Girl Trouble (27 page)

Did Andrea Ashworth's experiences owe anything to feminism? Undoubtedly, although it may not be immediately obvious. The GIST project didn't appear to make a great impact on her future: she read English at Oxford. But Angela's chances of
getting into Oxford, as a girl, would have been much slimmer before the equality legislation of the mid-1970s. In addition to this, the climate in which stories of sexual abuse and domestic violence could be told, by the end of the twentieth century, owed a great deal to women's increasing self-confidence and to the concerns of feminism. These issues were much discussed in the 1980s.

In that decade, more and more women were going public with stories of how they had suffered abuse, as young girls, in the domestic environment, and often from men within the family.
99
From attempts to provide shelters for battered wives in the 1970s through campaigns to improve the treatment of girls and women who had suffered rape and abuse in the 1980s, feminists set out to confront sexual violence. They were successful in keeping these issues in the public eye, and thus on the political agenda.

This very success could bring its own problems. To draw attention to subjects which were previously hidden from the public gaze, and break taboos of silence, could generate a backlash. In 1987 a scandal over child abuse erupted in Cleveland. Doctors and social workers were shocked by their sense of just how widespread the problem might be, and struggled to cope. Controversy erupted, locally and nationally, as many parents asserted their innocence and bitterly protested against their children being taken into care. This precipitated a major crisis over the way the child protection services functioned. The Cleveland affair resulted in a judicial inquiry, chaired by Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, which took pains to produce a balanced view.
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However in the mass of newspaper coverage which accompanied events, it was clear that the women professional workers on the case, paediatrician Dr Marietta Higgs and social worker Sue Richardson, had become the targets of a great deal of misogyny.
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They were
seen by some as over-zealous, interfering feminists. On 30 June, the
Independent
published an editorial recommending caution. While applauding the work that TV personality Esther Rantzen had done in founding the child protection charity Childline, the article reminded its readers that ‘militant feminists are inclined to consider all men sexually aggressive and rapacious until proved innocent'.
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There is a sense in which some of the blame for child abuse seems to have been displaced on to the professionals unearthing it. They were in danger of being vilified as folk devils in the process.
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Feminists had always been vulnerable to ‘stereotyping' of course. Just as in the early years of the twentieth century suffragists had been caricatured as ugly harridans, their descendants in the 1970s and 1980s were often represented as dungaree- and woolly-hat-wearing, cropped-headed lesbians. The satirical magazine
Private Eye
ran a series labelled ‘A Compendium of Loony Feminist Nonsense' in the eighties, chortling over references to ‘chairpersons', ‘snowpeople', and ‘phallocracy'. It was illustrated with cartoons of big-bummed women hovering malevolently with knives over the genitals of trussed-up, pleading males. The magazine
Viz
featured the activist ‘Millie Tant' ranting on about all men being beasts and the importance of bringing up children in a man-free environment. The barbs weren't always satirical. Feminists often suffered direct abuse. The American feminist Andrea Dworkin, for instance, was a particular target, partly in consequence of her inveterate battles against pornography.

The right-wing press delighted in stories about feminists falling out with each other. ‘Punch-up at the Women's Lib Peace Rally' had announced the
Daily Mirror
, happily, as early as 1971, reporting on a conference in Canada.
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There had always been differences of opinion among feminists, of course, and
to some extent this was a reflection of a strong and healthy movement. But the WLM in Britain lost coherence in the 1980s as divisions deepened. There was a great deal of heart-searching about whom the movement spoke for. Was it too middle class? Were black women being marginalised or excluded? There was bitterness among activists who considered that British feminists were ignoring the very different experiences of women elsewhere in the world. Controversies over sexuality and pornography also became divisive. Some academic feminists retreated into what could look like ivory-tower obsessions with the nature of language and identity. Some feminists looked around gloomily, seeing signs of backlash and reaction. But there had been profound shifts in culture, language and social expectation. This enabled others to be more sanguine, trusting that a new generation of younger women would take ideas about sexual equality as their birthright.

7 | BODY ANXIETIES, DEPRESSIVES, LADETTES AND LIVING DOLLS: WHAT HAPPENED TO GIRL POWER?

‘Girl power' was much discussed in the 1990s and early 2000s. It was sometimes rendered – with the suggestion of a pleasing growl – as ‘grrl power'. The
Oxford English Dictionary
notes that the term originated in the USA, where it was at first associated with popular music. Alternative punk rock Riot Grrrl bands brought feminist, political themes into the underground music scene. Later, the term ‘girl power' was appropriated as a more general, celebratory slogan by the British group the Spice Girls. And girl power came to denote more than just a trend in underground or popular music. In Western societies, girls could appear more active and more confident than ever before. The
OED
defined girl power as ‘a self-reliant attitude amongst girls and young women manifested in ambition, assertiveness and individualism'.

Strong girls were in fashion. Young female punks in the late 1970s perfected a new kind of stylish stroppiness.
1
From the 1980s, popular culture had begun to reflect a widespread enthusiasm for self-assertive female types. Stars such as Madonna and Courtney Love both celebrated and parodied femininity: they were anything but self-effacing, and modelled the possibilities of female entrepreneurship and ambition. The Riot Grrls of the 1990s built on these foundations and encouraged political expression at a grassroots level, through a variety of new media, such as home-produced fanzines. Feisty girl heroines began to crop up on cinema and television screens: Xena, Warrior Princess,
Charlie's Angels, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Wilting heroines were wet and passé. Social observers began to analyse what they identified as a new cultural turn. The
OED
added its entry on girl power in 2001.

