Feminists had always been vulnerable to ‘stereotyping’ of course. Just as in the early years of the twentieth century suffragists had been caricatured as ugly harridans, their descendants in the 1970s and 1980s were often represented as dungaree- and woolly-hat-wearing, cropped-headed lesbians. The satirical magazine Private Eye ran a series labelled ‘A Compendium of Loony Feminist Nonsense’ in the eighties, chortling over references to ‘chairpersons’, ‘snowpeople’, and ‘phallocracy’. It was illustrated with cartoons of big-bummed women hovering malevolently with knives over the genitals of trussed-up, pleading males. The magazine Viz featured the activist ‘Millie Tant’ ranting on about all men being beasts and the importance of bringing up children in a man-free environment. The barbs weren’t always satirical. Feminists often suffered direct abuse. The American feminist Andrea Dworkin, for instance, was a particular target, partly in consequence of her inveterate battles against pornography.
The right-wing press delighted in stories about feminists falling out with each other. ‘Punch-up at the Women’s Lib Peace Rally’ had announced the Daily Mirror, happily, as early as 1971, reporting on a conference in Canada.104 There had always been differences of opinion among feminists, of course, and to some extent this was a reflection of a strong and healthy movement. But the WLM in Britain lost coherence in the 1980s as divisions deepened. There was a great deal of heart-searching about whom the movement spoke for. Was it too middle class? Were black women being marginalised or excluded? There was bitterness among activists who considered that British feminists were ignoring the very different experiences of women elsewhere in the world. Controversies over sexuality and pornography also became divisive. Some academic feminists retreated into what could look like ivory-tower obsessions with the nature of language and identity. Some feminists looked around gloomily, seeing signs of backlash and reaction. But there had been profound shifts in culture, language and social expectation. This enabled others to be more sanguine, trusting that a new generation of younger women would take ideas about sexual equality as their birthright.
7 | BODY ANXIETIES, DEPRESSIVES, LADETTES AND LIVING DOLLS: WHAT HAPPENED TO GIRL POWER?
‘Girl power’ was much discussed in the 1990s and early 2000s. It was sometimes rendered – with the suggestion of a pleasing growl – as ‘grrl power’. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the term originated in the USA, where it was at first associated with popular music. Alternative punk rock Riot Grrrl bands brought feminist, political themes into the underground music scene. Later, the term ‘girl power’ was appropriated as a more general, celebratory slogan by the British group the Spice Girls. And girl power came to denote more than just a trend in underground or popular music. In Western societies, girls could appear more active and more confident than ever before. The OED defined girl power as ‘a self-reliant attitude amongst girls and young women manifested in ambition, assertiveness and individualism’.
Strong girls were in fashion. Young female punks in the late 1970s perfected a new kind of stylish stroppiness.1 From the 1980s, popular culture had begun to reflect a widespread enthusiasm for self-assertive female types. Stars such as Madonna and Courtney Love both celebrated and parodied femininity: they were anything but self-effacing, and modelled the possibilities of female entrepreneurship and ambition. The Riot Grrls of the 1990s built on these foundations and encouraged political expression at a grassroots level, through a variety of new media, such as home-produced fanzines. Feisty girl heroines began to crop up on cinema and television screens: Xena, Warrior Princess, Charlie’s Angels, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Wilting heroines were wet and passé. Social observers began to analyse what they identified as a new cultural turn. The OED added its entry on girl power in 2001.
7.1 Rotherham punk Julie Longden and friends pose in a photobooth, 1977 (by kind permission of Tony Beesley and Julie Longden).
In sharp contradiction to all this, a steady stream of books began to emerge from major publishing houses on both sides of the Atlantic arguing that girls were being massively damaged and disadvantaged by social change. An early example of this trend was Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, first published in 1990.2 Wolf’s book was based on work she had carried out as a Rhodes scholar in Oxford. The book’s main message was that in spite of legal and material gains in status, young women’s lives were increasingly ruined by pressure to conform to idealised standards of beauty. Eating disorders, Wolf claimed, had risen ‘exponentially’, and more and more girls were seeking cosmetic surgery.3 In terms of how girls were feeling about themselves, she suggested, they were probably worse off than their grandmothers. The Beauty Myth became a best-seller, and proved lastingly influential, particularly with younger audiences.
