Girl Trouble

by Dyhouse, Carol

  Only a small proportion of girls suffer from serious eating disorders. Affluent societies, and not just girls, are obsessed with body size and image. Binge eating, and obesity, affect both sexes. It may seem paradoxical that there is so much concern about thinness when obesity is increasingly defined as one of the major health problems of the age, affecting far greater numbers. Notwithstanding Professor Crisp’s objection to classifying anorexia alongside other forms of disordered eating, it is possible to see all eating disorders as to some extent rooted in distortions of appetite. These distortions seem to pervade wealthy societies bent on consumption. Young women in our society are undoubtedly subject to many pressures, and they are relentlessly targeted as consumers.36 It is tempting to suggest that some of them feel stuffed, and lose their appetite in consequence. The intake of food is one area over which they can exercise power, and feel in control.

  The question of whether too much is expected of girls today has often surfaced in the press throughout the twenty-first century so far. Are girls exhibiting unprecedented rates of unhappiness and depression? Some have urged that this is the case. Two academic studies, one based on a sample of school-aged youngsters in the West of Scotland, the other coming from North America, provoked a great deal of discussion.37 The Scottish study, published by Patrick West and Helen Sweeting in 2003, resulted in a paper entitled ‘Fifteen, Female and Stressed: Changing Patterns of Psychological Distress over Time’. The authors argued that between 1987 and 1999, levels of worry increased among girls but not boys. The girls’ worries were not least about school performance, as well as looks and weight, and the researchers thought that this might have to do with changing gender roles. They recognised that girls tended to internalise, and boys to externalise stress, and admitted that the boys may have found respite from pressure in ‘laddish’ pursuits. The American study which highlighted women’s unhappiness was by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers; entitled ‘The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness’, it was published in 2009. Stevenson and Wolfers suggested that in spite of all the ostensible improvements in women’s lives (better wages, control over fertility, freedom from domestic drudgery and the like), their sense of subjective well-being appeared to have diminished since 1970.

  Both studies proved controversial. As philosophers have been aware for centuries, happiness is difficult to define, to pin down and to measure. Subjective experiences of well-being are often mercurial, much influenced by different reference groups and changing aspirations. How does education impact on happiness, for instance? It might bring a measure of happiness through self-respect, while conducing to unhappiness through an increased awareness of the miseries of others on a global scale. Whatever their limitations, both the Scottish and the American studies were eagerly seized upon by commentators. Some journalists with feminist leanings were keen to exploit the opportunity of drawing attention to problems still faced by girls. Other feminists smelt a rat. In the USA, for instance, the much-respected writer Barbara Ehrenreich penned a sharp attack on Stevenson and Wolfers for having opened the doors to those who triumphantly concluded, on the basis of their work, that all feminism had done was to make women miserable.38

  The psychologist and TV pundit Oliver James weighed in with the opinion that young women were ‘the most screwed up group’ in society, despite living in an era of greater freedom and affluence than ever before. It was no coincidence, he thought, that girls’ unhappiness had increased at around the time they started to outstrip boys at school. Girls were bent on having it all and blamed themselves if they didn’t succeed. He likened girls’ situation to that of canaries down a mine, whose suffering should warn others of their impending fate under ‘selfish capitalism’.39 But were teenage girls ‘a stand-alone demographic in crisis’, as the Observer’s social affairs correspondent, Amelia Hill, averred in 2010?40 The British think tank Demos set out to investigate this issue in a report entitled Through the Looking Glass, published in 2011.41 Demos researchers came up with a mixed picture. They reported that twice as many girls as boys suffered from ‘teen angst’. Rates of binge drinking, teenage pregnancy and physical inactivity among British girls were higher than in other parts of Europe. However, in many ways girls were doing extremely well. They were ‘significantly more successful than boys in making the transition to adulthood’. Their performance in education was exemplary, and, for the first time, women aged between twenty-two and twenty-nine had closed the pay gap, ‘with young women getting paid 2.1% more than their male peers’.

