Girl Trouble

by Dyhouse, Carol

  There are some parallels here with the media treatment of ‘celebrity’ fashion model Kate Moss. Moss’s career took off a little earlier in the 1990s, and particularly when she was photographed by her friend Corinne Day.67 These now-famous images showed the then teenage Moss almost bare of make-up, slender and unsophisticated in an ordinary, rather shabby domestic setting. She was almost immediately subjected to a stream of negative comment in the press. On account of her pale and waiflike looks, she was accused of constituting a poor role model for other girls.68 There was (gratuitous) speculation about whether she was anorexic, she was repeatedly vilified for looking too thin, and she was regularly criticised for smoking. Early rumours about drug taking spread fast when the kind of look associated with the young model and some contemporary female singers was labelled ‘heroin chic’. Kate Moss soon established herself as one of – if not the – most successful model of her generation. Her personal life, in the meantime, was rocky. In 1995 the Daily Mirror conducted a relentless campaign against ‘Cocaine Kate’ for her alleged drug dependency.69 This showed little of the tolerance which had sometimes been extended to Marianne Faithfull by the same newspaper some decades earlier. Nevertheless, neither the bad press (nor the wild partying) did more than temporary, minor damage to Moss’s career. Historically, the public naming and shaming of young women had often had devastating effects. It was an effective means of controlling them. Looking back over the careers and public exposure of Kate Moss and Katie Price, it seems that things were now changing.

  Glamour modelling and fashion modelling are often perceived very differently. It might be argued that judgements of class and taste intrude here. Even so, glamour modelling is often assumed to be about taking clothes off, rather than showing them off. Feminists concerned about young girls seeing themselves as sex objects will worry about both categories. The fashion industry might be blamed for encouraging thinness (‘size zero models’) and impossible standards of physical perfection: what Naomi Wolf castigated as ‘beauty pornography’. Glamour modelling usually draws more opprobrium, as veering dangerously close to pornography. Glamour modelling conjures up images of seedy photographers, Playboy bunnies, lap dancing and other forms of ‘sexual objectification’.

  The problem for feminism is that many British women appear happy to aspire to glamour modelling. They buy red-and-black lace bustiers, suspenders and impossible shoes. As well as admiring Katie Price, young women in their droves post images of themselves, half-dressed and looking inviting, on the web. Presumably some women, somewhere, once even bought a Tesco’s pole dancing kit. In the first chapter of her book Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, Natasha Walter takes us into a nightclub in Southend in 2007, where a group of young women are competing for a modelling contract with Nuts, a lads’ magazine.70 The atmosphere gets steamy and raucous as the competitors are exhorted to undress. Afterwards, some of the girls admit that they found the experience a bit degrading. Even so, they are ruefully aware of the fact that they had chosen to be there: no one had forced them into it.

  Natasha Walter is herself also ruefully aware of women’s complicity in glamour modelling and other aspects of ‘raunch culture’: girls can’t be seen as victims in any simple sense of the word. But she argues that part of the problem stems from young women’s continuing lack of choice, the fact that they perceive few routes open to them as having the potential to bring success. Walter contends that the range of cultural possibilities available to girls is actually shrinking, as glamour modelling, lap dancing and prostitution are now ‘mainstream’ activities.71 In this sexualised culture, girls are encouraged to see such activities as ‘empowering’: they are being sold a false vision of success, liberation and empowerment. The process begins early, with girls being offered pink and glittery toys, or Bratz dolls in fishnets and miniskirts, their ‘heavily painted faces looking as if they have been created by Jordan’s make-up artist’.72 This represents what Walter calls ‘the new sexism’ which turns girls into ‘living dolls’.

  Many other writers have taken up this theme. In the Guardian two years earlier, Polly Toynbee embarked on a rant against what she called ‘girlification’ and the colour pink. From infancy, she claimed, girls were subject to ‘a poisonous pink assault’: ‘everything Barbie and Bratz, Princess tiaras, fairy and ballerina dressing up, pink, pink everywhere – and it damages girls’ brains’.73 The campaigning group Pinkstinks, established in 2008, set out to combat ‘the pinkification’ of girlhood, determined to fight against the limited and stereotyped roles it maintained that society offered to girls.74 Much of this was reminiscent of the 1970s, when feminists contested gender stereotyping in the toyshops and rewrote fairy stories with similar objects in mind. Pinkstinks campaigners often argued that the gender stereotyping evident in toyshops and bookstores had notably worsened over the last twenty years. New stores such as Girl Heaven hawked sparkly hairslides and pink feathery tutus to three- to thirteen-year-olds. From the story of Cinderella to the popular television series Sex in the City, both little and grown-up women were being bombarded with the message that salvation would come through shoes.