From the USA, a few years after The Beauty Myth, came psychologist Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (1994), and historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (1997).4 Pipher’s book was based on her clinical work with young girls. She contended that young women in American society were the victims of a ‘girl-poisoning culture’. This culture ‘smacked girls on the head’ with ‘girl-hurting “isms” such as sexism, capitalism and lookism’ at their most vulnerable stage in growing up. Their experience was like that of ‘saplings in a hurricane’. No wonder that they were prey to eating disorders, depression and despair. The book sold widely. So, too, did Joan Brumberg’s The Body Project. A respected social historian, Brumberg suggested that where once girls had focused their attentions on improving their minds, they had now become obsessed with perfecting their bodies. Good looks had become more important than good works. The past century had undoubtedly brought gains in autonomy, but at the same time girls had lost the ‘protective umbrella’ which – in the form of single-sex groupings and environments – had previously sheltered them. They had freedom, but this was laced with peril. Adolescent girls and their bodies, Brumberg insisted, had borne the brunt of social change in the twentieth century.
Yet more alarms were sounded in the next decade. Ariel Levy, a staff writer on the New Yorker magazine, launched an attack on what she called ‘raunch culture’ in her witty and polemical Female Chauvinist Pigs, published in 2005.5 Levy took issue with ‘women who make sex objects of other women and themselves’.6 Her text is rich in its denunciations of women ‘who get their tits out for the lads’, girls happy to strut around in white stilettoes and body glitter, sporting Playboy bunny rings, and rhinestone-studded thongs and G-strings. Feminists had taken a wrong turning if it they saw this kind of behaviour as ‘empowering’. Bawdiness, she, reminded her readers, was not the same thing as liberation.7
Levy, like many others, was disturbed by statistics showing the rising popularity of breast augmentation procedures in the USA. This theme of the social pressure on young girls to achieve perfect bodies was taken up again in 2007 in Courtney E. Martin’s Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body.8 In Britain, the psychotherapist Susie Orbach, who had risen to fame in the late 1970s with the publication of her unforgettably entitled book Fat Is a Feminist Issue, expanded on the theme of body hatred and the damage done by the diet industries in Bodies, published in 2009.9 The same year saw the publication in the UK of M. G. Durham’s The Lolita Effect, which deplored the inappropriate ‘sexualisation’ of young girls.10 The British cultural critic Natasha Walter’s Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, was published by Virago in 2010.11 This took a similar line to Ariel Levy’s polemic on raunch culture. Walter argued that girls are the victims of a newly intense, sexist culture which force-feeds them on a diet of fluffy pink and internet porn, presenting them with a hollow or even poisonous version of ‘liberation’.
Disentangling the various strands of these contemporary anxieties isn’t easy, because there are many ways in which they overlap. The literature on girls’ anxieties about their bodies, for instance, is often closely related to that on eating diso
rders, unhappiness and depression. Nor is it easy to separate out hard evidence from social panic. Both polemical books written by journalists and social critics, and the findings of academic and professional researchers are taken up and amplified – and sometimes distorted – in the press. Since the 1970s, the media have shown an exaggerated interest in girls’ bodies. Some historians have traced this back to the permissiveness of the late 1960s; others have seen the trend as part of a backlash against the rise of feminism.12 The topless ‘Page Three’ girl first became a feature of the popular British newspaper The Sun in the 1970s, and has irritated feminists to a greater or lesser extent ever since.13 ‘Personal interest’ stories about girls struggling to lose weight, or battling against ‘the slimmer’s disease’ of anorexia nervosa began to appear in the pages of the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail around the same time, but increasingly in the 1990s. More recently television documentaries detailing the stories of the prodigiously fat or the thin and emaciated, or the body transformations of those undergoing marathons of cosmetic surgery, have become a hallmark of several television channels. On top of all this, we have to consider the world-transforming influence of the internet. To observe that we live a culture increasingly dominated by visual imagery, and in particular by images of bodies, has become the cliché of all clichés.
