Sluts

(Yes, it’s all been too hard, so I’ve decided to do a Rundle and end it all quickly. The title oughta do it pretty well.)

Last month, I wrote a post riffing off Cooking in a Bedsitter, a very funny and much loved cookbook by Katherine Whitehorn. In preparing the post, I read a bit about Whitehorn who, no surprise, turned out to be a very funny and very feisty lady. Whitehorn was a young woman in 50s London and thrived in the liberation of the times. Not mainly sexual liberation, although that also seemed part of it, but more intellectual and social liberation. Whitehorn revelled in no longer needing to be dainty or so proper. For some great little interview snippets with Whitehorn, go here.

From the early 60s and for many decades, Whitehead wrote a weekly column in the London Observer. Her most famous and very funny column was Sluts, written in 1963. The column was not called that but that is how people seem to remember it now, or as the “the Sluts column”. Not surprisingly, the column caused a stir.

To clarify, Whitehorn used the term “sluts” in that column (and many times afterwards) to mean a (female) slob, without the sexual connotations. This is truer to the original English usage, although the sexual usage came in soon after. Probably a more accurate word for Whitehorn’s purposes is “slattern”, although this still has some sexual connotations. Why did Whitehorn use “sluts”? Presumably for the scandalous undertones (or, more accurately, tones). It certainly grabs one’s attention.

Below is Whitehorn’s Sluts column, as well as a follow-up column written a few months later. Both columns seem to be only available in grainy archiving, so it seemed worth transcribing them (which wasn’t easy). Presumably there are copyright issues, but I’m hoping they’re forgotten enough that no one objects (and obviously I’ll respect any objections).

 

Sisters under the coat

December 29, 1963

This article is dedicated to all those who have ever changed their stockings in a taxi, brushed their hair with someone else’s nailbrush or safety-pinned a hem, and those who have not had probably better not read on.

Anyone in doubt, however, can ask herself the following questions. Have you ever taken anything back out of the dirty-clothes basket because it had become, relatively, the cleaner thing? How many things are there, at the moment, in the wrong room – cups in the study, boots in the kitchen: and how many of them are on the floor of the wrong room?

Could you try on clothes in any shop, any time, without worrying about your underclothes? And how, if at all, do you clean your nails? Honest answers should tell you, once and for all, whether you are one of us: the miserable, optimistic, misunderstood race of sluts.

We are not ordinary human beings who have degenerated, as people think: we are born this way. Even at four you can pick us out: the little girls in the playground who have one pant-leg hanging down and no hair-slide; at 10 we are the ones who look dirty even when we are clean (unlike the goodigoodies who look unfairly clean when they are dirty); and at 15, now that black stockings are back, we betray ourselves in the changing room by legs spotted like a Dalmation’s, the inevitable result of using Indian ink instead of darning wool.

It’s an effort

People who are not sluts intolerantly assume that we must like things this way, without realising the enourmous effort and inconvenience that goes into being so ineffective: the number of times we have to fill the car’s radiator because we don’t get it mended, the fortunes we spend on taxis going back for parcels we have left in shops, the amount of ironing occasioned by our practice of unpacking not so much when we get back from a week-end as four days later.

We acquire, it is true, certain off-beat skills: I am much better at holding a bottle of varnish between two fingers than those of my friends who do not paint their nails in the Tube, and they cannot cut their nails with a penknife either: but nothing really makes up to us for the difficulties of our condition. 

However, I am not trying to make a soggy bid for sympathy so much as to work out what we can possibly do to improve our condition. And the first thing is to inscribe ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE over the lintels of all our messy houses; for it is our optimism that is principally our undoing. We keep hoping that we will remember to wash our white collars, or find time to comb our hair on the way to the office, or slide into the building and dump our coats before anyone can see that there are three buttons missing. More, it seems to me, could be done if we could only face up realistically to all the things we will never be able to do. 

No resolutions

We can realise, for example, that no power on earth is going to make us look well turned out all, or even most, of the time. We can therefore give up right away any New Year resolutions about fashion: a second pair of little white gloves will simply result our carrying two right hands; wigs would be a waste of money because those of us who cannot keep our real hair tidy cannot keep our toy hair tidy either. Instead, we can wear reasonably sober clothes normally, go for stacked heels because we know we won’t remember to get them reheeled before they are worn down, have only one colour of accessories, so that we cannot wear the brown shoes with the black bag. 

Bulk buying

And, having accepted that people are not going to say “she’s always so chic,” we can concentrate every now and then on really dazzling efforts that will knock our audience sideways. Jane Austen was right when she said that no beauty accustomed to compliments ever got anything like the thrill of an ordinary looker who was told she was looking terrific that evening.

We can give up making good resolutions about replacing things before they run out, which is absurd, and concentrate instead on bulk buying, so that the gap between supply and supply happens much more rarely. We can also, of course, keep icing sugar, the wrong sort of rice, tea bags, spearmint toothpaste and so on specifically to tide us over when we run out of these things. It is true that we tend not to have any money either, but as we usually spend what we have at the beginning of the month like drunken sailors anyway, we might as well spend it on vast tubs of cleansing cream, acres of Kleenex (which we have to, since clean handkerchiefs, let’s face it, are beyond us), sugar in 10lb. bags.

Apart from this sort of grim realism, there are, I think, only two other things that can help us. The first is habit; odd as it may seem, even sluts do occasionally acquire good habits (we clean our teeth, for example, even if sometimes we have to do it with soap) and these, indeed, are all that hold us together. A slut who baths whenever she has time never baths at all: her only hope is to get up into one every morning; if she shops here and there for food there will never be any around, but a Saturday supermarket raid will settle a whole week’s hash at one go.