7.1
Rotherham punk Julie Longden and friends pose in a photobooth, 1977 (by kind permission of Tony Beesley and Julie Longden).

In sharp contradiction to all this, a steady stream of books began to emerge from major publishing houses on both sides of the Atlantic arguing that girls were being massively damaged and disadvantaged by social change. An early example of this trend was Naomi Wolf's
The Beauty Myth
, first published in 1990.
2
Wolf's book was based on work she had carried out as a Rhodes scholar in Oxford. The book's main message was that in spite of legal and material gains in status, young women's lives were increasingly ruined by pressure to conform to idealised standards of beauty. Eating disorders, Wolf claimed, had risen ‘exponentially', and more and more girls were seeking cosmetic surgery.
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In terms of how girls were feeling about themselves, she suggested, they were probably worse off than their grandmothers.
The Beauty Myth
became a best-seller, and proved lastingly influential, particularly with younger audiences.

From the USA, a few years after
The Beauty Myth
, came psychologist Mary Pipher's
Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls
(1994), and historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg's
The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls
(1997).
4
Pipher's book was based on her clinical work with young girls. She contended that young women in American society were the victims of a ‘girl-poisoning culture'. This culture ‘smacked girls on the head' with ‘girl-hurting “isms” such as sexism, capitalism and lookism' at their most vulnerable stage in growing up. Their experience was like that of ‘saplings in a hurricane'. No wonder that they were prey to eating disorders, depression and despair. The book sold widely. So, too, did Joan Brumberg's
The Body Project
. A respected social historian, Brumberg suggested that where once girls had focused their attentions on improving their minds, they had now become obsessed with perfecting their bodies. Good looks had become more important than good works. The past century had undoubtedly brought gains in autonomy, but at the same time girls had lost the ‘protective umbrella' which – in the form of single-sex groupings and environments – had previously sheltered them. They had freedom, but this was laced with peril. Adolescent girls and their bodies, Brumberg insisted, had borne the brunt of social change in the twentieth century.

Yet more alarms were sounded in the next decade. Ariel Levy, a staff writer on the
New Yorker
magazine, launched an attack on what she called ‘raunch culture' in her witty and polemical
Female Chauvinist Pigs
, published in 2005.
5
Levy took issue with ‘women who make sex objects of other women and themselves'.
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Her text is rich in its denunciations of women ‘who get their tits out for the lads', girls happy to strut around in white stilettoes and body glitter, sporting Playboy bunny rings, and rhinestone-studded thongs and G-strings. Feminists had taken a wrong
turning if it they saw this kind of behaviour as ‘empowering'. Bawdiness, she, reminded her readers, was not the same thing as liberation.
7

Levy, like many others, was disturbed by statistics showing the rising popularity of breast augmentation procedures in the USA. This theme of the social pressure on young girls to achieve perfect bodies was taken up again in 2007 in Courtney E. Martin's
Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body
.
8
In Britain, the psychotherapist Susie Orbach, who had risen to fame in the late 1970s with the publication of her unforgettably entitled book
Fat Is a Feminist Issue
, expanded on the theme of body hatred and the damage done by the diet industries in
Bodies
, published in 2009.
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The same year saw the publication in the UK of M. G. Durham's
The Lolita Effect
, which deplored the inappropriate ‘sexualisation' of young girls.
10
The British cultural critic Natasha Walter's
Living
Dolls: The Return of Sexism
, was published by Virago in 2010.
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This took a similar line to Ariel Levy's polemic on raunch culture. Walter argued that girls are the victims of a newly intense, sexist culture which force-feeds them on a diet of fluffy pink and internet porn, presenting them with a hollow or even poisonous version of ‘liberation'.

Disentangling the various strands of these contemporary anxieties isn't easy, because there are many ways in which they overlap. The literature on girls' anxieties about their bodies, for instance, is often closely related to that on eating disorders, unhappiness and depression. Nor is it easy to separate out hard evidence from social panic. Both polemical books written by journalists and social critics, and the findings of academic and professional researchers are taken up and amplified – and sometimes distorted – in the press. Since the 1970s, the media have
shown an exaggerated interest in girls' bodies. Some historians have traced this back to the permissiveness of the late 1960s; others have seen the trend as part of a backlash against the rise of feminism.
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The topless ‘Page Three' girl first became a feature of the popular British newspaper
The Sun
in the 1970s, and has irritated feminists to a greater or lesser extent ever since.
13
‘Personal interest' stories about girls struggling to lose weight, or battling against ‘the slimmer's disease' of anorexia nervosa began to appear in the pages of the
Daily Mirror
and the
Daily Mail
around the same time, but increasingly in the 1990s. More recently television documentaries detailing the stories of the prodigiously fat or the thin and emaciated, or the body transformations of those undergoing marathons of cosmetic surgery, have become a hallmark of several television channels. On top of all this, we have to consider the world-transforming influence of the internet. To observe that we live a culture increasingly dominated by visual imagery, and in particular by images of bodies, has become the cliché of all clichés.