  A new theme – or at least buzzword – began to surface in these debates about the well-being of young women. This was the term sexualisation. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, girls were increasingly identified as being the targets of ‘a sexualised culture’, or the victims of a ‘creeping’ or ‘inappropriate’ sexualisation. There were a number of slants on this. A popular notion that girls were under pressure ‘to grow up too soon’ was sometimes bolstered by notions of childhood innocence. This tapped nostalgia for a presumed ‘golden age’ when children played with balls and hoops rather than Barbie dolls and Tomb Raider, and Freud had yet to disturb the middle-class parent’s state of mind. There was also growing concern about the commercial exploitation of childhood. In itself this was nothing new, but exploitation was seen to take a particularly unacceptable turn when a multinational company such as Tesco’s, one of the largest retailers in the world, started marketing pole-dancing kits as toys. The furore over this hit the headlines in 2006.

  Tesco’s pole-dancing kit came complete with ‘a sexy garter’ and some paper money – or ‘Peekaboo Dance Dollars’ – to tuck in the knickers, along with instructions about how to ‘unleash the sex kitten within’. Parents’ groups went wild. The Daily Mail leapt on to the moral high ground, suggesting that only the most depraved people determined to corrupt their children would want to buy such a thing. Tesco insisted that the ‘toy’ was for adult use, but it was too late, no one was really listening. Deluged by complaints, Tesco agreed to remove their kit from the toys and games section of their website, but would continue to market it as a fitness accessory.42

  Opponents of the ‘sexual commodification of childhood’ turned their attention elsewhere. The Daily Mail’s Bel Mooney weighed in with attacks on the influence of girl pop groups, such as the Pussycat Dolls and Girls Aloud, in articles with titles like ‘Erotic Girl Group Steals Innocence of Childhood’ and ‘Sexy Schoolgirls Are Poisoning Our Culture’.43 In recent years, there have been campaigns against Primark, for instance, for selling padded bikini tops and T-shirts and knickers with ‘inappropriate’ slogans, and New Look for marketing shoes with three-inch heels to pre-pubescent girls. Pencil cases and stationery embellished with the Playboy bunny logo have also attracted a great deal of opprobrium from groups such as Mumsnet, which launched a ‘Let Girls Be Girls’ campaign on the internet in 2010, out of concern ‘that an increasingly sexualised culture was dripping toxically into the lives of children’.44

  A long list of individuals and groups queued up for the chance to jump on this particular bandwagon. Concerns were raised not only in Britain. M. G. Durham’s book The Lolita Effect cites journalist Jill Parkin of Australia’s Courier Mail deploring what she identified as a new trend of ‘little girls dressed as sex bait’.45 Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, columnist Rosa Brooks worried about whether American capitalism was ‘serving our children up to pedophiles on a corporate platter’.46 Politicians in the UK sensed a golden opportunity. In 2010, the Conservative leader David Cameron, for instance, spoke out in defence of parents against ‘premature sexualisation’. Children were being bombarded by inappropriate messages, he thought.47 In the same feature, the (now extinct) retail store Woolworth was reported to have recently withdrawn its Lolita range of girls’ bedroom furniture.

  Was this a moral panic? A few brave voices spoke up, suggesting that indeed it was. Laurie Penny shrewdly pointed out that the notion of ‘sexualisation’ needed unpacking, because it tended
to assume girls had no sexual feelings of their own. She confessed that she herself ‘would have killed for a padded bra when I was in primary school, if only to give an extra boost to the wodges of toilet roll I had already begun to stuff into my crop-top’.48 Adolescents showed insecurity about growing sexual development in various ways. Penny detected something of a class agenda behind the attacks on stores such as Primark for ‘trashy’ merchandise. The British journalist Barbara Ellen, always a staunch defender of the autonomy of teenage girls, and uneasy about what she termed the ‘sub-McCarthyist hysteria’ about child sexualisation, made similar observations.49 What stands out from the historian’s point of view is just how quickly stores such as Primark capitulated to pressure groups, withdrawing the offending merchandise.

