Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism

by Natasha Walter

  12 Caroline Flint’s resignation letter, 5 June 2009

  13 Marie Woolf, ‘Paternity leave scheme shelved by Lord Mandelson’, Sunday Times, 31 May 2009

  14 Brendan Burchell, Colette Fagan, Catherine O’Brien and Mark Smith, Working Conditions in the European Union: The Gender Perspective (Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 2007), retrieved 24 January 2009 from http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/pubdocs/2007/108/en/1/ef07108en.pdf; statistics for the UK discussed in Sarah Womack, ‘Career women work longer hours than men’, Daily Telegraph, 2 December 2007

  15 Pay statistics from the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s analysis of data from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Office of National Statistics, 2008) and Labour Market Statistics Bulletin (Office of National Statistics, 2008), based on mean hourly earnings, retrieved 1 September 2009 from www.equalityhumanrights.com

  16 From 2007 to 2008 the pay gap widened by 0.1 per cent. Based on mean earnings, from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Office of National Statistics, 2008), retrieved 26 May 2009 from http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=167. In 2007 the pay gap for women and men in senior professional positions also widened for the first time in more than a decade, according to the National Management Salary Survey (Chartered Management Institute, September 2007). ‘In real terms female managers earned an average of £43,571, last year – £6,076 less than the male equivalent of £49,647. The difference (12.2 per cent) is up from 11.8 per cent, last year. At director level the gap is £49,233 or 23 per cent, up from 20 per cent, last year.’ Press release retrieved 24 January 2009 from http://www.managers.org.uk/listing_media_1.aspx?id=10:347&id=10:138&id=10:11&doc=10:3364

  17 Jill Treanor, ‘Women quit before hitting glass ceiling’, Guardian, 8 March 2007

  18 Anya C Hurlbert and Yazhu Ling, ‘Biological components of sex differences in colour preference’, Current Biology, 17, 16 (2007), 623–5

  19 Steve Connor, ‘Boys like blue, girls like pink, it’s in our genes’, Independent, 21 August 2007

  20 Martin Wainwright, ‘Pink for a girl and blue for a boy – and it’s all down to evolution’, Guardian, 21 August 2007

  21 Girls’ Schools Association website, ‘Answers to frequently asked questions’, retrieved 13 October 2008 from http://www.gsa.uk.com/default.aspx?id=135

  22 Quoted in Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje, ‘Little girls carried away on a pink wave of princess products’, San Antonio Express, 3 October 2007

  23 Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference (London: Allen Lane, 2003), p20

  24 Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference, op cit, p185

  1: Babes

  1 Sales of Zoo slipped 13.6 per cent from 2007 to 2008, sales of Nuts slipped 9.8 per cent over the same period. Statistics from the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC), quoted in Owen Gibson, ‘Lads’ mags cocktail of booze, birds and banter loses its fizz’, Guardian, 15 August 2008

  2 Traffic to the Nuts website increased sharply in 2008, with over 1 million unique users in June 2008, a 121 per cent year-on-year increase. Figures from IPC press release, retrieved 26 May 2009 from http://www.ipcmedia.com/press/article.php?id=270943

  3 Survey carried out by the Lab, 6 June 2005, retrieved 10 October 2008 from http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/s/161/ 161338_naked_ambition_rubs_off_on_teen_girls.htm

  4 Martlet, newsletter of Pembroke College Cambridge, 9 (September 2005)

  5 Telegraph reporter, ‘Cambridge University magazine prints topless page three picture of student’, Daily Telegraph, 20 November 2008

  6 Quoted in Janice Turner, ‘Is the misogyny of lads’ mags good clean fun?’ Guardian, 22 October 2005

  7 Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (London: Simon & Schuster, 2006)

  2: Pole-dancers and prostitutes

  1 Estimate from OBJECT and Fawcett Society’s briefing on lap dancing, retrieved 1 September 2009 from www.object.org.uk.

  2 Retrieved 29 June 2009 from http://www.thestagcompany.com/lapdancing-stag-weekends/

  3 Retrieved 15 October 2008 from http://www.clubmuse.co.uk/clubmuse.htm

  4 Gordon Stuart, ‘Spice Girls learn to pole dance’, Sun, 24 October 2007

  5 Gordon Stuart, ‘Sugas are sweet on pole-dancing’, Sun, 3 April 2008

  6 Louise Gannon, ‘Emilia Fox on the noble art of pole-dancing and how she learned to undress for her husband’, Daily Mail, 12 April 2008

  7 Stranger magazine, August 2006, retrieved 1 June 2009 from http://www.stranger-mag.com/features/life/the-importance-of-beingimmodest.html

