Getting Real

by Melinda Tankard Reist

  One is a false self, manufactured for appearance’ sake and set before an audience. This self is allowed to speak, to act, to express, to live. But the other self, who is the real self, is consigned to silence. She is hidden, denied, eventually forgotten, and even, in some cases, unnamed. Thus the deceiver is in danger of never remembering that she has a real self. The real self continues to experience, to feel, to move through life. But in our minds, we destroy her experience, and thus we lose ourselves.

  In a sexualised society, women and girls are required to live out a “pornographic idea of the female” while our real selves are “cast back into silence” (Griffin, 1981/1988, p. 202).

  * * *

  6 For a detailed description of the lengths to which the so-called beauty industry goes to ensure that women and girls are dissatisfied with their natural bodies, see Sheila Jeffreys’ Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West (2005).

  * * *

  It interferes with relationships

  The concern about relationships expressed in the Guardian article quoted above is a real one. A ‘pornified culture’ does undermine ‘healthy sexual relationships,’ mainly because it is false and creates false expectations. Men are in danger of deceiving themselves into believing that all women should look slim and sexy and dress in a provocative way and, while most men know that such a picture of women is a fantasy, many live with the feeling that they might have settled for second best when their girlfriend or wife doesn’t fit the ‘slutty’ look. Similarly, women live with the constant reminder (every time they look in the mirror) that they do not measure up to the impossible (and problematic) standards of beauty and sexiness all around them (see Andrusiak, this volume). As a result, what many women bring to their relationships is a low self-esteem and a lack of confidence in their own bodies, while many men try to ‘make do’ with a partner who is less than the sexualised ‘standard model.’ Those women who do try to measure up, live lives that are constricted by uncomfortable clothing, stilettos, diets and cosmetic surgery procedures, and spend a great deal of their time in and out of beauty clinics. Men, on the other hand, are free to be their natural selves and to engage with life as it comes.

  Relationships suffer, also, when men insist on experimenting with the kinds of degrading sexual activity they see in pornography or fantasise about when confronted with exploitative pictures of women on billboards and other advertising. If his partner refuses, the relationship suffers because he feels that his desire to ‘spice up’ the sexual side of the relationship has been rejected. And she feels betrayed that he would even consider asking her to submit to such exploitation. If she agrees, the relationship will still suffer because, at some level, both partners know that what they are doing is not ‘real.’ Their whole relationship is in danger of becoming make-believe in the way that all pornography and sexualisation is make-believe.

  Conclusion

  Feminists concerned about the increasing sexualisation of our culture are misrepresented and silenced by those who seek to keep women and girls subordinated and sexually available to men. A sexualised culture trivialises and degrades women and girls and insults those men and boys who take no pleasure in seeing the female sex exploited for sexual purposes. It creates false expectations in both sexes, and undermines the potential for relationships between women and men to be real. It makes equality impossible.

  References

  Arndt, Bettina (2009) The Sex Diaries. Why Women Go Off Sex and Other Bedroom Battles. Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.

  Dworkin, Andrea (2002) ‘Pornography, prostitution, and a beautiful and tragic recent history’ in Christine Stark and Rebecca Whisnant (Eds) Not For Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography. Spinifex Press, North Melbourne. pp. 137–145.

  Faludi, Susan (1991) Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women. Chatto & Windus, London.

  French, Marilyn (1992) The War Against Women. Penguin, London; Hamish Hamilton, London.

  Gill, Rosalind (2003) ‘From sexual objectification to sexual subjectification: The resexualisation of women’s bodies in the media’ Feminist Media Studies 3 (1) pp. 99–106, http://monthlyreview.org/mrzine/gill230509.html

  Griffin, Susan (1981/1988) Pornography and Silence. The Women’s Press, London (1981); Harper and Row, New York (1988).

  Jeffreys, Sheila (2005) Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West. Routledge, London and New York.

  Jeffreys, Sheila (2009) The Industrial Vagina: The Political Economy of the Global Sex Trade. Routledge, London and New York.

  Levêque, Sandrine (2009) ‘Our culture is infected with porn’ The Guardian, London, April 24, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/24/porn-object-protest-feminism

  MacKinnon, Catharine (1990) ‘Liberalism and the death of feminism’ in Dorchen Leidholdt and Janice G. Raymond (Eds) The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism. Pergamon, The Athene Series, New York. pp. 3–13.

  McKee, Alan, Katherine Albury and Catharine Lumby (2008) The Porn Report. Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.

  McLellan, Betty. Unspeakable: A Feminist Ethic of Speech (forthcoming).

  Morgan, Robin (1993) ‘Women vs. the Miss America Pageant’ in Robin Morgan The Word of a Woman: Selected Prose 1968-1992. Virago, London. pp. 21–29.

  Morgan, Robin (1993) ‘Goodbye to all that’ in Robin Morgan The Word of a Woman: Selected Prose 1968-1992. Virago, London. pp. 49–69.

  Moschetti, Carole (2005) Conjugal wrongs don’t make rights: international feminist activism, child marriage and sexual relativism. Unpublished PhD thesis, Faculty of Arts, Political Science, Criminology and Sociology, The University of Melbourne.

