Emma Cowing: What do today's girls want? It's a no-brainer

Published on Monday 7 February 2011 14:43

EVERY GIRL grows up dreaming of her wedding day. Or so we're told, at any rate. Personally, I grew up dreaming of the day Noel Edmonds would disappear from our television screens, but you can't have everything in life.

Yet even the girls who devote months of their lives to selecting just the right sort of sugar almond favours and are on first-name terms with ten different types of tulle would have struggled to conjure up a 14-stone wedding dress with so many fairy lights its only mandatory accessory was a fire extinguisher.

I refer, of course, to My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, the Channel 4 series which over the past few weeks has been dazzling the nation, quite literally, with more rhinestones than you can shake a glowstick at. With unprecedented access into the traveller community, it has treated us to a bird's-eye view of life as a gypsy woman in 21st-century Britain. It is a world that, on the surface at least, seems strange and alien.

Girls drop out of school at the age of 11 to scrub the floors and polish the family caravan. Many of them cannot read. They are not expected to get jobs, but must instead focus on constant personal grooming, and getting married in their late teens. This involves a bizarre ritual called "grabbing", where the girls must first resist the attentions of young men before finally giving in, getting engaged and planning a flamboyant, over-the-top wedding involving a dress the size of a football ground and a cake made of candyfloss and glitter. Then it's back to the caravan for a life of popping out babies, applying sparkly lip gloss and hoovering the kitchenet.

One of the reasons this programme has been such a big hit (more than 7.5 million of us tuned in last week) is the sheer vicarious thrill divined from watching it. "Oooh," we gasp, as some 16-year-old sporting enough spray tan to keep the Sheridans' bathroom cabinet stocked for at least six months comes plodding down the aisle in a quivering sea of acid pink polyester, "can you imagine wearing something like that?"

But are they really so different from us? Teenage girls in mainstream society may not spend their days scrubbing floors and would certainly turn their noses up at living in caravans, but image, and how one looks, is of deadly importance.

My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding's brash ITV3 cousin The Only Way Is Essex reveals a world where young people have plastic surgery at the drop of a hat, have no discernible jobs and will happily spend an entire day "getting ready to go aht".

A 2008 survey of British teenage girls found that the majority overwhelmingly picked beauty over brains, with 32 per cent interested in becoming a model, 29 per cent interested in becoming an actress and 20 per cent in becoming a beautician. Just 14 per cent wanted to become a scientist, while a lowly 4 per cent displayed an interest in engineering.

And that's the ones who want jobs at all.For many young women, the road to riches is paved not with good grades and a decent education, but with footballers boots. The high-profile coverage given to WAGs means that for many young women, marrying a footballer has now become a legitimate career choice.

We have created a modern, fast-moving media world where everything centres on looks. From your Twitter profile picture to your Facebook friend list, there has never been so much pressure on teenage girls to look beautiful, and to use those looks to get what they want, whether it be a slot on the latest reality show or a rich, famous boyfriend. Where once girls compared handwriting, now they compare manicures.

There are exceptions of course, and Scotland's universities are teeming with bright young women who do want careers, not just fan pages on Facebook. But what is frightening is that this sort of attitude is no longer unusual. Watching my Big Fat Gypsy Wedding is like peering into one of those mirrors at the funfair. It's a world that's distorted and strange, but it's also increasingly, worryingly familiar.

So much so, that if thousands of young Scottish women turn round to Daddy at the age of 18 and demand a wedding dress with so many fairy lights that it requires a fire extinguisher, we probably shouldn't be surprised.