Growing girls have probably always been sensitive to their body weight and appearance. There is a haunting passage in Pearl Jephcott’s study of working-class girls, Girls Growing Up, which was published during the Second World War in Britain. One of the respondents in Jephcott’s survey, ‘Mary Smith’, was an intelligent and articulate young woman who had struggled against unpromising odds to train as a nurse. Jephcott herself was sufficiently moved by Mary’s story to reproduce it, verbatim, as the first chapter in her book. Mary’s plucky and heart-warming story ended with a confession:
I never bother the opposite sex & very, very seldom they bother me, but my biggest tragedy is I am fat & wear W.X. clothes, I don’t like dancing because I think I am too fat. I don’t go swimming because I think I am too fat, I feel very embaressed [sic] when in the company of males, I cannot dress as I like because the styles of dress I like do not suite [sic] fat people …14
A study of adolescents published in 1950 found girls more obsessed with their appearance than boys, and noted the widespread concern with ‘fatness, thinness, tallness, shortness, lack of development, exceptionally early development, blackheads, pimples, bad eyes, irregular teeth, ugly noses and receding chins’.15 James Hemming, a humanist and educational reformer, was awarded a PhD from the University of London for his work on the problems of adolescent girls in the 1950s. His study was subsequently published as a book.16 Hemming analysed more than three thousand letters written by young girls to a weekly paper in the early 1950s. The girls sought advice on a range of personal matters, including friendship, and relationships at home and school, but one of the biggest areas of anxiety was appearance. Hemming found very few girls content with how they looked, and noted widespread dejection, and a desperate striving for perfection in this area.17
Writers such as Naomi Wolf were much influenced by surveys such as one carried out by Glamour magazine in 1984, which found that some three-quarters of the women polled thought that they were too fat.18 Only around one quarter of these women would have been regarded as overweight using the medical criteria of the time. The 1980s was a decade in which the ‘workout’ became fashionable, and body consciousness may have increased. Whether this was altogether a bad thing is debatable, particularly given generally rising rates of obesity at the end of the twentieth century.19 But a key question for feminists is whether younger women’s perceptions of their body image were becoming increasingly distorted, and whether this carried increasingly damaging implications for their health. Did such changes lead to an ‘epidemic of eating disorders’ as often suggested?
Anorexia nervosa was a term established in the late nineteenth century, but as a condition self-starvation has a long history. It can be traced back, for instance, to the saints and fasting girls of medieval times.20 In the nineteenth century, the display of a healthy appetite could be viewed as unfeminine. Some Victorian girls developed troubled eating patterns, swallowing little in public, while consuming food furtively in private. There has been some suggestion that self-starvation was common among girls in the 1920s.21 The press paid little attention to anorexia before the 1970s, although there were occasional features relating to the pioneering work of Professor Arthur Crisp on the subject. In 1979, for instance, the Daily Mirror included a brief mention of Crisp’s suggestion that girl anorectics ‘were victims of middle-class values’ in a piece headed ‘Peril of the Rich Twiggies’.22 Dr Tony Smith, medical correspondent for The Times, on the other hand reported Crisp’s work as showing the strains which society subjected girls to at adolescence, and suggested that anorexic girls were unconsciously rejecting adult sexuality.23
Newspaper references to the condition increased during the 1980s, but the real explosion of media interest came during the following decade. A quick search for ‘anorexia’ in the Daily Mirror’s digital archive, for instance, yields nearly eight hundred hits, clustering particularly in the years between 1995 and 2005. Brief reports on medical findings gave way to lengthy, personal stories. These were often illustrated by images of cadaverous women, their rib cages and pelvic bones jutting horribly from their emaciated bodies. Harrowing accounts of personal tragedy – a mother’s loss of both of her daughters to the disease, for instance – then began to alternate with gossip and exposés.24 Photographs of celebrities who were looking a bit on the slim side were accompanied by speculation from their friends about whether or not they had succumbed to anorexia. Princess Diana’s thin arms inevitably provoked suspicion. When Diana’s sister-in-law, Lady Victoria Spencer, admitted to the disease, the press had a field day.
