- When did feminism lose the plot? Join the live debate, above, at 1pm today
It is Friday evening at Liverpool Street station, London, and while browsing
commuters kill time in WH Smith before their trains, a dozen young women
attack a stand of lads’ magazines. Over the covers of Nuts, Zoo, GQ
and Loaded — “50 Boobiest Blondes”, “Summer’s real breast fest” —
they slip brown paper bags adorned with handwritten slogans: “Don’t be Nuts
— get this sexism out of my face”, “Stop mainstreaming porn”, “FHM:
For Horrible Misogyny”.
Soon the mags in bags cover a whole shop wall and the women, activists from
the feminist group Object, pause exhilarated yet apprehensive, awaiting a
response. Mostly people are puzzled. A few men sidle out of the shop. But
when Object asks women to sign its petition, to have lads’ mags reclassified
as porn and displayed on top shelves, no one refuses. “I never feel
comfortable when they’re on the counter in a newsagent’s,” says one woman,
clutching a copy of Grazia. Finally the store manager comes over and
actually apologises. “I don’t like selling them,” he shrugs, “but it’s
company policy.”
A few miles south, in New Cross, a band of residents — mums, teenagers, men
too — have gathered on a traffic island outside the White Hart pub, recently
restyled as Unique’s Gentlemen’s Club (sic). They are furious that the bar,
where strippers in curtained booths perform private dances — £10 topless,
£15 fully nude — is in the midst of their homes and three primary schools.
Lewisham Council was appalled too: it rejected the owner Ken Linwood’s
application. But he just took it to Bromley magistrates, who overrode the
earlier ruling. Robin Cross, a Labour councillor, shakes his head at the
bitter irony. It was his party, under the initiative of Tessa Jowell, that
brought in the Licensing Act 2003, allowing pubs to turn into strip joints,
without requiring a change to their licence. Moreover the Government has
just bunged New Cross £45 million in urban regeneration grants to bring up
this impoverished area. “But this seedy club is just taking it down again!”
Cross says. “And there is nothing we can do.”
Both these protests set me thinking: how did it come to this? When the lads’
weekly magazines were launched five years ago where were the voices arguing
that titles with 30 pairs of breasts an issue and a harsh misogynist tone —
“Win your girlfriend a boob job” — were pornography and had no place on a
newsagent’s sweet counter? And why, when legislation was introduced that has
permitted 300 lap-dancing clubs to set up in Britain, giving the sex
industry a franchise on many high streets, did no one speak out? Judging
from the commuters at Liverpool Street, and the countless drivers who beeped
their approval in New Cross, I’d wager that the majority of British people
are unhappy about the invasion of porn culture into our everyday lives. So
why the silence? And why, above all, did feminism so spectacularly lose the
plot?
Almost every day, I’m flabbergasted by things that I’d call sexist, although I
know this very word makes me officially 100 years old. Like this year, when
Wimbledon officials allocated Centre Court matches to women players based
not on whether they were top seeds, but top totty. Or when a teenage girl,
who is my Facebook friend, receives a message saying: “You are sooo
gorgeous, I want to rape you.” As a compliment — from another girl! Or when
I watch Gok Wan and wonder when the apogee of female empowerment became
agreeing to parade naked on TV.
It is all so wrong-headed, so retrograde, so screwed up. But is it only me, Ms
Ranty-Pants, and my generation who care? Why do younger women seem largely
oblivious? So I decide to meet up with a half a dozen twentysomethings, all
graduates with decent jobs, to probe their consciousness. Over a bottle of
wine, I first ask if any of them see themselves as a feminist. Only one
replies yes. “I’ve never really related to it,” says Carlene, 26. “It’s
always portrayed as this Sixties bra-burning thing.” The only feminist they
can think of is Julie Bindel, the radical lesbian writer. Feminism means no
fun or make-up, anger and hating men. It is a broken brand, not needed now.
As one put it: “All the battles are won.”
Harriet Harman clearly doesn’t think so. Last week, Labour’s Deputy Leader
raised the standard for sexual equality in The Sunday Times,
enthusing about plans to organise a “Gender 20” summit for women leaders to
run alongside the maledominated G20, and saying “men cannot be left to run
things on their own”. According to the Daily Mail, she was
derided as “bonkers” by one Cabinet colleague for her “feminist outburst”.
Rosa, 26, says: “I admire Harriet Harman because she’s not scared to talk
about these things and it’s seen as so unsexy and so uncool. And if you look
at the Daily Mail, you’d think that she’s the worst person in the
world; it can get away with talking in such a sexist way. In lots of ways,
the racism debate is far ahead of the sexist debate because you can’t get
away with the equivalent in racism now.”
