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Out of context: Reply #30450
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First, their cleanliness is not up to Lyall’s American standards. “Even in the twenty-first century, for instance,” she points out, “many British people still ride the subway during the evening rush hour without benefit of deodorant.”
“When they do the dishes,” she observes, “they appear to believe that the part where you are supposed to rinse off the soap is optional.”
Second, there’s the issue of sex, including the stereotype that many British men are gay. Lyall hops around this a bit, with some empathetic anecdotes about friends and family members “harassed and groped, if not forced to have sex, by teachers and other boys. Even now, in the way the culture works, they are supposed to make light of it.”
After discussing sex education and le vice anglais (the Frenchman’s gleeful term for the British love of spanking), she concludes: “Is it any wonder that Englishmen – particularly British men of a certain class – are so mixed up about sex?”
Finally, there is the food, which, according to Lyall, is dependably bad (in spite of a liberal use of “salad cream, a squirtable mayonnaise product that can be slathered on their food to obscure its unpalatibility”).
- How dare she!
* Minces off to Spud-U-Like.Horp - No one, not Fàbregas or the rest of the Arsenal squad, is worthy of the armband********
- How dare she!