Speculation about celebrities became feverish and intrusive. Some celebrities went in for personal confession, admitting struggles with anorexia, ostensibly to help others. There have been attacks on the fashion industry for featuring ‘size zero’ models, and horror stories about the ballet world, blamed for subjecting young dancers to rigid body-control regimes. Horror stories about ‘sick’ ‘pro-ana’ or ‘thinspiration’ websites, accused of encouraging young girls to starve themselves, drew attention in both the popular press and in television documentaries from the mid-2000s. Stories about anorexia have probably now lost some of their power to shock. More recently, media coverage of the disease has found eye-catching new angles on the subject. ‘Anorexic mum who weighs less than her 7-year old’, shrilled the Daily Mirror in November 2011.25 The article was accompanied by a photograph labelled ‘Frock shock’, showing beaming mother and slightly embarrassed-looking daughter wearing identical, pink flower-patterned dolly dresses with Peter Pan collars.
Anorexia is a terrible disease and it kills. Has its incidence increased as much as some writers have suggested? Naomi Wolf stated that ‘eating disorders rose exponentially’ in the period just before she was writing and described anorexia as ‘a killer epidemic’.26 But it is very difficult to get a clear, statistical picture. This is partly because less was known about the condition before 1960. One thing media exposure has ensured is that now, many more people know about the disease, and it is much more likely to be reported. Many parents understandably get concerned as soon as they see any signs of a daughter going on a diet. Another problem is that the statistics which we do have relate to hospital admissions, and not all sufferers are hospitalised.27 Establishing long-term trends is difficult because we don’t have reliable figures on incidence from before the 1970s. The evidence we have is fairly impressionistic. Arthur Crisp’s figures have sometimes been used as a baseline. Crisp suggested that around one girl in every hundred in independent schools in London was suffering from some degree of anorexia in the 1970s.28 Writing later, in 2006, he suggested that the form and content of the disease had changed little between 1960 an
d 1995, and even that it might have become somewhat less common.29 The incidence of bulimia nervosa, on the other hand – cycles of eating and purging – had risen greatly. An important study of time trends in eating disorder incidence published in 2005 found that the incidence of anorexia nervosa detected by general practitioners had remained stable between 1988 and 2000. The authors of this study too found that the incidence of bulimia had shown a dramatic increase in the 1990s, but that this now appeared to be falling.30
The notion, then, of a sudden ‘epidemic’ of anorexia among young women in Britain at the end of the twentieth century is misleading. The eating disorders charity Beat suggests that between 1 and 2 per cent of young women in the UK may be suffering from anorexia.31 The Royal College of Psychiatrists suggests that the condition affects approximately 1 in 150 fifteen-year-old girls. The mental health charity Mind gives the ratio of 1 in 100 women between the ages of fifteen and thirty.32 The disease is not, of course, found only among young women. Men, children and older females can also develop the condition. Anorexia is not the only form of eating disorder suffered by young women. What about bulimia? Bulimia is not life-threatening like anorexia nervosa, but still carries health risks and can undoubtedly cause suffering. There are also many other forms of disordered eating, often referred to as ‘Ednos’ (eating disorders not otherwise specified), which include excessive dieting, binging, occasional purging, and similar behaviours. Do we include the kind of overeating that has led to widespread obesity under the label of an eating disorder? If we widen the definition in this way, it is far from evident that this is specifically a female problem.
There has always been a great deal of debate about the causes of anorexia nervosa. Arthur Crisp had little time for anyone blaming fashion, insisting that this was to trivialise the condition. Interestingly, he objected strongly to the idea of lumping anorexia together with other ‘eating disorders’. He maintained that problems such as bulimia and susceptibility to diet fads bore ‘the same relationship to the psychopathology of anorexia nervosa as does a cough to cancer of the lung’.33 Anorexia is now generally recognised as a serious and complex pathological condition, what journalist Laurie Penny has described as ‘a psychotic strategy of self-control’.34 Another journalist, the Guardian’s Hadley Freeman (who like Penny has admitted to having suffered from anorexia in her youth), put the matter in a nutshell, asserting that ‘eating disorders do not stem from a desire to be slim: they are an expression of unhappiness through food’.35
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