I ask what the group think of the rise of lap dancing and am intrigued that
what concerns them is not the morality of the sex industry, whether it is
innately degrading for women to show their vaginas to men for money. Their
only criteria is whether the women are adequately rewarded. If a job pays
well enough, it transcends judgment. “I think there is a market for it,”
says Rosie, 26, who works for a charity, “so sadly it is always going to be
there.”
Rosa, a TV camera operator, adds: “Lap-dancing clubs have become so
normalised, we don’t even question them any more.”
These are truly boomtime girls, part of that first generation to beat boys at
A level, outnumber them at university and often out-earn them in the
workplace. A decade of national prosperity won them that feminist ideal:
economic equality. But, as Professor Michael Sandel argued in his recent
Reith Lectures, we have allowed expanding markets to define our moral
limits. Certainly with lap-dancing clubs, as with 24-hour drinking and
liberalised gambling laws, the question for new Labour was never whether
these were desirable to us as a society, only do people want them, is there
demand? If the answer is yes, they must be good. And those who oppose them
must, by definition, be anti-populist fun-suckers.
And during the boom years, the language of women’s liberation was ransacked by
companies trying to flog us stuff. Suddenly feminism wasn’t about rights or
social advances, but shopping. Self-worth now came in a shampoo bottle —
“Because you’re worth it”.
Liberation was brunch and designer bags as in Sex and the City. As
Maureen Dowd, the US columnist, put it: “Feminism has been replaced by
narcissism.”
The most unlikely things are now classed as “empowering”: buying shoes, taking
a pole-dancing class, having a boob job, sending a snap of your breasts to Nuts
magazine, entering one of the beauty contests newly revived across British
campuses. That these are the kind of dumb-ass submissive practices long
performed for male view, is, it seems, coincidental. Feminism 2009 means
acting out male masturbation fantasies — because you want to.
You may think that I am ignoring here the many notable women in British public
life. Yet while there are female CEOs and politicians, it has never been
made clearer to a woman that, whatever her other talents and achievements,
her true capital lies in her body. Twenty years ago, no commentator ever
(publicly) discussed Mrs Thatcher’s figure or even, much, her clothes. But
now how women who are public figures look frequently overshadows their work:
too frumpy, too tarty, too plain wrong. So never mind that Harriet Harman is
demanding that an investigation into how the justice system treats rape
victims should have a wider brief; just check out her garish jacket and her
Dame Edna magenta specs.
As for younger celebrities, they can forget their gold medals, Oscars and
PhDs. The only question that matters is: are you “hot” enough to look good
in a basque? Often it seems female stars play the raunch game to mitigate
against their success, to appear less threatening, more biddable, to men.
But it is not only women who are properly recompensed for flashing their
wares who are expected to perform. Very young girls — even the A-starred
GCSE candidates at fancy private schools — now measure themselves against
how well they fit into a particular aesthetic: skinny, full breasts, long
hair, full lips and an utterly hair-free body. As several writers — Ariel
Levy and Pamela Paul — have noted, this look and its raunchy
always-up-for-it countenance comes direct from the porn industry, which has
seeped into mainstream life through all those lap-dancing clubs and lads
magazines but, most particularly, through the internet.
More than 25,000 users of Bebo, the social networking site, use “slut” in
their usernames, according to research by Dr Jessica Ringrose, an
educational academic. “Hi I’m Daniella And I Like It Up The Bum” is typical
of the taglines she came across among girls as young as 13.
If old-school feminists protest against this pornification, we are accused of
being anti-sex, not groovy enough to enter that 24/7 pleasuredome of modern
youth culture. But what is strange and shocking is how women’s own sexual
pleasure is seldom mentioned. The female orgasm, the clitoris, barely get a
shout-out. From the lie-back-and-think-of-England days, when sex was
something men did to women, today it is perceived as something women perform
for men. Girls pride themselves in how well they give head and handjobs,
such as the singer Kelis, whose “milkshake brings all the boys to the yard”.
And anal sex, that Act 4 of every porn movie, which gives little female
pleasure and often much pain, is now firmly in the sexual repertoire of many
16-year-old girls.
It is their choice, you might say, how they want to look, to act, to make
love. Quite so. Yet if women are allowed to be whatever they want to be, why
is the template of female beauty more restricted and savagely policed than
ever before?
The psychologist Suzie Orbach, in her new book Bodies, remarks that in
the 1960s food disorders were relatively rare, part of some greater problem.
Now every young woman she encounters has a food disorder: it is a given,
part of the body self-hatred that is now accepted as the female condition.
Lately even the Girl Guides Association has expressed grave concern about
the body phobias of its young members.
Today’s pornified aesthetic is so narrow that it not only excludes the fat and
old, but demands drastic adjustments even from lovely young women. On TV
makeover shows, such as 10 Years Younger and The Swan, women
are paraded and their shortcomings discussed, until they consent to painful
operations. Is this liberation or even choice? What is absent, certainly, is
any discussion about whether promoting (highly profitable) plastic surgery
clinics on mainstream television is ethical, let alone constitutes abuse of
women.
