Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism

by Natasha Walter

  This idea that sexual bullying is often seen as just something that girls have to put up with was confirmed to me by other women working in this field. Hannah White, who runs a project at Womankind Worldwide that seeks to tackle sexual bullying, told me: ‘I wouldn’t say it was anything new, I think boys have always behaved in this way. But what I would say is that it’s been normalised in this generation in a way that makes it very hard to challenge.’ She raised to me the fact that technology has enabled the circulation of very sexualised images of young girls. So, for instance, the rise of what is called ‘sexting’ – circulating sexual images by mobile phone – bears witness to the strange, sad reality that the sexualisation of young girls often becomes the shaming of young girls. As Helen Penn from the Child Exploitation and Protection Centre told the BBC in 2009, ‘We are getting more reports of teenagers being bullied, called names and strung up in front of their whole school.’26

  Such evidence suggests that the sexualisation of young women is taking place in a world in which old imbalances of power still operate, often harshly. In 2009 the NSPCC worked with researchers at the University of Bristol to uncover truly shocking truths about the sexual experiences of young women. In a survey of young people aged 13 to 17, they found that nine out of ten had been in an intimate relationship, and that of these one third of the girls had experienced sexual violence from their partner.27 Adults who might once have seen the need to protect girls from sexual bullying and assault may be confused by the way that girls themselves can seem to be complicit in their own sexualisation. At a recent trial of three young boys accused of raping two teenage girls, the barrister who was defending the boys suggested that the way that girls wanted to live up to media and fashion images of sexiness had to be taken into account. ‘I am afraid cold stark reality is that things are not the way they used to be,’ the defending barrister, Sheilagh Davies, said. ‘The clothing available for young girls is so provocative. There is pressure on girls from eight to wear these stomach-revealing outfits, skinny jeans worn way down on the hips. They are learning to be sexually attractive, perhaps before their time. It’s about, “Let’s try it, let’s get on with it.” I am afraid information in the media tells us that some girls do comply, maybe to gain attention, maybe to gain affection, and go along with it quite willingly.’28 The confusion between sexual liberation and the sexual objectification of young girls means that there is a danger that young girls might not be seen as in need of protection from unwanted attention and even assaults.

  If this early sexualisation of young women was all about their liberation, and they were in control of it, we would not see large numbers of women saying that they regretted their first sexual experiences. But just as the number of girls having sex early has grown, so has the number of girls who look back with regret. Eighty per cent of girls who had sex aged thirteen or fourteen said they regretted it in a survey carried out in 2000, compared to 50 per cent in 1990.29 Since one in four girls has sex below the age of sixteen, that’s a lot of regrets. Rachel Gardner is trying to encourage girls and boys to challenge this reality through a project she has set up called the Romance Academy, where young people get together to try to work through an alternative view of intimacy. ‘I don’t talk about abstinence,’ Gardner says, ‘as that has such negative connotations. We talk about delaying sexual experience.’ Abstinence does indeed have very negative connotations. Any voices that have challenged our highly sexualised culture in recent times have generally come from the religious right, which means that liberals have become uneasy about joining them.

  One of the young women who has experienced the Romance Academy agreed to talk to me, and we met in a cafe in Harrow. Grace is a talkative young woman who first had sex when she was fourteen, with a boyfriend she had been with for three months. Now, at eighteen, she has had a few sexual partners, she won’t say exactly how many. She wishes that she hadn’t had sex so young and with so many people. ‘It’s such a part of our culture to have sex that young. Most of my friends were having sex at the same age. The pressure is there because you are confused. You feel like everyone else is. Now, when I look back I think that was young, that was too young, but I didn’t understand that I wasn’t ready for it.’

  Grace felt the pressure from the media around her. ‘There is so much talk about sex. In these magazines – what they don’t understand is that young girls read women’s magazines – it’s all thrown at you – top ten tips to good sex, everything’s saying you should be doing it – even in the young magazines, there’s nothing saying don’t do it, just be a teenager with your friends.’ But she also experienced sexual bullying from her peers. ‘I’d call it sexual bullying now, but I didn’t have the words for it at the time. But it is bullying. That’s how I lost my virginity, because my boyfriend was going on about it and all his mates, and you feel like well, I should. It’s pressurising, some of the things they used to say, it wasn’t nice, they make you feel like a piece of meat. Even little comments like, yeah, are you going to get some of that tonight, they don’t make you feel good, because you’re vulnerable, it hurts you a bit. But because you’re younger you don’t talk back. You’re not really friends with boys at that age, and to boys you’re like a sexual object.’