  But did tinsel, pink glitter – or even Playboy bunny pencil cases – really signify the slippery slope into lap dancing and living doll land? Girls are not always so gullible. Researchers Rachel Russell and Melissa Tyler looked at how young girls reacted to Girl Heaven and its merchandise, and found them often critical and guarded in their response to the images of girlishness and femininity they found on offer.75 They were far from being passive consumers. Do we need to see the colour pink as demeaning or is the condemnation of girlishness itself a subtle form of misogyny? It can seem precariously close to misogyny at times. The Daily Mail columnist Liz Jones, for instance, responded to Polly Toynbee’s piece in the Guardian by raging against ‘sickly pink tat, adorned with fluff and sequins’ and continuing:

  Toynbee cited a new trend called the ‘girlification’ of women. It is reinforced by the half-dressed trollops who masquerade as icons, such as the members of Girls Aloud, who would surely feel more at home plying their trade on the streets of Ipswich.76

  Adult women infantilised themselves by wobbling around in high-heeled shoes, Liz Jones insisted, asking: how could women be so pathetic?

  Do we have evidence to accept Natasha Walter’s suggestion that a sexualised culture is increasingly ‘shrinking and warping the choices on offer to young women’? It depends where one looks. Walter’s writing is persuasive and at times polemical, although she punctuates her text with attempts to supply a balanced judgement. She admits, for instance, that opportunities for women are ‘far wider than they were a generation ago’. In her final chapter she concludes that feminists in the West have ‘set in motion the greatest peaceful revolution the world has ever known’. The achievements have been impressive: political rights, equal education and opportunities for work, rights over contraception and reproduction. Aside from abortion rights, which have proved consistently controversial and are constantly being challenged, most of these achievements are now pretty much taken for granted. Girls today drink, and misbehave, and may be persuaded into choices they will later regret. But by no means all girls behave in this way and among even those who do, many will soon grow out of it. In this, they are not wholly different from young men.

  The bigger picture gives more cause for optimism. From a historical perspective, the gains since the 1980s have been impressive. Girls have made dramatic progress, for instance, in education. In 1999, three leading feminist educational researchers, Madeleine Arnot, Miriam David and Gaby Weiner published their important book Closing the Gender Gap: Postwar Education and Social Change.77 In this they scrutinised long-term trends in school examinations in Britain, showing how girls had improved both their entry and performance in these public examinations, at ages sixteen and eighteen, particularly since 1987. Partly as a result of the introduction of a national curriculum, more girls took up subjects such as science and maths, previously dominated by boys
. This new pattern was well established by the 1990s. The gender gap was closing. Moreover, girls not only caught up with boys, they began, in several areas, to outperform them. Boys were not making progress at the same rate. By 2001, some 56.5 per cent of girls were achieving good grades (A*–C) in five or more subjects at GCSE, compared with only 45.7 per cent of their male counterparts. At primary level, girls got off to a much better start than boys in their reading, and this advantage was sustained right through the school years. The researchers treat their findings with caution, since differences of social class and ethnicity complicate the picture: not all girls succeed, nor do all boys fail. Even so, they conclude that these patterns of female performance constitute ‘one of the most significant transformations in the history of social inequality in education in the UK’.

  Girls’ successes in schooling were mirrored in higher education. Before 1970 the proportion of female undergraduates in British universities had been relatively stagnant. Thereafter the situation improved.78 A number of factors came into play here: the growth of the attractive ‘new’ universities of the 1960s, for instance, and the closure of teacher training colleges, which had previously functioned as a kind of higher-education-on-the-cheap option for girls. As girls bettered their examination results, ‘quotas’ limiting female entrants in elite forms of higher education were declared illegal, and the process whereby colleges in Oxford and Cambridge went coeducational accelerated.79 With women no longer hedged in and herded into separate compounds in higher education, their share of undergraduate places first rose above the 50 per cent level in 1996. And it continued to rise. By the end of the twentieth century, female undergraduates outnumbered the men. Even in the medical schools, once bastions of rugby teams and patriarchy, women students began to find themselves in the majority. This situation would have been unimaginable in the 1960s.80

  Overall, the changes in education amounted to something of a quiet revolution. As Arnot, David and Weiner emphasise, for the first time in Britain state schooling decisively ‘broke with the gender order’.81 Girls were no longer offered a totally separate curriculum designed to make them feminine and to turn them into wives and mothers. They studied the same subjects and were ostensibly assessed by the same criteria as boys. This would have been unimaginable in 1900. Girls’ conspicuous and runaway successes unnerved many, who worried about boys being left behind. The label of ‘underperformance’ switched from girls to boys, and something of a moral panic about how to explain boys’ ‘failure’ followed.82 Educationalists and parents agonised about whether schools expected too much conformity and girly compliance in the classroom. Were boys being bored senseless by the nagging demands of coursework? There was sometimes a whiff of misogyny about all this. Would male teachers have a better idea of boys’ need to indulge in rough play and to let off steam? Had feminism contrived to upset the natural order of things?