  8 Kelly DiNardo, ‘Burlesque comeback tries to dance with feminism’, Womens ENews, 12 July 2004, retrieved 1 June 2009 from http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/2099

  9 ‘Take a peep at Mel B’, Sun, 3 April 2009

  10 See for instance, Conrad Astley, ‘Lap dance girls pay for naked ambition’, Manchester Evening News, 13 June 2003; Lee Sykes, ‘Lap dancing club has fallen foul of the law’, Oldham Advertiser, 22 March 2006; ‘Call for curbs on lapdancing clubs’, BBC News 17 August 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/3572112.stm; Julie Bindel, Profitable exploits: lap dancing in the UK (Child and Women Abuse Studies Unit, London Metropolitan University, 2004), retrieved 1 June 2009 from http://www.rapecrisisscotland.org.uk/documents/profitable%20exploits.pdf

  11 Lilith report on lap dancing and striptease in the London Borough of Camden (2003) p10, retrieved 15 October 2008 from http://www.eaves4women.co.uk/Lilith_Project/Documents/Reports/ Lilith_report_lap_dancing_striptease_camden.pdf

  12 Catherine Bennett, ‘Why can’t we stop the spread of degrading adverts for sex?’, Observer, 1 June 2008

  13 Belle de Jour, The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005); Miss S, Confessions of a Working Girl (London: Penguin, 2007); Tracy Quan, Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl ((2001), London: HarperCollins, 2005)

  14 Emile Zola, Nana ((1880), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p452

  15 Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist ((1839), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), p364

  16 Miss S, Confessions of a Working Girl, op cit, p89

  17 Russell Brand, My Booky Wook (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2007), pp126–7

  18 Caroline Crowe, ‘Meet the men who pay for sex’, Sun, 30 October 2007

  19 Maddy Coy, Miranda Horvath and Liz Kelly, It’s Just Like Going to the Supermarket: Men Buying Sex in East London, report for Safe Exit at Toynbee Hall (Child & Woman Abuse Studies Unit, London Metropolitan University, 2007), p20

  20 Helen Ward et al, ‘Who pays for sex? An analysis of the increasing prevalence of female commercial sex contacts among men in Britain’, Sexually Transmitted Infections, 81 (2005), 467–71

  21 Peter Baker, of the Men’s Health Forum, commented that: ‘Many people will be surprised by the relatively large numbers of men who are willing to pay for sex. But it’s not so surprising in the context of social trends – women are increasingly sexualised in the media.’ Quotations from BBC report, ‘Twice as many men pay for sex’, 1 December 2005, retrieved 18 October 2008 from http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4482970.stm

  22 The coverage of this report on the Guardian website linked to an internet soft porn site on 10 November 2007 – the link no longer exists. www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1654880,00.html

  23 K Elliott, H Eland, and J McGaw, Kerb Crawling in Middlesbrough: An Analysis of Kerbcrawlers’ Opinions (Safer Middlesbrough Partnership, 2002) unpublished, cited in Coy, Horvath and Kelly, op cit, p3

  24 Retrieved November 2007 from www.punternet.com, spelling and punctuation corrected

  25 M A Barnard, G Hurt, C Benson and S Church, Client Violence Against Prostitutes Working from Street and Off-street Locations: A three-city comparison (Swindon: ESRC Violence Research Programme, 2002), cited in Coy, Horvath and Kelly, op cit, p3

  26 Paying the Price: A Consultation Paper on Prostitution (Home Office, 2004), p11, retrieved 18 October 2008 from http
://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/documents/paying_the_price.pdf?view=Binary

  27 J Pearce, It’s Someone Taking a Part of You: A Study of Young Women and Sexual Exploitation (National Children’s Bureau for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2002), cited in Paying the price, op cit, p95

  28 H Kinnell, correspondence, 1993, cited in Paying the price, op cit, p95

  29 J J Pearce, M Williams and C Galvin, Research Findings: the Choice and Opportunity Project, Young Women and Sexual Exploitation (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2003), cited in M Hester and N Westmarland, Tackling Street Prostitution: Towards an Holistic Approach (Home Office research, development and statistics directorate, July 2004), p60

  30 R Campbell, Working on the Street, an Evaluation of the Linx Project 1998–2001 (Liverpool Hope University, 2002), cited in Hester and Westmarland, op cit, p78

  31 I Peate, ‘Paying the price: health care and prostitution’, British Journal of Nursing, 15 (2006), 246–7, cited in M Goodyear and L Cusick, ‘Protection of sex workers’, BMJ, 334, 7584 (13 January 2007), 52–3