  Grace watched similar things happening with other girls around her, and saw that the pressure came from girls as well as boys. ‘My friend, she was a very good girl, she wasn’t confident with boys and stuff, but she got a boyfriend, and she wasn’t ready to lose her virginity, but one of our friends was putting pressure on her, saying, he wants it, you’ve got to give it to him, you’re so frigid, making her feel bad because she wasn’t having sex with him. When you’re really being strong, you’re seen as being weak, like there’s something wrong with you.’ She feels that the experience of getting support from the Romance Academy has enabled her to find her own voice. ‘Now, I’ll speak back,’ she told me. ‘I’ll tell them to shut up, I’ll stick up for myself, but that’s because I’m older and I’ve had the Romance Academy experience. It made me a lot more confident in the idea that you don’t have to be having sex and you can be a strong person even if you’re not having sex. But at school I’d be the girlfriend who’d sit there and smile and giggle. I didn’t have a voice to say, don’t talk about me in that way. I didn’t know that there was something wrong with it. I didn’t know I could speak up.’

  Although the idea of a Romance Academy that encourages young women not to have sex may sound as absurd as the Junior Anti-Sex League in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, there is clearly a truth here: that girls need renewed leadership from one another or role models, to be encouraged into seeing themselves as valued for more than their sexiness. This is not just about giving children more and more sex education, as some feminists argue. Knowledge of the nuts and bolts of sex is important, but we also need to give our children the tools to challenge the culture around them. That will need a change not just in factual messages given in a classroom or by an individual parent, but a more widespread questioning of why we are encouraging our daughters to feel that their worth is so bound up with their physical allure at such an early age, and why there are so few alternatives on offer. It may not be easy for feminists to accept that liberal messages have not always been empowering for young women on the cusp of exploring their sexuality, but it does seem that what was once seen as sexual liberation has become, for young girls, more like sexual imprisoning. As Rachel Gardner says, ‘Some of the messages of sexual liberation have actually made it harder for young women to find sexual fulfilment. The younger a teenage girl starts having sex, particularly if it’s a negative experience, the harder it is for her to find out what it means to be sexual, and the more likely it is that she’ll just see herself as an object.’

  A world in which such pressure is put on young girls to value themselves only for their sexual attractiveness is not where feminists once thought we would be at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is tragic to hear a girl such as Carl
y saying that she feels entirely isolated on this issue. ‘Nobody is speaking out about this,’ she told me more than once. She is wrong to say that nobody is speaking up about this situation, but it is true that dissent is often muffled and marginalised. Many young women I spoke to felt that any questioning of this hypersexual culture will only be seen as prudishness, since liberation has become so associated with overtly sexualised behaviour. ‘If you say you don’t like it, you are just saying that you are uptight and unattractive,’ Carly told me. ‘That’s the problem. Nobody is saying that they don’t like it so if you do you sound like an old granny – it makes you sound like some old fart saying, oh I don’t think you should wear that, dear.’ We need not reinvent the wheel here – there is a great history of feminist argument against the sexual objectification of girls. If we could bring such dissent back into the mainstream, it would give strength to those girls who want to find a different path – girls such as Grace or Carly, who said to me, with sadness, ‘There aren’t any other options. There isn’t anyone speaking out against it. You’re just a sex object, and then you’re a mother, and that’s it. There is no alternative culture. There’s no voice saying that girls can be anything else or do anything else.’

  4: Lovers

  One of the primary goals of the second-wave women’s movement of the 1970s was to enable women to feel free to enjoy sex without being held back by traditional social expectations. After The Female Eunuch was published in 1970, Germaine Greer said to a journalist from the New York Times, ‘Women have somehow been separated from their libido, from their faculty of desire, from their sexuality. They’ve become suspicious about it.’1 And so Greer attempted to shift women away from the modesty that she felt constrained their natural sexual appetites. This was partly about freeing them from the trap, as she saw it, of monogamy, and encouraging them to move towards a guilt-free promiscuity, which she was certain would deliver more fulfilment. As she wrote in The Female Eunuch, ‘Possessive love, for all its seductiveness, breaks down personal poise and leaves its victims newly vulnerable … Lovers who are free to go when they are restless always come back.’2 And as she put it when talking about her own sexual relationships, she was proud to see herself as a woman who was not possessive. ‘Supergroupies don’t have to hang around hotel corridors. When you are one, as I have been, you get invited backstage. I think groupies are important because they demystify sex; they accept it as physical, and they aren’t possessive about their conquests.’3, 4

  Even if not all writers who are associated with feminism’s second wave had quite Greer’s cheerleading tone when talking about promiscuity, this was a time when women who had more than one sexual partner were often seen as necessarily more honest and braver than those who chose monogamy. Marriage, which had been sold to so many women for so long as their ultimate ideal, now came under serious questioning. Although there had always been a few independent women who had decided not to follow social pressure to be married, before the 1970s these women had always been successfully marginalised. Now, for the first time, the argument could be heard even in mainstream culture that women could be entirely fulfilled without marriage, and even that women who stayed in marriage had somehow compromised.

  This shift towards questioning marriage and monogamy could be seen in magazines, consciousness-raising groups, everyday behaviour and fiction during this period. When Doris Lessing wrote The Golden Notebook in 1962, she didn’t have the immense optimism of Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch – on the contrary, she communicated a deeply troubled view of sexual relationships. But even then she gave voice to women who were able to state with pride that they had ‘not given up and crawled into safety somewhere. Into a safe marriage.’5 She chronicled their sexual encounters, good and bad, without shame or any attempt to gloss over their reality. Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room, published in 1977, contains a similarly questioning look at married relationships. Although the failure of married monogamy was not to be greeted wholly with joy, it was still seen as a necessary failure. The journey away from bourgeois marriage into freer sexual relationships, even if it was a journey fraught with sadness, was seen as progress.

