Dirty girls

HOW A NEW SPECIES OF FETID, FREAKY, FOOTBALL-LOVING CHICKS IS CHANGING THE FACE OF GENDER POLITICS IN THE U.K.

There's a new breed of minx roaming the streets in Cool Britannia. She drinks beer by the gallon, goes man-hunting with a tribe of like-minded girlfriends, sleeps half the day and reportedly changes her boyfriend four times as often as she changes her bedclothes. This is the new Ladette, according to a survey commissioned by DuPont of 506 British single women 18-34 years of age, and she is taking the pubs and the tabloids of Britain by storm.

These are no whiny, Ally McBeal-ites desperate to get hitched and create their own Dancing Baby -- although it must be said that "Ally McBeal," along with "Friends" and "ER," are their favorite TV shows. Nearly half of these "squalid creatures" (as they are referred to in the London newspaper the Evening Standard) must wash a dirty cup when they need one, and one in six vacuums less than once a month. They sleep in until the early afternoon (22 percent), iron their clothes on the day they need them (65 percent) and over a third of them admit to cheating on their boyfriends regularly.

Ladettes had packed the pub the night I went to see a World Cup match on big screen TV when I first arrived in England, although at that point I didn't know what these sex-crazed, ale-swilling man-eaters were called. All I knew was there were just as many young women watching the match as there were men, and they all looked the same: tiny tank tops with spaghetti straps, tight pants, strappy sandals and aggressively pretty. They were fascinating to watch -- seemingly neither man nor woman, but some sort of gender in between, or of their own making. They were downing beer with speed and determination, and shouting at the screen when they weren't chatting animatedly with the lads. "Lager Lout-esses," my friend Trevor had mumbled. What I didn't realize at that point was how potentially incendiary the combination of Ladette and World Cup was to domestic tranquillity. After dinner, Trevor, his girlfriend Sallie and I were to trudge off to the trendy North Pole pub in West London to catch the Brazil vs. Holland semifinal. Trevor was anxious to observe the prowess of the Brazilian goalkeeper; meanwhile, I wondered how many Ladettes (who were ferociously knowledgeable about football) would be there. Football interested me about as much as, say, the Super Bowl, but I was keen to observe the mating habits of this new vixen.

"I didn't know you were such a fan of football," I said to Sallie. She was filing her nails at the kitchen table, surrounded by the clutter of our pasta dishes, empty wine glasses, bottles and the odd arugula leaf here and there. Trevor was scraping leftover penne into plastic containers, eyeing the clock every 45 seconds or so.

"We still have an hour," Sallie said to him.

Trevor snapped the lid on a piece of Tupperware. "I know. But you know how that place gets when there's a match on."

"No, I don't," Sallie said a bit shortly, and I looked at her. "I'm not that concerned with football as a rule," she said to me. "But you feel a bit of an idiot when the entire country is discussing if a player is offside and you have no idea what that means." She was right. Despite England being unceremoniously eliminated the week before, London was still in a vise grip of World Cup Fever. It was an event that many of my British friends could not talk about without a catch in their voice and a glassy-eyed stare that, through my American eyes, looked curiously like lust.

She drew the file across her nails in a long, exaggerated stroke and added pointedly: "Mind you, I'm in the minority. Ask any of the Ladettes there tonight, and they could tell you strategies, history, players' stats, everything. Trevor could tell you all about Ladettes."

N E X T+P A G E +| They're very chatty