  32 Miss S, Confessions of a Working Girl, op cit, pp4–6

  3: Girls

  1 Quoted in Tanya Gold, ‘The queen is dead’, Guardian, 6 October 2004

  2 ‘Express Yourself’, Black Eyed Peas featuring Apl de Ap, Geffen/Universal 2007

  3 Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Random House, 1997), pxxi

  4 Retrieved 15 August 2009 from http://www.trinnyandsusannah.com/

  5 Esther Blum, author of Eat, Drink and Be Gorgeous, in Daily Mail, 12 January 2009

  6 Sally Jeffrie, The Girls Book of Glamour (London: Buster Books, 2007)

  7 Susie Orbach, Bodies (London: Profile, 2009), p136

  8 ‘Girls diet for pop star bodies’, BBC News, 20 July 2005

  9 Beth Neil, ‘The diet generation’, Daily Mirror, 27 April 2009

  10 Richard Garner, ‘Girls aged six “unhappy with weight”’, Independent, 8 March 2005

  11 Dr Jan Stanek, quoted in Bel Mooney, ‘On vanity’, Daily Telegraph, 22 July 2000

  12 Survey carried out by Dove in 2006, reported in ‘Quarter of teens considering plastic surgery’, Daily Mail, 10 March 2006

  13 J Kelly and S L Smith, Where the Girls Aren’t: Gender Disparity Saturates G-rated Films, 2006, www.thriveoncreative.com/clients/seejane/pdfs/where.the.girls.arent.pdf, cited in American Psychological Association, Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, American Psychological Association (Washington DC, 2007), retrieved 16 October 2008 from http://www.apa.org/pi/wpo/sexualizationrep.pdf

  14 Kate Figes, ‘Hello boys’, Guardian, 20 January 2006

  15 K E Dill and K P Thill, ‘Video game characters and the socialization of gender roles: young people’s perceptions mirror sexist media depictions’, Sex Roles, 57, 11–12 (December 2007) 851–64

  16 Jess McCabe, ‘Sexual harassment is rife online’, Guardian, 6 March 2008

  17 L M Ward and R Rivadeneyra, ‘Dancing, strutting and bouncing in cars, the women of music videos’, paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association (Chicago, August 2002), cited in Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, American Psychological Association (Washington DC, 2007), retrieved 16 October 2008 from http://www.apa.org/pi/wpo/sexualizationrep.pdf

  18 Retrieved 10 August 2007 from http://www.lookagain.co.uk/web/main/productdisplay.asp?An=0&A=26K742%5F15&N=428+583+4294967092&Au=P%5FMasterItem&Nu=P%5FMasterItem&Ns=P%5FColour%7C0%7C%7CP%5FSize%7C0

  19 Rachel Bell, ‘It’s porn, innit?’ Guardian, 15 August 2005

  20 Colin Fernandez, ‘Tesco condemned for selling pole-dancing toy’, Daily Mail, 24 October 2006

  21 BHS withdrew the underwear after criticism – ‘Sexy children’s underwear withdrawn’, BBC, 26 March 2003

  22 Next was criticised for selling these T-shirts to young girls – Judith Woods, ‘Girls just need to be young’, Daily Telegraph, 20 February 2007

  23 Annie Leibovitz’s photographs of Miley Cyrus were widely criticised – Sheila Marikar, ‘Leibovitz defends provocative Miley Cyrus photos’, ABC News, 26 April 2008

  24 Survey conducted by the NSPCC and Sugar in 2006 among 674 Sugar website visitors. Retrieved 16 October 2008 from http://www.nspcc.org.uk/whatwedo/mediacentre/pressreleases/ 22_may_2006_unwanted_sexual_experiences_wdn33559.html

  25 Panorama: Kids Behaving Badly, BBC1, 5 January 2009

  26 BBC Newsbeat, 4 August 2009

  27 Christine Barter, Melanie McCarry, David Berridge and Kathy Evans, ‘Partner exploitation and violence in teenage intimate relationships’, executive summary retrieved 10 September 2009 from www.nspcc.org.uk

  28 ‘“Gang-raped girl was glad of the attention,” says barrister’, Daily Mail, 18 May 2007.