  By questioning monogamy and supporting sexual freedom, the writers associated with the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s undoubtedly created a real shift in the way that women saw their sexuality. This was a positive shift, in that it allowed women to talk about physical realities and lay claim to their own desires and pleasure. Female sexuality was now discussed with an honesty that had never been seen before, as writers detailed orgasms, masturbation, periods and positions without shame. And alongside this defiant reclaiming of sexual pleasure there was clearly, at that time, a moral charge in the new imperative not to be locked into monogamy. For too long, said the second-wave feminists, and with justification, women had been tricked by romantic ideals into subsuming their own sexual desire into their partner’s. They had sunk into marriage instead of claiming pleasure with more than one person. They now needed to learn to take sexual pleasure for themselves and to experiment, and that would necessarily include having sex outside committed relationships.

  Feminism is not now always associated with this kind of sexual liberation, as it is often more connected to the thoroughgoing critique of heterosexuality that was enunciated by some feminists later in the 1970s and 1980s. But feminists who opened out the ideal of freer sexual relationships were part of the whole counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, and they helped to create a revolution in women’s behaviour, one whose effects are still with us.

  One day I spent a couple of hours talking to A-level students at a sixth-form college in London. We discussed their ideals for their sexual lives, and I was struck by how definitely they held on to an ideal that few women before the 1960s could possibly have espoused. ‘The idea of spending my life with one man, the whole marriage thing, I’m not keen on that,’ said Ruby, an articulate young woman with fine features and a tough way of talking, early on in our discussion.

  I was faced that day in the sixth-form college with a dozen teenage girls, a mixture of black and white, middle class and working class, British by birth and immigrants. They all, no doubt, had different experiences of love and sex. I do not want to exaggerate the changes in our society by suggesting that all individuals’ real lives fall in with the dominant cultural mood. Just as in Jane Austen’s time there were women who had sex before marriage and lovers after marriage, so there are women now who hold themselves in readiness for their one true love and seek to remain eternally faithful to him. But just as in Austen’s time the promiscuous woman was presented in the dominant culture as marginal and to be condemned, so now a girl who has decided to delay sexual activity until she finds a true emotional commitment can be pushed to the margins and silenced.

  Sometimes I felt a range of experience was momentarily apparent; when a girl mentioned that she felt there was too much pressure to have sex, for instance, and another girl chimed in with agreement, ‘Yeah, there is pressure – if you’re a virgin – and you’re at a party, and the college stud muffin is interested, then there’s pressure to just do it, just do it.’ But it was clear in the group that certain girls’ experiences were more approved of and more easily spoken about than others. These dominant experiences belonged above all to three girls; three slender, well-dressed, beautiful white girls whose voices were louder than the others and whose laughter more scornful. ‘Mean girls,’ I scribbled on my notebook when their laughter silenced the girls who were tentatively describing how they felt pressured into sex too early. Not that they were actually mean, but just like the mean girls in the film of the same name, they were so confident that the other girls in the group seemed subdued beside them. And their sense of certainty clearly arose partly from their sexual self-confidence. While two hundred years ago the girls given the greatest status in a group of unmarried young women would have been those who presented themselves as pure virgins, now the greatest status can be owned by the girls who can
boast, as one of these girls did, to having had twenty-two sexual partners – thirteen men and nine women – by the age of eighteen.

  When I talked to these three girls afterwards in a cafe, they were easy about telling a stranger quite how uninhibited they were in their happily promiscuous sex lives. Bella, the girl who had had twenty-two sexual partners, was a confident 18-year-old with long, straightened brown hair and bright eyes made brighter with immaculate make-up. She started telling me how she does still sometimes have to prove to men that she really is not looking for love and romance. She told me about how a male friend had come to see her the previous night and got drunk with her. ‘Somehow we got on to how much sex I had. He was trying to convince me that I had had a traumatic childhood and that was why I had so much sex. I had to keep saying no, I actually am happy. I like having this much sex. I love it.’

  But by and large she felt that her behaviour was accepted by her friends and by the wider culture. Her friend Ruby agreed. ‘I don’t have boyfriends. I have sex with men, but I wouldn’t call them boyfriends,’ she said. Is that just how things are now, I asked her curiously, or is that how she wants to run her life? Ruby looked at me with a scornful gaze. ‘It’s how I want to run my life, basically,’ she said, taking another sip of her frappuccino. For girls like these, the romantic ideal that meant so much to previous generations of women, the belief that one day you would find a man who would be the love of your life and you the love of his, has died. ‘I did fall in love with my first boyfriend,’ said Ruby. ‘But it went tits up. It was a load of bollocks.’ That was when she was thirteen, but now, at eighteen, these girls are older and wiser.