  Tankard Reist, Melinda (2007) ‘An invasion of pornography’. On Line Opinion, July 23, http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=6114

  Wild, Rex and Alison Anderson (2007) ‘Little Children are Sacred.’ Report to the Northern Territory Government, http://www.nt.gov.au/justice/docs/depart/annualreports/dpp_annrep_0607.pdf

  How Girlhood Was Trashed and What We Can Do to Get It Back: A Father’s View

  Steve Biddulph

  All sex and no love

  Sexuality, when fully allowed to unfold, has many aspects. It merges the sacred, the intimate, the sensual, the emotional, the creative, the funny, the tender and the intense. This should be no surprise to us, after all there are no boundaries in the human organism; everything is permeable. Hormones sing in our brains; our thoughts soften our heart muscles; a touch on our skin sparks memories of innocent joy. We are made whole, although life can break us apart.

  Our sexuality is wedded to our heart and our mind. For all its problems, most of us still believe that sex can be a radiant and life-affirming thing. So when we see our children grow into beginning adults—what we now call teenagers—we want them to experience it at its very best. To unfold it in their own time and way, and to suffer no harm.

  Parents, and perhaps especially parents of girls, have lots of fears about their daughters’ sexual safety and wellbeing. There are plenty of age-old hazards—unintended pregnancy, rape, infection. But also the inner harms—loss of trust, loss of the capacity for love, destruction of self worth, death of spirit.

  We know, intuitively, and sometimes from bitter experience of our own, that if you hurt someone’s sexuality you hurt their soul. When the soul begins to die, the body follows. And sure enough, among sexually abused young women, addiction, depression, self-harm and suicide have always been endemic. As a therapist treating men and women over thirty years, sexual abuse of a child by someone older became the byword, the thing you waited and watched for, in depressed, self-harming, self-doubting, anxious adults or teens. Sexual abuse was so common, you took your time, made the space ready for them to tell you. And conversely, in the gradual healing of broken trust, the symptoms would slowly recede.

  Today though, something new has begun to happen in the culture, reported by parents and counsellors, doctors and psychiatrists.
The cluster of symptoms that normally result from sexual abuse— self-loathing, depression, addiction, anxiety and difficulty in being close, are now appearing in millions of girls who have not been sexually abused; girls whose family lives are ordinary and safe. Boys are also affected. Adolescence today is a minefield of mental health problems. This was not always so, it is a new and deeply troubling trend. Just what is going on?

  One explanation gaining prominence is that our culture itself has become abusive. Some commentators have actually termed this ‘corporate paedophilia’ (see Rush, this volume), since its motivation is to gratify shareholders and company profits, and its method is to attack and invade young people’s psychic space, making them feel badly about their looks, their worth, their social lives and love lives, as a route to selling them more goods.

  Media interests have been quick to defend themselves, and to suggest that concern about sexualisation arises from ‘wowserism,’ some anti-sex impulse. In my experience, the people most concerned, and most angry with the corporate message, are those most in touch with their sexuality; affectionate and vibrant kinds of people who want the next generation to inherit this freedom of spirit. They are driven by a wish to nurture and empower the young, so that they may experience all that sex and love have to offer. Above all they want young women to be the agents, not the subjects, of their own sexuality. What is happening in our culture as corporate communication so permeates our lives, might be more accurately termed de-sexualisation, the death of sex, the draining out of all spontaneity, connectedness and meaning. I have lived and studied families in many cultures, tribal and rural, eastern and western. It’s my view that we are one of the least sexy cultures ever to inhabit the earth. Robbed of inner meaning, tricked out to sell worthless junk, sex in the western world has become a dying shell.

  The young feel this most acutely. The romantic, tentative, and tender feelings of young people would surprise many adults. But these positive and loving qualities can easily be battered, bruised and driven underground, if the culture does not reinforce them. There is little poetry left in the culture thrown at young people. For the boys, conditioned by online porn and compliant but disengaged girls, sex may come to have no more meaning than an ice-cream or a pizza. For many girls sex has become a performance, anxiously overlaid with worry about how does my body look? What sexual tricks does he expect or not expect? How do I compare with all the others he has slept with? Little wonder we have one of the most depressed, anxious and lonely generations of young people ever to inhabit the earth.

  The hall of mirrors

  Sexuality is the means to exploit teens, but marketing begins much younger than that. The war waged by the advertising media on younger girls works primarily by attacking self-image. Instead of seeing oneself from the inside, and from the thoughtful comments of extended family siblings and friends, girls now live in a world of endless unfavourable comparison with the world’s most photogenic women. For 99 per cent of our history, most humans never even saw a mirror. Our world consisted of a few dozen real people. We saw beauty in them, and ourselves, based on their kindness, laughter, warmth and care. Images were almost unknown. Today, we see thousands of images a day of total strangers, dressed, made-up, and photo-shopped to look perfect.

  The electronic and print media is now so shockingly pervasive, that it has become ‘the third parent’ for many children. In most homes, television plays throughout breakfast, much of the day, and late into the night. Kids retreat to their room with magazines, music videos, computer screens, or TVs of their own. Outside, the landscape of the urban and suburban world is little better, a barrage of commercial images and messages.