  29 Statistics from the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, quoted in BBC report, Education ‘prevents underage sex’, 30 November 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1683271.stm and in Kaye Wellings et al, ‘Sexual Behaviour in Britain: early heterosexual experience’, Lancet, 358, 9296 (December 2001), 1851–4

  4: Lovers

  1 Quoted in Judith Weintraub, ‘Germaine Greer – opinions that may shock the faithful’, New York Times, 22 March 1971

  2 Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch ((1970), London: Harper Perennial, 2006), p275

  3 Quoted in Judith Weintraub, op cit

  4 Similarly, in her 1973 novel Fear of Flying the American writer Erica Jong described how essential the pursuit of the ‘zipless fuck’ was to the narrator as a married woman: ‘Five years of marriage had made me itchy … my response was to evolve my fantasy of the Zipless Fuck. The zipless fuck was more than a fuck … For the true, ultimate zipless A-1 fuck, it was necessary that you never get to know the man very well.’ Even though the zipless fuck turns out to be a chimera, the pursuit itself is worthwhile, as it leads her out of the stalemate of her claustrophobic marriage. Erica Jong, Fear of Flying ((1973), London: Minerva, 1974), p11

  5 Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook ((1962), London: Flamingo, 1993), p36

  6 Statistics from the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles 2000, quoted in Anne M Johnson et al, ‘Sexual behaviour in Britain: partnerships, practices and HIV risk behaviours’, Lancet, 358, 9296 (December 2001), 1835–42

  7 Abby Lee, Girl with a One-track Mind (London: Ebury, 2006), pp110–13

  8 Abby Lee, op cit, p103

  9 Catherine Townsend, Sleeping Around (London: John Murray, 2007), pp207 and 222

  10 Zoe Williams, ‘I don’t write to titillate’, Guardian, 11 August 2006

  11 Mary Wollstonecraft, Letter to William Godwin, 4 October 1796, in The Collected Letters, Janet Todd ed (London: Penguin, 2003), p371

  12 Emma Goldman, Living My Life, Volume 1 (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1931), p441

  13 Michèle Roberts, Paper Houses (London: Virago, 2007), p67

  14 Michèle Roberts, Paper Houses, op cit, p295

  15 Michèle Roberts, Paper Houses, op cit, p67

  16 Anaïs Nin, Henry and June (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), p66

  17 Abby Lee, op cit, p113

  5: Pornography

  1 Leo Benedictus, ‘Extreme close up’, Guardian, 12 May 2007

  2 Adam Thirlwell, Politics (London: Jonathan Cape, 2003), p216

  3 Robin Morgan, ‘Theory and practice, pornography and rape’, (1974) in The Word of a Woman (London: Virago, 1993), p88

  4 Andrea Dworkin, ‘Why pornography matters to feminists’, Sojourner, 7, 2 (1981)

  5 At one protest in 1978 in Soho, sixteen feminists were arrested. ‘Women in porn demo acquitted’, Guardian, 3 May 1979

  6 For a good discussion on the lack of evidence to link pornography and sexual violence, either through laboratory studies or through observational research, see Nadine Strossen, Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex and the Fight for Women’s Rights (London: Abacus, 1996), Chapter 12; and Lynne Segal and Mary McIntosh (eds
), Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the Pornography Debate (London: Virago 1992)

  7 For a good discussion of the range of feminist reaction to pornography, see Nadine Strossen, op cit, Chapter 7

  8 Nina Power, ‘The dirty girl: Charlotte Roche brings Wetlands to the English-speaking world’, Der Spiegel (online English version), 6 April 2009

  9 Zoe Margolis, ‘Something for the Ladies’, Guardian, 29 November 2007

  10 Survey carried out by Nielsen NetRatings for the Independent on Sunday, 28 May 2006

  11 Janis Wolak, Kimberly Mitchell and David Finkelhor, ‘Unwanted and wanted exposure to online pornography in a national sample of youth internet users’, Pediatrics, 119, 2 (February 2007), 247–57

  12 Sonya Thompson, ‘One in three boys heavy porn users, study shows’, University of Alberta, 23 February 2007. Report retrieved 22 October 2008 from http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-02/uoa-oit022307.php; full unpublished study supplied by Sonya Thompson in personal correspondence

  13 In 2004–5 eight hundred labial reductions were carried out on the NHS, double the number of six years earlier. One private cosmetic surgery business, Surgicare, reported in 2009 that labia reduction procedures increased 300 per cent in the last year. Retrieved 20 September 2009 from www.surgicare.co.uk

  14 Retrieved 18 February 2009 from http://www.channel4embarrassingillnesses.com/about/episodes/teen-bodies/teens-below-the-belt/

  15 Retrieved 23 March 2009 from the website of the Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation Institute, http://www.cosmeticgyn.net/dlv.htm

  16 Zadie Smith, On Beauty (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005), p316

  17 Zadie Smith, op cit, p397

  6: Choices

  1 Rod Liddle, ‘Harriet Harman is either thick or criminally disingenuous’, Spectator, 5 August 2009

  2 Comment retrieved 12 August 2009 from http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/features/5244693/ harriet-harman-is-either-thick-or-criminally-disingenuous.thtml

  3 Retrieved 24 October 2008 from http://www.herobuilders.com/

  4 India Knight, ‘Aah, what a relief’, Sunday Times, 7 September 2008