Treasured hope

And the second is money: for the only way a slut can really get things done is to get someone else to do them. Even the most domestic slut will find it worth earning a few pounds to pay for the help in the house. 

The only way to make up for missing the post is a long-distance telephone call; the only way to not have to go back to fetch things is to get them picked up by messenger. The only thing that will get a slut’s carpets vacuumed daily is a daily. All sluts ought to be, or to marry, rich people: and I treasure the hope that among the really rich there may be dozens of sluts lurking undetected by the rest.

Money, low cunning and a sense of realism may help us somewhat; but it is a hard life all the same. I wrote this article two years ago, but as it was felt that it hardly came well from the pen of a fashion editor, it was never printed. So I thought I had a soft option using it now; except that, of course, I couldn’t find it, and have had to write the whole blasted thing again.

 

Pages from a slut’s handbook

March 15, 1964

A couple of months ago I owned up in this column to being a slut. It was absolutely splendid. I found that there were scores of us, all struggling away.

There was the woman who got to be a dab hand at identifying lettuce in the dark, as she never remembered to pick it by daylight, and the one who said she couldn’t have daily help as it was too much effort clearing up before she came. There was one who cited her six children as proof of her sluthood, in one direction at least, and the mother who claimed that (thanks to a scarf in the wrong washing-machine load) her baby was the only one in Ruislip with blue nappies. 

Coming to terms on a yacht

Men too, they call it slobs, one wrote in block capitals by candlelight having run out of shillings for the meter and another said he stapled his braces to his trousers when all buttons failed.

Some sluts had come to terms with their state. “We live on a small yacht: it solves a lot of problems” – presumably much of the mess simply falls over the side and is washed away. Others are still protesting, “Why are there no three-way mirrors even in first-class carriages?” A good many offered suggestions on thwarting the second law of thermodynamics which, as one pointed out, is the tendency of everything in the universe towards dissolution and decay.

Their suggestions were colourful to the point of being lurid. There was the business of keeping suspenders going when the bobble is old, many rejected aspirins, on the grounds that sluts never have any (but use gin for headaches instead), and instead advocated corn rings and coins, one said “I used the buttons on my husband’s pyjamas till he sewed them on again.”

Betrayal by the seam

Shoulder straps can be kept going with a paperclip, and one woman even suggested that if both straps have gone you can keep a slip up by wearing your bra outside it. To my mind, one should go in for vests and slips that are strapless on purpose. I [?] made that way and stay up accordingly.

Plainly, sluts should not wear seemed nylons, as it is the seams that usually betray the fact that the stockings are not a pair – and ladders show pale than in patterned stockings. Sluts should get all necessary hems shortened at the time of purchase, since they will never actually get around to doing it themselves, and, apropos of hems, they should keep a steady supply of black safety pins. 

Many would agree that colourless pearl nail varnish shows chips less than coloured but if the varnish is to hide London grime as well three coats per nail is a minimum. For any dress that has a little white collar, a slut should also buy some white beads, for the collar’s off-days, and all sluts should have bathroom curtains made of towelling for the times when the towels are in the hot-cupboard and the guest in the bathroom. 

Explosions, sheets of flame

Sluts have special problems in the kitchen. Any slut must at all costs avoid a pressure cooker, or sooner or later she will leave it too long (like all those other blackened pans) and blow herself up. She needs a lot of Kleenex, both for sitting a cup on when the saucer is sloppy, and for wiping around a pan out of which fat has spilled: if you don’t, as I know from bitter experience, the fat down the side of the pan acts as a fuse to the gas and the whole thing goes up in a sheet of flame.

One slut asserts sadly that “you cannot make white sauce with custard powder”: another recommends double sinks – so that when one is stacked with dirty crocks you can still wash the cup you need in the other. I myself am a great believer in wooden plates (from Leuter, Munich) since you cannot break them; though I have to admit that you can – I have – set them on fire. 

Second-try disaster

When it comes to entertaining, sluts should beware the second time. The first time you cook anything, you go carefully and may get it right; the second, the chances are you think you remember it better than you do or overcorrect on some small faults, and disaster follows. 

No slut could be expected to keep a hostess book, but one book which is useful is a book like an address-book as a check on all other cookery books: you look up veal, say, and it gives you your six different recipes with the books they come in and page numbers. This begins by being exactly the sort of pointless time-consuming reorganisation that sluts love, and ends by being an effective way of stopping you either cooking the same thing over and over, or embarking on the right dish but the wrong recipe. 

Sluts should buy stamped envelopes, as half of them never have stamps and the other half never have envelopes: they should go in for string bags because their overloaded paper carriers always burst.

Those who have desks can stratify the mess on them by putting a layer of newspaper over it all and starting again – the dates on the newspapers then tell the slut what the paleolithic shells tell the geologist (though one don in Cambridge who does this is said to have buried his umbrella on his desk – open).

One could go on forever. No one was able to suggest a way in which sluts could cure themselves of the disease known in my home town as “doing a Whitehorn” – taking endless trouble to save yourself trouble, so that you clean an oil lamp rather than walk to the corner of the road to buy a new bumb, or throw cushions at a door for 10 minutes rather than get up and shut it. 

A substitute for tidiness

The only serious spur to tidying up is generally agreed to be visitors – the only drawback being that after they have gone your Pelmanism has to be even better than usual if you are ever to find anything again. But sluts are good at using memory as a substitute for tidiness – though I absolutely deny that I ever said (as friends allege): “If you’re looking for the tax forms, they’re under your slippers in the salad bowl.”

Perhaps there should be a limit on the size of salad bowl a slut should be allowed to own.