Even in the mid-1990s it seemed that some kind of truce had been declared in
the sex wars. Natasha Walter’s book The New Feminism was almost
complacent about the progress in employment, political representation and
personal relationships women could expect. And I recall a discussion back
then that Page 3 of The Sun might be dropped because, maybe, it was
an anachronism. Yet within years Nuts and Zoo brought forth a
slew of images far more explicit and degrading since, unlike tabloids that
have women readers, they seek to please only young men.
How did we let this happen? Perhaps we had all become a bit po-faced and felt
that we’d achieved enough to relax. Humour burst through the political
correctness initially in Loaded magazine, which — unlike the
breastfest it later became — celebrated a blokeish, not unattractive, Nick
Hornby-ish masculinity, obsessed with vintage British comedy stars and pub
gags. Suddenly men who’d have thought twice about calling women “chicks” or
“birds” could do so under the cloak of irony and be thought witty and
daring. Women lightened up. Who wants to be a prig or a killjoy?
But over time that irony became a cloak for what has been termed
“retrosexism”: modern attitudes that mimic or glorify sexist attitudes of
the past;. sexual politics as defined by Detective Gene Hunt from Life on
Mars.
Meanwhile, the sex industry was upgrading its image. Before the Nineties
stripjoints were dives that no professional man would admit to frequenting.
But the clubs found that they could stop paying their lap dancers and
instead charge them for the right to work. With this new business model the
clubs could smarten their decor and become ritzy enough to attract young
City guys and their corporate clients. Now distanced from sleaze, the clubs
represented hedonism, glamour, freedom.
This not only legitimised lap dancing as a wing of the leisure industry but
made life uncomfortable, even unbearable, for women in the City who felt
obliged to go along to these clubs or miss out on deals. The Fawcett Society
is trying to address this by asking companies to agree to a charter
promising not to use the sex trade for corporate hospitality: BT, Barclays
and Matrix Chambers have already signed.
But retrosexism was perhaps the wrong word. As the academic Rosalind Gill has
pointed out, in raunch culture women are not passive sexual objects, but
active, even voracious agents. Or so they appear. Mostly, though, they are
acting out the scripts, the exaggerated desires of pornography.
When porn lived on the top shelf it was clearly fantasy, removed from real
relationships. But once porn was omnipresent it suddenly gave the appearance
of being true. Porn has “groomed” young women until they don’t even address
their own pleasure. Instead they are expected to get off on men getting off
on them.
For example, in my focus group, Chloe, 26, remarked: “I hate it when two women
in clubs kiss for the benefit of men who are watching.” The others all
nodded: they see this faux bisexual act constantly. Lesbian action is a
staple of porn, since it allows men the bonus of two pairs of breasts and
watching sexual activity without the straight male discomfort of seeing a
penis.
All the women in the group too, even the one self-professed feminist, said
that they shave or wax their genitals, a practice now considered a matter of
hygiene or “neatness”, but historically one that emanates from the US porn
industry. Earlier feminists wanted women to be content with their bodies,
not feel that they must depilate to resemble prepubescent girls. But these
young women have never challenged the painful rituals. Bodily hair was such
a source of horror that even a young feminist author who I interviewed said
that she’d never swim if her legs weren’t smooth. And one of my focus group
e-mailed me saying that she’d had a nightmare in which her body hair grew
unstoppably. Sisters, what is the big hairy deal?
After the debate most of them agreed that they’d thought about some issues for
the first time. Yet when a survey was published recently showing women’s
declining mental health in the past 30 years the conclusion, in the
headlines at least, was that this was the fault of feminism. Where, I
thought, is this feminism? While America has maintained a tradition of
feminist writers and thinkers, including Naomi Wolf and Katie Roiphe, where
are the young women questioning the orthodoxy here?
There has not been a single influential feminist book published this decade.
There is the odd young subversive voice — Beth Ditto, Lily Allen, daring to
write a song Not Fair suggesting that women need pleasing in bed too
— but these are marginalised and derided. Only the young women from Object —
who are not, for the record, ugly or man-hating and like make-up, fashion
and fun — are hammering their cause.
Maybe women’s mental health is damaged by the absence of feminism: the
negative, hateful and omnipresent messages that our bodies are ugly, our
choices wrong, our mothering inadequate. We need to debate whether we want a
society in which a new lap-dancing club opens every week, where little girls
grow up believing that their life’s work is tending to their bodies and the
sex industry is allowed to wash through our culture unchecked, so our young
have their nascent sexuality defined by the grinding industrial genitals of
porn. Feminism has slumbered too long: it is high time it woke up.
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