“Ladette”: A word and culture that should be consigned to history
Last week, in a BBC Radio 4 broadcast, the former Radio 1 DJ Sara Cox complained about the word “ladette.” Barely able even to utter this irksome description, “Coxy” described how, during her tenure as the presenter of The Radio 1 Breakfast Show, this became the culture of the day.
The term “ladette” first came into being in the 1990s but didn’t enter the dictionary until 2001. In it’s simplest form, it is said to refer to: “A young woman whose social behaviour is similar to that of male adolescents,” but in reality it sums up a much nastier type of creature.
Led by the likes of Billie Piper, Charlotte Church and Cat Deeley, these noisy women swilled beer, swore and vomited wildly whilst watching football. They assaulted one another and anyone else who got in their paths in nightclubs and bars and generally caused havoc wherever they went. All in all they, like the “chavs” many now talk of, were a menace to society.
Actress Joan Collins, like Cox, rightly had little time for the ladettes of Great Britain:
“I don’t understand the fascination of getting as drunk as possible and having as many partners as possible… Is this what the suffragettes worked for? What real, decent man is going to want to marry a girl like that?”
A television show named Ladette to a Lady attempted to stem the activities of this group of horrors but it seems to have achieved little. The ladette is most definitely not dead. When I visited a large Tesco store in Devon a couple of days ago, I was unfortunate enough to see plenty of women of this type stocking up on WKD and Hooch. It was not a pleasant sight especially as many were pushing prams full of mini-me’s.
The talk of the moment might be of Andrew Mitchell MP calling a policeman a “pleb” but frankly, this nation really ought to get Roman and end the era of the common ladette.