IN Musselburgh, summer starts not with the first sight of swallows, but with Ladies Day at the races. On this annual fixture, in the middle of June, our street turns into a catwalk as a parade of chic and glamour to rival the Champs Elysees during Paris Fashion Week passes beneath our windows. Around mid-morning, racegoers head for the track.

The women are elegant and stylish in silks and satins that look like spun sugar, topped by confectionary hats and tailed by vertiginous heels. Their men don’t look bad either, in waistcoats, silk ties and winklepickers.

Seven or eight hours later, these manikins return, rather more gingerly. Some are soberish, but many have been quaffing since elevenses. They weave bare-foot down the middle of the road, shoes dangling from their fingers, hollering for each other as if a pea-souper had descended.

While one or two of their escorts relieve themselves by the trees, they collapse onto the verge, like puppets whose strings have been cut, or souffles exposed to the cold. This year, four peacocks unfolded picnic chairs and took up their station by the kerb, pulling wine and Prosecco and hip flasks from their handbags. One could not coax her legs to bend, and toppled onto the grass before reaching out for a bottle. At least she did not remove her bra. Someone did, though, because I later found it in a hedge.

The drunkenness of these racegoers is relatively innocent compared to the centre of Edinburgh or Glasgow on a Saturday night yet it is part of a trend. A generation ago, the idea of ricocheting like a pinball, removing clothes or throwing up in the street would have been a mistake you might make once. Now, it seems, being drunk and disorderly, semi-comatose or vomitous, is as much a part of the girly repertoire as having a bikini wax or applying fake tan.

Why can’t a woman be more like a man? bemoaned Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady, expressing the wish of centuries of husbands and lovers. Well, it seems that, belatedly, we have risen to the challenge and very dismal and depressing it is too. Recent reports indicate that women are not only starting to rival men for how heavily they drink but also for their swearing and levels of violence.

Where previously it was males who excelled in the use of the F-word, now it is us. Last year, one in three complaints about domestic abuse was registered by a man and there has been a rise of one-third in the past decade in the number of women jailed for violent or serious sexual offences. Meanwhile, in the United States and UK, more than half of the three million trolls who abused women online in the space of four years were themselves female. Whatever happened to sisterhood?

I’ve never believed that women are the better sex, nor that they’re nicer. But I have, wrongly, always assumed that we were slightly less dim-witted when it came to peer pressure. As the unedifying increase in female binge-drinkers and brawlers suggests, that is no longer (perhaps never was) the case.

One psychologist trying to explain the rise of women behaving badly has suggested that it is simply another example of the feminine desire to please. If true, it is a little ironic. In trying to match their pals or colleagues in alcohol intake, bitchiness or giving their boyfriend a black eye, such women might be appeasing their friends but they are making everyone else unhappy. Not just their families, but the police, education authorities, and staff in accident and emergency are decidedly unimpressed. At the same time as mirroring men’s habits, these laddish loutettes trick themselves out like an old-fashioned Barbie: revealingly tight clothes, hobbling heels and makeup as thick as cement. It’s a masterclass in mixed messages.

One of the words I have always loathed is “ladylike”. When I was growing up, this catch-all concept was seen as a cardinal virtue and flouting it the first step on the road to ruin.

She who chewed gum loudly or stuck a safety-pin through her ear lobe was as good as socially and morally dead. Becoming a feminist was almost the polar opposite of “ladylike”. It entailed standing up for yourself, challenging male authority and not pandering to men’s expectations, of which looking good and being submissive were top of the list.

At one point in the 1980s, it seemed as if women were on the way to becoming truly the equal of men in the sense of opportunity, rights and legislation. From that hopeful spring, it is a long, Siberian march to where we are at present. I find it dismaying and heartbreaking to watch women aping the crassest male behaviour and to realise that the women’s movement has aided and abetted them. Legal and economic liberty, a rightful sense of entitlement and educational and career opportunities have all enabled us to copy men, for good or ill.

Without such advances, we would still be the weaker, inferior, less visible sex. No matter how many foolish or venal individuals misuse their freedom, though, you would not want to turn the clock back. You can’t help wondering, though, how the message of modern womanhood has been so lost that hundreds of thousands think necking bottles of spirits, passing out in the high street or thumping their mate is okay.

Violence, whether verbal or physical, comes into a category of its own. In this, I suspect the figures reflect two things: the rise in consumption of drink and drugs, which fuels many acts of aggression, and the fact that there have always been brutish women and always will be.

It would be easy to fall into despair at the damage such acts cause, to all within reach. Those of us who believed that the conditions won by feminism would vastly improve our position have reason to feel chastened and alarmed. That a growing section of the population chooses to degrade rather than elevate itself and that it sees the worst masculine behaviour as a blueprint rather than a warning is profoundly disturbing.

And yet, is any of this really new? Some have said that the shock factor lies in the fact such crudeness is regularly displayed in public, where before it took place behind closed doors. But that’s not entirely true either. For instance, in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket, in 1828, a man tried to sell his wife.

As a report of the sale described, when the auctioneer was heard to insult the unwanted bride, “The women of the neighbourhood armed themselves with stones, some threw them, and others put them in their stockings and handkerchiefs, and made a general charge through the mob, knocking every one down that came in their way, until they go up to the auctioneer, when they scratched and tore his face in a dreadful manner”.

The question arises, of course, of why the husband wanted to sell his wife in the first place. Apparently he told the crowd it was because she was “a notorious Drunkard.” Perhaps, knowingly or not, today’s lady louts are merely upholding tradition.