  For a teen or pre-teen girl these messages seem to speak to them personally. The mind’s automatic response to certain cues cannot be underestimated. Just recently I waited in a fog-bound airport for three hours. Close to my seat was a collecting box in the shape of a life-sized guide dog. Without exception every small child who came past, despite the noise, movement and sensory overload of an airport concourse, saw the animal, and urged their parents to go over to it. We are all programmed to focus on certain cues, and advertisers identified these long ago. For teens, it is other teens. Adolescence is about finding yourself in reflection with others, it is about comparisons and establishing norms, whether we obey or rebel against those. And increasingly, the media world provides these norms. It is more present, more pervasive, more consistent than friends or family. But its message is airbrushed, modelled, posed and utterly unreal. This, it says, is how to succeed socially, how to have a career, how to be liked, be secure and safe, be loved.

  By creating or allowing this barrage, particularly the endless examples of youthful beauty that obsess our culture, we have trapped girls in a terrifying hall of mirrors, surrounding them with distorted images of girlhood, always implicitly critical of their selves, always based on externals. In a piecemeal, cumulative way, this is invading and tarnishing girls’ vision of themselves, making it almost impossible to put together a positive and integrated sense of self.

  It’s not just what is there, but also what is missing from this virtual reality. It’s a deeply impoverished world view, there is no reflective space, or self searching about values, little in the way of nuanced relationships, which girls used to devour in books and poetry. In this culture, inner qualities are not even mentioned, let alone valued. Loyalty, patience, tenderness, sacrifice, intelligence, grit, endurance, friendliness, individuality itself, are all ignored in favour of body shape, skin tone, hair, and clothing.

  The disappearance of caring adults

  The attack on girlhood would be less successful if we had not at the same time removed their main defences. In the last thirty years, as we began flooding girls’ senses with these narrow versions of womanhood, we were also dismantling the emotional support system that had previously sustained young girls into womanhood. Aunties, grandmas, older women friends, even mothers themselves, became much less available to nurture and reassure, challenge and inform adolescent girls. These women elders were either too busy, too distant geographically, or too preoccupied with their own lives, to be able to offer their time and affirmation.

  This has been a remarkable change, more so for the fact that it has largely gone unnoticed. Girls today spend perhaps one tenth of the time in conversation and company of older women than they would have had even fifty years ago. The peer group does its best to fill this gap, and some of the best and most touching moments among young teens are their attempts to nurture and support each other, but it’s haphazard. They are not equipped for such a vital and complex role.

  The important place of men has diminished too. Fathers, uncles and grandfathers who ideally provided male affirmation and thoughtful conversation free of sexual pressure, once made it possible for a girl to begin seeing herself as intelligent, interesting, capable, strong and fun to be with, independently of any physical attributes. Men are gradually becoming re-activated in their fatherhood, but it’s very early days. Most daughters wait in despair. A generation of adult women carry the wounds of this absence.

  This then is the double jeopardy of girlhood. If no one is helping a girl to appreciate her inner qualities, and she is bombarded with images of womanhood based merely on appearance, something unbalanced begins to happen. A girl’s sense of herself becomes more and more external, more and more visual. How she appears to others becomes everything. This leads to the shocking research findings (cited elsewhere in this book) that most girls today hate their own bodies. What an outstandingly successful assault on the mental health of girl children.

  What can be done?

  The solutions to a problem as massive and complex as the media’s assault on the young have to be multiple and overlapping. Parents have some say, in fact a lot of say, about which media they expose their children to. There is a significant move towards not exposing young children to television at all—it has been clearly linked to developmental difficulties of many kinds, from inabi
lity to play well or concentrate well, to obesity, anxiety, sleep problems and so on. Parents being proactive with television—switching on to watch a specific program, then switching off—is a very significant improvement in what children are exposed to. Not watching commercial television at all, or at least very selectively, also makes a large difference. Using DVDs and videos instead of live-to-air TV, if electronic childminding is the only way to survive the pre-dinner hour! Not having TVs in children’s or teens’ bedrooms is probably the best single protection of their mental health. This has been found to drastically reduce TV viewing in total, not to mention exposure to imagery of either a violent or sexually inappropriate kind, with subsequent impacts on anxiety, aggressiveness, and problems with sleep. Another simple and practical measure is simply not buying girls’ magazines, most of which are purely marketing vehicles for make-up, clothes and toys they neither need nor benefit from.

  But parental actions can only go so far. And the most vulnerable girls will always be the ones who have inept or disempowered parents. Public and governmental action is essential. Most commentators agree that the self-regulatory system for advertising in Australia has failed. As argued so clearly and well by groups like Young Media Australia and Kids Free 2B Kids (see Gale, this volume), regulation of public advertising and careful boundaries around young people’s viewing content, have a very large role to play. Advertising aimed at young people is increasingly being disallowed in progressive European societies, on the legal ground that children do not have the cognitive capacity to defend themselves and advertising aimed at them is therefore deceptive and unethical. No economies have collapsed as a result of not exploiting children, but much useless and wasteful consumption has ceased, and that has to be a good thing.