Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism

by Natasha Walter

  But what I found in Hull was that the dismembered body of 25-year-old Natalie Clubb actually had little in common with the corpses of 29-year-old Samantha Class and 20-year-old Hayley Morgan, all found within a few months of one another. Although they had all died violent deaths, it was not one man who had murdered them all. The awful truth was that it was just chance that three prostitutes had been murdered in such a short space of time in a single city – or, rather, not chance, but the result of the violence to which women who sell sex are constantly exposed. All the women whom I interviewed in Hull bore witness to this constant threat, telling me about clients who had threatened them or beaten them up. Those memoirs of prostitution that have become mainstream successes tell stories of a way of life that readers would like to see as totally separate from this kind of violence and abuse. The writers are prostitutes who are also, by and large, educated women working in small brothels and through escort agencies. Yet even these books cannot sidestep the threat of abuse. And, horribly, the ability to deal with this abuse, not by challenging or stopping it, but by accepting and dissociating from it – is seen as success. For instance, Miss S’s Confessions of a Working Girl was sold as an enjoyable account of a prostitute’s life, with a pretty pastel cover showing a young woman in underwear. Yet as soon as you begin to read it you realise that there is an ugly strand of violence to her work, and that Miss S has to learn to accept this violence in order to continue. In her first shift as a prostitute, she had three clients, one of whom ‘forced my head down on him with his hands … I gagged time and again’ while he shouted ‘Suck it, bitch,’ and another who ‘slapped my breasts until they turned pink’ while she was determined not ‘to give him any indication that it hurt like hell, as he probably would have got off on it and would have gone on just to spite me.’32 Gradually you realise that you are reading the memoir of a woman who is teaching herself to dissociate herself from her body. On another occasion after an evening’s work Miss S’s vagina is so damaged that she has to visit a clinic to be stitched up. ‘The doc looked up and said I had a lot of small internal tears and, as I was still so swollen, she could not sew them up. The longer one nearer the entrance was a different matter and seemed to be the cause of most of the bleeding.’ But Miss S is soon back at work deciding that, ‘I would use the red condoms, so the guys wouldn’t notice any spots of blood.’ Although the reader might feel physically sick after reading these descriptions of sexual violence, Miss S seems to see her ability to allow her own abuse to continue as a sign of her own strength of character.

  When I interviewed prostitutes in Hull during that time when women were being murdered, I was shocked by the way that violence was so close to their lives, stalking them as they worked. But it wasn’t just the physical trauma they talked about, it was also the psychological trauma of having to accept the dissociation of sex and emotion. I spent a long time talking with a prostitute called Melanie, who had known all the dead women, and who had been working on the streets for three years. What remained with me was the way that she had learned to dissociate from her own experiences to get through the nights. ‘The first time I did it I hated myself so much. I threw up and then I got in a bath and scrubbed myself for hours. Now,’ she said sadly, ‘I just get on with it. You learn to switch off. You do manage. I can do it now.’ For her, undoubtedly, heroin helped her to switch off. But it wasn’t just the drugs. She had become inured to a situation in which she had to remove herself from her body rather than listening to her own desires and needs. The ease with which prostitution is presented as an acceptable choice for women dismisses the psychological trauma that actually seems to be not the occasional, but the inevitable, result of selling sex.

  When Angela, the woman who had been tempted into prostitution by the idea that it might be reasonably easy, actually started to sell sex, she was shocked by what she discovered about both the physical and the psychological impact of the work. ‘I saw,’ she told me unequivocally, ‘it’s not empowering, it’s very disempowering. It’s harmful. It narrows how you value yourself, how you define yourself. It’s very dangerous to define yourself through the eyes of these men who are buying your body. I see that now – I wish I could get other women to see it. I feel as though this hypersexualisation of society – everyone’s falling for it, and more and more young girls think that prostitution is about being Billie Piper, being Belle de Jour, and it just isn’t. It really isn’t like that.’

