Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (2 page)

This association of femininity and sexiness starts early: while it’s hardly new for women to want to be sexy, it’s new that even childhood playthings should look so sexy. Although feminists in the 1970s deplored Barbie’s tiny waist, large breasts and perfect features, she could be marketed to girls as a pilot, a doctor or an astronaut, with accessories to match her roles. Bratz dolls, who recently toppled Barbie from her throne as the best-selling fashion doll, were created with a wardrobe for clubbing and shopping, dressed in fishnet and feathers, crop tops and miniskirts, with heavily painted faces that look as if they have been created by Jordan’s make-up artist.
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When you wander into a toy shop and find this new, altogether more slutty and sultry ideal pouting up at you from a thousand figurines, you realise that there has been a genuine change in the culture aimed at young girls. While girls have always been encouraged to see self-decoration as a central part of their lives, today they are also exposed to a deluge of messages,
even at an early age, about the importance of becoming sexually attractive. These dolls are just a fragment of a much wider culture in which young women are encouraged to see their sexual allure as their primary passport to success.

This highly sexualised culture is often positively celebrated as a sign of women’s liberation and empowerment. It was indeed an aim of the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s that women should be released from conventional morality around sex, which had confined them to idealised chastity on the one hand or contemptible promiscuity on the other. The fact that women can now be sexually active and experienced without being condemned is a direct result of second-wave feminism. And this is clearly something to be celebrated. But it is strange that all aspects of the current hypersexual culture are often now seen as proof of women’s growing freedom and power. So the renaissance of glamour modelling is seen by many who participate in the industry as a marker not of persistent sexism, but of women’s new confidence. For instance, as one ex-editor of a lads’ magazine said to me, ‘It’s the women who are driving this. It’s all changed…. I think that to people of my age, it’s bizarre to see young women being so confident sexually at such an early age.’ Similarly, the fashion for pole-dancing classes is talked about as if it were liberating for women. The website for Pole Dancing Hen Weekends states that, ‘Pole dancing classes are all about freeing yourself from the restrictions imposed on you in your everyday life and empowering yourself.’
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Even occupations such as lap dancing and prostitution are often now surrounded by this quasi-feminist rhetoric. One young lap dancer quoted in an interview in
The Times
in 2008 said, ‘I have never had a job where I felt so empowered,’
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and the actor Billie Piper, who starred in a television adaptation of the memoir by ‘Belle de Jour’, a prostitute working in London, said in an interview, ‘When I am playing Belle I have to play a sexually liberated, empowered young prostitute.’
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This means that rather than being seen as negative for women, the mainstreaming of the sex industry is now often presented as a culmination of the freedoms that feminists have sought. As one female writer who was looking at the mainstream appeal of pornography put it in an article in the
Guardian:
‘Instead of desperately longing for the right to be seen as human beings, today’s girls are playing with the old-fashioned notion of being seen as sex objects. This is not terrible news. In fact, to me, this is the ultimate feminist ideal.’
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This equation of empowerment and liberation with sexual objectification is now seen everywhere, and is having a real effect on the ambitions of young women. When I interviewed women who have worked in the sex industry for this book, I was struck to find that some of them had been seduced by the idea that this work could enhance their sense of individual power. Ellie is an articulate, well-educated woman who had gone to private school and a good university, and had been brought up to believe she could do anything in any profession – law, medicine, politics. Instead, she had decided she wanted to be an actor, but when jobs were hard to find and she found herself financially desperate, she took a sideways step in her twenties by going to work in a lap-dancing club in London. She didn’t feel, at first, that it would be very difficult. She told me she had picked up messages from our culture that lap dancing was pretty straightforward and even empowering for the women who do it. ‘People say that, don’t they,’ she said to me thoughtfully when we met. ‘There’s this myth that women are expressing their sexuality freely in this way, and that as they can make lots of money out of it, it gives them power over the men who are paying.’

This was not what she found herself, however. She was shocked to discover quite how demeaning and dehumanising she found the work. In the situation of the club, women became more like dolls than people. ‘There’s something about the club – the lights, the make-up, the clothes you wear, those huge platform
heels, the way that so many women have fake boobs,’ she said. ‘You look like cartoons. You give yourself a fake girly name, like a doll. You’re encouraged to look like dolls. No wonder the men don’t see you as people.’

Although the word empowerment is so often attached to this culture, it is a strange distortion of what the term once meant to feminists. When we talked about empowerment in the past, it was not a young woman in a thong gyrating around a pole that would spring to mind, but the attempts by women to gain real political and economic equality. Towards the end of the twentieth century, there was a real optimism that this kind of power genuinely could be within the grasp of more women than ever before, and that women would then be free to attain their true potential without being held back by the weight of inequality.