  Moral outrage had developed its own momentum, nonetheless. Three British-government-backed investigations reported on the issue of premature sexualisation between 2009 and 2011.50 David Buckingham’s report The Impact of the Commercial World on Children’s Wellbeing was published in 2009 and brought an intelligent, balanced approach to issues such as sexualisation and body image. Buckingham warned that debate around these subjects had been conducted ‘in rather sensationalised and moralistic terms’. Next, Linda Papadopoulos was commissioned by the Home Office to undertake a review of the sexualisation of young people. This was published in 2010. Papadopoulos asserted that ‘hypersexualisation’ was a problem for both girls and boys. She claimed that it pervaded the media and led to a climate in which violence against women and girls was thought acceptable. Some critics thought that these claims needed more scrutiny.51 The third report was commissioned by the children’s minister Sarah Teather, backed by the now Prime Minister David Cameron, in the same year. Teather asked Reg Bailey, Chief Executive of the Christian organisation Mothers’ Union, to report on the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood. Bailey’s report, Letting Children Be Children, was published in June 2011. It called upon business and broadcasting to help to protect children from ‘the sexualised wallpaper’ deemed to surround them. Bailey’s suggestions for intervention included more attention to TV watersheds, urging news vendors to sell lads’ mags in plain wrappers, laptops with more parental controls on access, and so forth.

  In the meantime a number of other British politicians and writers went into the fray. Journalist Tanith Carey produced a manual designed to help parents protect their daughters from a hostile culture, entitled Where Has My Little Girl Gone?52 Conservative MP Nadine Dorries began a campaign to require schools to teach the benefits of abstinence to girls (but not boys) between the ages of thirteen and sixteen.53 And veteran broadcaster Joan Bakewell was widely reported as having done an astonishing U-turn on the reputation she had earned for liberalism in the 1960s by confessing that she had come to wonder whether, after all, Mary Whitehouse might not have been right.54 Bakewell herself protested that she hadn’t changed her views completely. But she was unhappy about a society where sex meant money: ‘no wonder young girls get mixed messages and grow up to make bad decisions’.55 One wonders exactly what Joan Bakewell thought was new here.

  Much of the literature denouncing the sexualisation of girls presents girls as victims, as relatively passive, with limited power to make decisions of their own. On the other hand, another vein of concern runs through these debates. This represents girls as leaping on a handcart to ruin through their own incontinence and ‘laddish’ behaviour. Girls drinking too much, taking drugs, taking their clothes off, exhibiting loud-mouthed and vulgar behaviour, and creating mayhem in the streets began to dominate newspaper headlines in the 1990s. These girls were often described as ‘ladettes’ or as unrepentant participants in ‘raunch culture’. Researchers Carolyn Jackson and Penny Tinkler have observed that the image of the ‘ladette’ harks right back to reports of cocktail-swigging flappers in the 1920s and 1930s.56 In 1927 the Daily Mail had even described girls misbehaving at southern seaside resorts as ‘boyettes’.57 The crux of the matter was that the behaviour of these women could not be perceived as ‘ladylike’.

  Feeding into representations of ladettes in the 1990s was also the pejorative stereotype of the ‘Essex girl’. The Essex girl – represented as unintelligent, promiscuous and vulgar – was disdained by her detractors, similarly, on grounds of class as well as gender. ‘Essex girls’ were mocked for their accents, as well as for their taste in fake tans, bleached hair, ankle bracelets and white stiletto shoes. None of these was regarded as ‘classy’ by the middle-class taste police. Some feminists protested about all this snobbishness. In an article headed ‘Long Live the Essex Girl’, for instance, Germaine Greer wrote half-admiringly of the image of the young woman as unashamedly fun-seeking, ‘anarchy on stilts’, the kind of girls who would descend on Southend for a rave, causing even the bouncers to grow pale.58 Greer objected to the misogyny fuelling a seemingly endless series of jokes about Essex girls as drunken slappers.