  Angela has mainly sold sex through the internet, or through putting advertisements for ‘massage’ up in small shops. She has also worked for an escort agency in London, and in the ‘brothel’ context of small flats run by a ‘madam’. She has found that there is always the possibility of actual violence. ‘There are a lot of clients who are respectful but it’s all over the spectrum,’ she told me. ‘Really younger ones want to experiment, they’ve seen stuff on the internet, violence and rape. What was extreme five years ago is commonplace now. I get enquiries about being tied up, being gagged, they want to tie you up, they want threesomes. I get the feeling that some of the men get off on the fact that the woman doesn’t want it. Basically you’ve consented to being raped sometimes for money.’

  When I ask her about physical violence, she pulls down the side of her jeans, and I see a huge bruise on her thigh. ‘I went to this guy’s house last week, twice – he was all coked up, a bit drunk. He said, I’m in love with you, you’re so nice, but there was always this violence underneath, and then all of a sudden he bit my leg – he said it was in the heat of passion. It is scary.’ What Angela finds most horrifying about her experiences, though, is not the physical violence but the psychological effect, the way that working as a prostitute forces her to dissociate her feelings from her body. ‘Even when they are violent, and you are scared, or when you are just repulsed, or just not into it – you have to act as though you are enjoying it. How can that not damage you? How can that not eat away at your psyche?’ Because of the psychological pressure, Angela feels that her ability to form intimate relationships has been damaged for ever. ‘To be honest, I don’t think I’ll be able to have a relationship again. I can’t trust men now and I can’t see them other than the way they behave to prostitutes.’

  The experiences of a prostitute may be discounted by many women as untypical of normal experience, but there is a resonance to Angela’s words as she looks at a society that has successfully told many women that there can be something liberating about working in the sex industry. ‘If women resist now, and start fighting back and saying, this isn’t power, this is slavery, I think we will be crucified,’ she told me. ‘All this push to get women to buy into porn and its values – it’s turning all women into paid or unpaid sex workers. Is it really empowering? If it was, wouldn’t it be empowering for all women? Where are the 70-year-old lap dancers? If I hadn’t done what I’ve done, I don’t think I’d see it so clearly. But now I see it, I feel like a goldfish fighting a whale. I’ve come to the conclusion that most of our culture is dedicated to producing an endless conveyor-belt of women who are there for men’s sexual convenience.’

  3: Girls

  The experiences of women who have actually decided to enter the sex industry can obviously be swept to one side by many people, and women who would never take that step might easily view them with disdain or simple incomprehension. Yet even if we put these experiences aside, the rise of a culture in which it is taken for granted that women will be valued primarily for their sexual attractiveness has become inescapable for many young women.

  This culture has even affected the lives of very young girls, from the heroines they look up to, to the clothes they wear, the way they see their bodies, and even the toys they play with. The look of a popular brand such as the Bratz dolls exemplifies the new expectation that young girls will be seen as sexy early in their lives. With their pouting lips and over-defined sleepy eyes, their bling and miniskirts and heels, Bratz dolls look like the young women at Mayhem’s Babes on the Bed club night. Those
who market Bratz would like girls to see these dolls as relevant to their real lives. As Lisa Shapiro, who is in charge of licensing for Bratz in the UK, said in an interview with the Guardian: ‘We want the girls to live the Bratz life – wear the mascara; use the hair product; send the greeting card…. Bratz is about real life. It has to be.’1