It may seem strange to say so after the political disillusion of the last decade, but the early years of the Blair administration in the UK and the early years of the Clinton administration in the US were hailed in many places as offering new hope for women who wanted to enter the corridors of power. Naomi Wolf, the American feminist, wrote in 1993: ‘In 1992 record numbers of women ran for office in the US … The genderquake rattled and reoriented the presidential elections.’
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And I wrote in the
Observer
just before the 1997 General Election in the UK: ‘If we see a six per cent swing to Labour, the number of women MPs should double … It’s not equality yet, but don’t underestimate what it will mean. We’ll see the gentleman’s club begin to crumble, we’ll begin to see a political culture that responds to women’s priorities … This impending revolution in women’s power is one issue that we shouldn’t be cynical about.’
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This shift towards greater equality in politics meant that feminist arguments that had long been regarded as marginal could be heard in many political debates. During the first five years of the New Labour government, we heard from policy makers about the need to prosecute crimes against women, such as
domestic violence and rape, more effectively. We also heard a great deal about the need to change the working world. New Labour brought in the minimum wage, which affected women far more than men, and also expanded parental leave rights, childcare and flexible working. During these early years the Labour government doubled maternity pay, introduced paid paternity leave, introduced free part-time nursery places for three- and four-year-olds, and its ministers discussed how they could push on a workplace revolution.
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There was an optimism not just about changes in women’s lives, but about changes in men’s lives too. When Tony Blair took a couple of weeks off work when his fourth child was born in 2000, his move was welcomed, since: ‘When one of the world’s most powerful men sets this kind of example, the impact on the workplace and parental leave will be immense.’
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With this kind of debate happening all around us, it was easy for me to argue in my earlier book,
The New Feminism
, which was published at the end of the 1990s, that even if the women’s movement may have quietened down, feminism had become part of the very air we breathed. It was also easy for me to argue, and I was glad to be able to do so, that feminists could now concentrate on achieving political and social and financial equality. In the past, feminist arguments had often centred on private lives: how women made love, how they dressed, whom they desired. I felt that the time for this had passed. I believed that we only had to put in place the conditions for equality for the remnants of old-fashioned sexism in our culture to wither away.

I am ready to admit that I was entirely wrong. While many women relaxed and believed that most arguments around equality had been won, and that there were no significant barriers to further progress, the dolls were on the march again. The rise of a hypersexual culture is not proof that we have reached full equality; rather, it has reflected and exaggerated the deeper imbalances of power in our society. Without thoroughgoing economic
and political change, what we see when we look around us is not the equality we once sought; it is a stalled revolution.

Men and women may still be trying to inch towards greater equality at home as well as at work, but the pressure for change and the sense of optimism has gone. The relentless masculinity of British politics is a marker of wider failure in the attempts to create equality between the sexes. While the 1997 election doubled the number of women in Parliament, from 60 to 120 out of 646, the pace of change then slowed to a standstill. The next two elections increased the number of women in Parliament by only eight, and in the Scottish Parliament the proportion of women actually dropped, from 40 per cent in 2003 to 35 per cent in 2009.
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New Labour gradually began to be associated with a sense of broken promises for women in politics. Many female ministers resigned during the summer of 2009, and one launched a bitter attack on the inability of the prime minister to support women in government, saying that she had been used merely as ‘female window-dressing’.
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Just as women have not moved forwards as far as was once hoped into the corridors of power, men have not taken the steps into the home that might once have been expected. Although the rhetoric is often spoken about flexible working and shared parental responsibility, in 2009 men were still only entitled to two weeks’ paternity leave at £123 per week. Plans to equalise rights to parental leave by introducing a scheme whereby men and women could share twelve months’ leave between them were shelved by the government in response to ‘tough economic times’.
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Given the discrepancy between women’s entitlement to spend time at home and men’s lack of similar rights, it is hardly surprising that women are still doing the vast majority of domestic work. Even when women work full-time, according to one study, they do twenty-three hours of domestic work a week, as opposed to men’s eight hours, while women who work part-time do thirty-three hours of domestic work per week. The authors of
that report commented that the domestic workload that still fell on their shoulders was what prevented many women from working the long hours required for higher-paid jobs.
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The reality is that although girls still do as well as boys at every level of education, the workplace has not seen the changes that were once expected. While men and women with young children have the right to request flexible working, for women the decision not to work full-time still carries a huge penalty. The hourly pay gap for women working full-time is around 17 per cent, but it is around 35 per cent for women working part-time – in other words, an average woman who works part-time earns only two-thirds of the money that the average full-time male worker would earn each hour.
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And what is most worrying is that there is evidence that progress on the pay gap has stalled; from 2007 to 2008 it actually widened.
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For women in senior management, equality may be more elusive than ever, as research carried out in 2007 showed: ‘The Price Waterhouse Coopers research found that among FTSE 350 companies in 2002 almost 40% of senior management posts were occupied by women. When that research was repeated for 2007, the number of senior management posts held by women had fallen to just 22%.’
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One female manager, who was interviewed about why so many of her peers had left, tried to put her finger on the problem. While people may understand the need for equality issues on intellectual grounds, ‘It’s what they get in their hearts that matters.’

What do we get in our hearts? It is time to make the links between the cultural changes we have seen over the last ten years and this stalled revolution. Although opportunities for women are still far wider than they were a generation ago, we are now seeing a resurgence of old sexism in new guises. Far from giving full scope to women’s freedom and potential, the new hypersexual culture redefines female success through a narrow framework of sexual allure.

What’s more, alongside the links that are made between this kind of exaggerated sexual allure and empowerment, we have recently seen a surprising resurgence of the idea that traditional femininity is biologically rather than socially constructed. A new interest in biological determinism now runs throughout our society. Indeed, the association between little girls and everything that is pink and glittery is being explained in many places not as a cultural phenomenon, which could therefore be challenged, but as an inescapable result of biology, which is assumed to be resistant to change. Some neuroscientists recently carried out an experiment which, they claimed, suggested that girls are biologically predisposed to prefer pink. This experiment consisted of presenting men and women with differently coloured pairs of rectangles and asking them to pick out their favourites. The researchers found that women liked reddish hues more than men did, and concluded by suggesting that this difference in colour preference could be explained by biological differences between men and women, which would have been created by their different occupations way, way back in the past. Since women, they speculated, would have been more likely to be gathering ripe red fruit than hunting big game under blue skies many millennia ago, women had evolved to respond more enthusiastically to pink than men would.
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