TV reporter Penny Marshall has written in the Mail today, attacking the fad of heterosexual teenage girls sharing kisses with eachother. Marshall’s piece sits proudly under the assumptive headline:

Lipstick lesbians: How this kiss sparked a teenage trend that will disturb every parent

Below this statement, which is pre-empting the anticipated parental disgust-wave about to ensue, is a picture of the notorious glancing of lips that Madonna and Britney Spears shared on stage at some awards show a while ago. This in itself was hardly a snog, yet the media outcry and sensationalism that followed would lead you to believe the pair had engaged in an act that Jaqcui Smith’s husband would have paid to view. Is the possibility of your teenage daughter sharing a kiss with her friend, presumably in a bid to show off and rebel (hardly unheard of in an adolescent), really disturbing? Of course not.

Marshall’s shock seems to be engulfed by her discovery that it isn’t those scruffy, ill-educated harridans of the working classes who would engage in the act of faux-lesbianism (lesbianism being too strong a term for it, probably), it’s that the perpetrators of this heinous offence are:

middle class…[and] come from smart homes with professional parents, are well-spoken and attend a well-respected Inner London day school

Woah – did you say middle class? We’re in a moral swap and I’m chewing on frogs. To think that well-educated, nice girls embark on that same blasé ‘I’m cooler than thou’ style adventure through their teenage years is unthinkable. I mean, these girls come from money! And if there’s one thing that wealth equals then it’s integrity and heterosexuality.

Marshall throws out a life jacket though. Don’t worry, because:

They’d both kissed boys before, and they will do so again, because neither girl considers herself a lesbian.

Phew. That was a close one. Again, Marshall claims that her ‘revelations’ will cause jaws to drop:

There’s no doubt many people will be shocked at the prospect of  such public sexual experimentation. But the fact is that it’s becoming increasingly common for middle-class girls to flirt with a kind of faux lesbianism. The social trend has even sparked its own acronym  -  LUGs, or Lesbian Until Graduation.

Why is it a problem for teenagers to act like this? They follow what celebrities do. As long as we’ve had the ‘cult of celebrity’ we’ve had copycat youngsters, emulating those they see on TV. Is a kiss between teenage girlfriends dangerous? Also, what’s Marshall’s issue with this being in public? Isn’t that the point? It’s meant to cause a stir – that’s the art of teenage show-offyness. Marshall goes on to say:

For previous generations, exhibiting any type of gay behaviour was certainly considered ‘harm done’. Being teased for being ‘lesbian’ was one of the more cruel taunts that could be hurled at a teenage girl.  But today we’re witnessing the emergence of a growing number of young girls who are willing to experiment with their female friends.

And what? The way Marshall presents the rise in tolerance towards homosexuals is one of concern – like she wants to go back to the ‘good’ old days, where being called a lesbian was still a ‘cruel taunt’. The fact is, sexuality doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as it used to. Shouldn’t we celebrate this apparent liberal attitude from teenagers towards same-sex kissing? It appears they’re breaking down a taboo. That’s progression.

Marshall goes on to say:

for the teenage girls who are, at 15 or 16, in some ways precocious, in other ways they are deeply naive about what the fallout might be from kissing another girl in public.

Yes, they’re vulnerable to intense social pressures to fit in with whatever is perceived to be fashionable. And yet few are mature enough to deal with the complicated sexual issues surrounding such behaviour. That’s why this celebrity fad is so insidious.

These girls aren’t emotionally mature enough to what? Share a brief kiss with a friend in a bit of harmless exhibitionism? Marshall reads too much into this. She’s trying to start a moral-crusade based around over-analysis of what is just a boisterous teenage fad. It’ll fizzle out, like most things.

Marshall said the Madonna/Britney kiss:

gave the veneer of acceptance to what would previously have been considered unacceptably risque public behaviour

What does she want? Same-sex kissing to be hidden away in private, like a seedy perversion? It’s normal. Heterosexuality and homosexuality are normal things. Marshall appears unable to accept this. She further still refers to this as ‘disturbing’ and apparently questions the legitimacy of bisexuality:

So while there is a generation of young female celebrities trying to shock us (or garner media attention) by sending a message that girls can like girls, and then boys, and then girls again, what’s really disturbing is that this trend is being emulated by many of today’s teenagers.

Why can’t people like boys and girls? Why is it ‘distrubing’? Marshall levels this abhorrence with little or weak justification. One teenage girl whom she spoke to summed it up perfectly. The 14 year-old said:

We know it’s the kind of thing that would shock adults, so we enjoy doing it

So what is Marshall doing? She bites. She takes the bait like a fish to a maggot. If she really does find this disturbing, which is a laughable concept, then shouldn’t she be ignoring it? She just adds fuel to the fire, making this fad even more appealing as she openly vents her disdain for it. That’s an own goal, Marshall.

According to the psychologist Donna Dawson, who Marshall quotes in her text, this could put peer-pressure on girls to do this, even if they don’t want to. I’m not a psychologist, but I contest this. It’s kissing – I daresay that it would only happen between close friends. It’s hardly like they’re going to surround one victim and force her to lock lips with an acquaintance. Even all of the youngsters quoted by Marshall said it’s harmless, they do it for a laugh and they do it to piss off adults. Why don’t Dawson and Marshall actually listen to what these girls are saying?

Ultimately, all Marshall has served to do is over-exaggerate a teenage fad. She lays particular emphasis on the girls being ‘middle-class’, which she references throughout, as if the middle-classes and wealthy hold some kind of moral high-ground, allowing self-righteous moralisers like Marshall to shell out ‘disturbing truths’. She shows an underlying sneer at everyone else, as if she would expect such awfulness from ‘commoners’. She assumes that every parent makes a big deal out of teenage fads like this. But, do they? I suspect not. I imagine her own children are bathing in shame. That’s if they haven’t been scared under the covers by horror stories from their mother – ‘watch out, there’s lesbians everywhere!!’.

I’m waiting for her next exposé – Lovebites: The pervert’s bruise on the morally-bankrupt neck of youth society.