  When Bratz: the Movie opened in 2007 I went to my local Odeon, where a stream of girls aged from four to fourteen, in their leggings and miniskirts, ballet pumps and wedge sandals, bunches and straightened hair, were waiting in the foyer. I started talking to Taylay and Bobbijo, two girls aged five and seven, who were dressed in denim miniskirts and silver ballet pumps. Bobbijo has thirteen Bratz dolls, Taylay has five. ‘They go out together,’ Taylay explained to me. ‘And we dress them up in cool clothes.’ ‘They love shopping,’ said Bobbijo. Another group of girls – 14-year-old Joanne and her friend Jade, and Jade’s sisters Courtney, seven, and Demi, four – joined us. Courtney was wearing a dark pink T-shirt stating ‘95 per cent cute. 5 per cent attitude’. What did these girls want to do when they grew up, I wondered. ‘I want to be just like the Bratz,’ Courtney said. I asked her what that meant. ‘I want to be in films. I want to wear great clothes and look like that.’ The film showed the Bratz girls shopping, dressing up, flirting and forming a pop group to impress other students in their high school. Afterwards most of the girls seemed happy with the film. ‘It’s like real life,’ said Jade, ‘as well as being fun.’ Only 4-year-old Demi wasn’t sure. ‘I wanted them to go on an adventure,’ she said.

  But there aren’t many adventures on offer in this part of our culture, in which the main journey for a young girl is expected to lie along her path to winning the admiration of others for her appearance. Despite the limitations of the narrative, I was struck, during the film, to hear a strong rhetoric of independence and self-expression running throughout. The song performed at the film’s denouement, ‘Express Yourself’, tells girls to be independent and think of themselves, because it is ‘your time’ and ‘you are first in line’: ‘Baby live your life, ’Cause now we’re here to remind you, That no one lives life twice … just express yourself.’2

  It is modern feminism that created this rhetoric that foregrounds self-expression. Feminists encouraged women to cease seeing the good woman’s life as defined through service to others, as it had been throughout the nineteenth century, and instead encouraged them to focus on their own desires and independence. But that focus on independence and self-expression is now sold back to young women as the narrowest kind of consumerism and self-objectification.

  The belief that even young girls will want to ‘express themselves’ through perfecting their appearance means that even girls as young as eight or nine are being expected to devote energy to dieting, grooming and shopping. The idea that girls should embark on what the American writer Joan Jacobs Brumberg has called ‘the body project’ at an early age is becoming more and more prevalent. Brumberg is a historian who has looked at the diaries of young girls to see how the idea of self-improvement has changed over the years. She has found that, ‘Before World War I, girls rarely mentioned their bodies in terms of strategies for self-improvement or struggles for personal identity. Becoming a better person meant paying less attention to the self, giving more assistance to others, and putting more effort into instructive reading or lessons at school.’ This meant that when girls in the nineteenth century thought about ways to improve themselves, they would focus on their internal character and how it was reflected in their outward behaviour. ‘In 1892, the personal agenda of an adolescent diarist read: “Resolved not to talk about myself or feelings. To think before speaking. To work seriously. To be self restrained in conversation and actions. Not to let my thoughts wander. To be dignified. Interest myself more in others.”’ A century later, Brumberg found that girls thought very differently about what bettering oneself meant. From one typical diary entry of contemporary girlhood Brumberg quotes, ‘“I will try to make myself better in any way I possibly can with the help of my budget and babysitting money. I will lose weight, get new lenses, already got new haircut, good makeup, new clothes and accessories.”’3

  It’s not just in diaries that we can see this shift. Throughout our culture it is constantly suggested that women’s journey to self-fulfilment will inevitably lie in perfecting their bodies. Much of the culture around young women centres on the idea of the ‘makeover’ – from television shows that focus on the transformation, such as Ladette to Lady, Britain’s Next Top Model or From Asbo Queen to Beauty Queen, to magazines that encourage even their primary-school readers to write in for a chance to be remodelled. The imperative is to better oneself not through any intellectual or emotional growth, but through physical remaking. Such media encourage young girls to believe that good looks rather than good works are at the centre of the good life.

