of the timeline, conversely, is distilled in the phrase: are you beach body ready? In the 90s, it was delivered as a completely straightforward question to women and girls of every age, sometime in March, to give us all time to buy whatever the hell they were selling (fake tan? Diet plans? Bikinis? Whatever it was, it was never anything fun, like a sea inflatable).
In the 00s, there was a little pushback, along the lines of: “Well, I have a body, and I plan to put it on a beach, so I guess yes, I am ready.” By the 10s, the question tended to be asked in jest, but the foundational expectation remained, that physical deviation from the ideal was your responsibility to cover up, and if that meant you were wearing a polo neck in 98-degree heat, well, had you considered one made of chiffon?
All the young women I know find my generation’s reflexive, internalised fat-shaming weird and ridiculous. Which, just in the spirit of remaining connected to modernity means, at 50, I’ve come full circle, and the only concession I make to the weather, the patriarchy, the whole architecture of social norm-enforcement, is that I’ll go to the small Tesco’s in my pyjamas, and never the big one.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
