What Kristin Scott Thomas really means when she says British women are 'abusing their sexy side'

Streaky tan and fat legs apparently define the women of the UK. How original

(Getty)

What does the quintessential British woman look like? Beloved British actor Kristin Scott Thomas thinks she knows – at least in comparison to the French.

French women can be “attractive without abusing their sexy side”, she was quoted as saying this week. “There is no vulgarity, it’s all about subtlety. The English are terrible and very much the opposite, like they wear miniskirts when they don’t have the legs for it.” She goes on: “French women would never get drunk on a Saturday in a miniskirt in November... And [the English] love tanning, especially fake tan, which means, by summer, everyone is orange.”

When I read the remarks it’s not the mini-skirted 19-year-old loving life on a Saturday night with her St Tropez-streaked calves and cleavage on show, “abusing her sexy side” with a nice-looking lad in the local pub, that I feel sorry for. It’s Kristin Scott Thomas - partly because she’s clearly never been on a night out worth having.

Remember that English Patient poster, with its strapline “In love, there are no boundaries”? Well, scratch that – and not just because that kind of thinking can lead you into trouble in the bedroom. It turns out that, when it comes to loving her fellow woman, Kristin’s cup runneth over in Paris but stops short at the Calais border gate.

What is it that’s so tiresome about the argument that it’s “vulgar” for a woman to stick on a skirt she really loves for the weekend, even if she hasn’t been blessed with the legs of a hairless gazelle? Let me count the ways. First, it suggests that when women step outside the house, they do so as passive vessels for appraisement. In Scott Thomas’s world it’s a punishable misdemeanour to pop to the corner shop for a bottle of milk in pyjama bottoms and oversized sunglasses on a hungover Sunday morning. The world is your display case, after all – shouldn’t you dress accordingly? If that’s what’s going on in France, I’m glad I’m getting dressed in shabby old Blighty, where PJs on the school run are de rigueur, as the Parisians wouldn’t say.

Second, if you accept the world as your display case – perhaps even relish it – you have to commit The A-List Footballer’s Madonna/Whore Complex Handbook to memory before you even begin to construct your image.

Rather than having the freedom to experiment sartorially (isn’t that why the world loved David Bowie?) or with garish make-up, fake tan, hair dye in unnatural colours and all the other accoutrements to be found at any Superdrug counter, Kristin’s girls have to toe the line. Like a choreographed circus act, every movement, every flick of eyeliner, every brush of bronzer, every inch of skirt must be dictated by the wafer-thin tightrope of subtle sexuality that runs between the chasms of “how many men does she have?” and “how will she ever get a man?"

And I take exception at Scott Thomas’s complaint that British women are “abusing their sexy side” with their apparently terrible choice of dress. Female sexuality is aggressively marketed, relentlessly policed and historically denied. The idea that women themselves are now exercising too much autonomy over their “sexy sides” – that this audacious failure to take into account what others might think of your November drinking outfit is a gross social transgression – isn’t just disappointing, it’s dangerous.

Needless to say, I used to be a Kristin Scott Thomas fan. But I’m reconsidering every tear I shed for her classic doomed love story with every reread of this dispiriting attack on us Brits. I doubt she’ll miss the devotion of an anonymous British woman. One thing’s for sure: she’s certainly no fan of mine.