  What makes these messages particularly attractive to young women is that they constantly return to the language of empowerment and opportunity. So fashion experts tell girls: ‘We’ll show you how to be the star of your own show,’4 while diet gurus exhort, ‘Embrace yourself, hold your chin up high and remind yourself who is in charge here – you’re gonna make it,’5 and advice books such as The Girls Book of Glamour will state, ‘Be confident, be gorgeous, be glamorous.’6 Susie Orbach, the psychoanalyst who wrote the influential book Fat is a Feminist Issue in 1978, returned to an exploration of women’s relationships with their bodies in her last book, Bodies, in 2009. In an interview Orbach described the way that women are encouraged to aspire to physical perfection through a rhetoric of power: ‘It’s about transforming that sense of feeling powerless into feeling powerful. It transforms the image of you as the victim into thinking, “Oh, this is a real opportunity! I could do it this time!”’7

  By drawing attention to this phenomenon, I am certainly not saying that narcissism should be rejected altogether by young girls. In the past, feminists have often seen only the negative aspects of the beauty and fashion industries. I still believe that there is great enjoyment in these pursuits, and when I watch my daughter revelling in her dressing-up box, and changing herself from cat to mermaid to warrior princess, I can sympathise utterly with the pleasure that is involved with transforming one’s appearance. As she grows up, I’d be very happy to see her continue that pleasure by exploring the joys of fashion and cosmetics. But there is a huge difference between taking pleasure in such pursuits and believing that the only route to confidence and power for a woman lies through constant physical vigilance.

  If we were seeing a growth of individualistic, pleasurable engagement in fashion and beauty, then the culture for young girls would not feel so punishing. Surveys have discovered that nearly three-quarters of adolescent girls are dissatisfied with their body shape and more than a third are dieting8; one study found that even among 11-year-olds, one in five is trying to lose weight9; another study found that most six-year-olds would prefer to be thinner than they are.10 It is often shocking to see how narrow the physical ideals held up to young women truly are. I have loved magazines since I was a child, starting with Jackie and then graduating through 19 and Elle to Vogue, but when I look at the magazines aimed at young girls now I can see a definite shift. While the magazines I read at school were never feminist tracts, they were not littered, as girls’ magazines are now, with page after page of expensively dressed and made-up young girls exposing such skinny, airbrushed bodies. They did not so relentlessly encourage their readers to measure up to a raft of celebrities whose doll-like looks are seen as iconic and whose punishing physical regimes are seen as aspirational. They did not so viciously dissect other women’s failures, as those magazines do that showcase embarrassing snaps of celebrities’ weight gain and poor clothes choices. And they never touched on plastic surgery as a strategy towards self-perfection.

  Plastic surgery has been boosted in recent years by the rise of stars such as Victoria Beckham or Jordan who are obviously reliant on the needle and the kni
fe for their transformations and by the trend for television makeover shows, such as 10 Years Younger and Make Me Beautiful, Please, which encourage the view of surgery as an easy fix for self-improvement. These programmes tend to use the language of choice and freedom; as one of the plastic surgeons who likes to participate in these shows put it: ‘What’s wrong with plastic surgery? It’s a matter of choice.’11 The influence that this culture has on young women is such that even teenagers now see plastic surgery as an answer to their anxieties about their bodies. One survey carried out in 2006 found that one in four girls were considering plastic surgery by the age of sixteen.12

  The power of this body project is clearly tied to the sexualisation of women. Of course, young girls as well as mature women are sexual beings, and it is great that young girls need no longer experience the shame and embarrassment that girls felt in the past about their sexual feelings. But the liberation that feminists once imagined as involving an honest acceptance of girls’ sexuality has now morphed into something altogether less enabling. Although there is now a genuine and understandable taboo around the idea of underage sexual activity, there is paradoxically a real pressure on girls to measure up as sexually attractive at a young age. The rhetoric of choice may have burgeoned in this generation, but in many ways the range of female characters and role models available for young girls has narrowed. Sexualised images of young women are threatening to squeeze out other kinds of images of women throughout popular culture.