  The image of the ladette was more encompassing. Ladettes could come from anywhere in Britain and they didn’t have to be working class. Female undergraduates at elite universities and even TV personalities could be and were described as ‘ladettes’. Ladettes could be ‘girly’ and sport stilettos and revealing necklines, or they could butch up in baggy trousers, hooded anoraks and clumpy boots. Again, distinguishing features were held to be the ability to down large quantities of alcohol, along with complete obliviousness to ladylike decorum. Jackson and Tinkler found the word ‘ladette’ first appearing in the British press in 1995: the behaviour of ladettes had generated around four hundred newspaper articles by 2003, a figure that rose to over two thousand by 2005.59 The press relished accounts of girls behaving badly: these usually encouraged commentary about feminism having taken a wrong turning. A feature headed ‘Ladettes … or Sadettes?’ appeared in the Daily Mirror in 1998, claiming to be based on a telephone survey of five hundred women aged between eighteen and thirty-one. Reporter David Pilditch saw one of the defining characteristics of the ladette as a rejection of domestic skills. Ladettes allegedly vacuumed their bedrooms as little as once or twice per year, and ‘More than a quarter admitted they change their sheets only once a month. A third said they had never washed their duvets … two thirds didn’t even know how to.’60 In addition to bucking housework, ladettes went out hunting for men in packs and downed beer from pint glasses. They earned large sums of money, and they endlessly delayed starting families.61

  In 2004, the then British Home Secretary David Blunkett was reported as having become increasingly concerned about ‘lager loutettes’. Traditionally, he suggested, young women had acted as a brake on young men getting into fights and displaying anti-social behaviour. Now, he feared, young women were competing with men in their bad behaviour, countenancing or even encouraging violence rather than acting as a calming influence.62 British media celebrities such as the television presenter Denise van Outen, and DJs Sara Cox and Zoe Ball, were criticised for their ladette-type behaviour. Trawling through press reports, Carolyn Jackson found ladettes variously blamed for rising levels of cancer, alcoholism, heart disease, child neglect, hospital treatment, violence, and crime and road accidents. The ladette had effectively become a folk devil. A popular UK television series featured attempts to convert ‘ladettes’ into ‘ladies’.63

  Ladettes were represented as the less acceptable face of female independence, as evidence for feminism having gone too far. Just as anxieties about ‘brazen flappers’ had accompanied the profound social changes of the 1920s and 1930s, the concerns over ladettes surfaced following the rise of girl power. Change brought unease. There was a tendency for negative press reports and representations to screen out a more balanced assessment of social trends. Barbara Ellen commented upon this in the Observer in 2010:

  It seems to me that, these days, girls everywhere are depicted as brain-dead drunken slappers. It’s rare to see a media image of a group of girls who are not preparing to have sex in a Burger King doorway at 4am. So virulent is this media constru
ct of British maidenhood that even the Oxford-Cambridge types only make the headlines when they go in for a spot of ironic glamour modelling.64

  The reference to glamour modelling hit a raw nerve. Feminists were increasingly disturbed by reports of girls allegedly rating personal beauty ahead of brains.65 There was incredulity and near-despair when surveys suggested that many British teenage girls saw glamour model Katie Price as a ‘role model’. Price had originally called herself Jordan, and her career dated from the late 1990s, when she became famous for the surgically enhanced breasts which helped establish her reputation as a ‘page three’ model. A talent for publicity, combined with shrewd entrepreneurship and a colourful personal life, kept her name in the headlines. Many wondered at her celebrity, and particularly, why she was so admired by teenage girls. The journalist Decca Aitkenhead, for instance, agonised over this in the Guardian.66 Price’s appeal to young girls might be based on her candour, she mused, or maybe her love of ponies, her ambition to make the best of everything; her body, her business, her love life. The fact that lots of bad things happened in Price’s life and that she pressed on, seemingly undaunted, could inspire admiration. And her refusal to be shamed by the media had a kind of courage about it. Discussion forums on the internet were full of vicious and abusive comments about Price, while the press regularly sneered at her behaviour. At the height of her popularity with young girls, Price became for others a kind of folk devil.