  The full implications of these educational changes are a matter of ‘contemporary history’: we have yet to find out where they are all leading. Girls’ educational successes haven’t always neatly translated into occupational advantage.83 Recent evidence has shown female graduates doing better in first employment than their male peers, but they may still fall back in terms of salaries and prospects for promotion in their late twenties and early thirties, or if and when they decide to become mothers. History warns us that when women have in the past risen to dominance in any particular occupation or profession, the status of that profession may fall.84 What will happen to the status and remuneration of GPs, for instance, if current predictions are correct and by 2017 most family doctors are female? Men still tend to dominate the top jobs in any particular area, and it may be that new patterns of gender segregation will emerge. In recent years, the impact of financial crisis and government attempts to curtail spending has had damaging effects on girls’ occupational prospects, not least because many girls set their sights on working in social services and the public sector.85 But in spite of all these caveats, the changes since the 1970s and 1980s have been marked. Women are now a force to be reckoned with in the workplace. Occupational advisory services and government jobcentres no longer draw a clear distinction between men’s jobs and women’s jobs. Girls have many more role models on offer. When women find themselves excluded from jobs on account of age and/or appearance there is often considerable public outcry. In itself, this might be taken to indicate that things are changing, even if change is slow and not without setbacks of various kinds.

  Looking back over changes since the 1990s, it is clear that a new generation of strong, resourceful young women did appear on the cultural scene and that many of them stayed there well after their youth was over. The list would include singers and musicians, artists, actors, television and film personalities, models, sports personalities and entrepreneurs. The singer Madonna’s career took off in the 1980s, reaching global proportions in the 1990s. The diversity of her activities in the 1990s made her both an inspiration to young women and a household name, and even in her fifties her performances, film making and charity work made headlines.86 Like Madonna, the rock musician Courtney Love parodied and played with femininity in performance, celebrating girlishness while refusing its constraints. Annie Lennox and Sinead O’Connor performed powerfully, pushed back boundaries, and combined talent with strong social and political views. Girl groups flourished.87 Sarah Lucas, Rachel Whiteread and Tracey Emin established themselves as rising young female talents and forces to be reckoned with on the British art scene. On television, a new breed of action heroines enthralled viewers. The American screenwriter Joss Whedon famously set out to create a girl character who would refuse victimhood when he dreamed up the idea of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The series achieved cult status when it was imported from North America and aired on British TV between 1997 and 2003. Legions of schoolgirls were inspired. All this is just to scrape the surface of what was going on, but it hardly suggests that what was on offer to young women was a narrowing vision of what they might become. Girl power may have been exaggerated – and it was certainly exploited by advertisers and in the media – but the evidence suggests it was no empty concept.

  There was much talk of ‘postfeminism’ in the 1990s. Its meaning was ill-defined. Some argued that women had achieved a sufficient measure of equality and that feminism was no longer relevant. Others identified a backlash, or a betrayal. As a political movement, feminism lost clear, cohesive goals, but has been far from disappearing. Something similar happened in the early part of the twentieth century, after the vote was won. There seem to be moments in history when feminism emerges as a force which powerfully impacts on contemporary culture, other times when its character appears more latent and diffuse. Some observers have heralded the appearance of third – or even fourth – ‘waves’ of feminism, more global and inclusive in their remit. The impact of the digital revolution has been profound. Where young women in the 1980s and 1990s produced fanzines, their counterparts today turn to websites and to blogging. Keeping in touch with what other young women are thinking has never been easier, and there are exciting possibilities both for self-expression and for making social and political connections.

  Founded and originally edited by Catherine Redfern (since 2007 by Jess McCabe), in 2001 www.thefword.org.uk set out to create a new spirit of community among younger feminists. The American blogger Jessica Valenti’s Feministing.com, which also set out to appeal to younger feminists, dates from 2004. UK Feminista, directed by Kat Banyard, was established as a grassroots campaigning organisation with an informative website (ukfeminista.org.uk) in 2010. A host of feminist websites in both the UK and North America address everything from how to combat patriarchy (Iblamethepatriarchy.com) through body image (www.about-face.org) and violence against women (www.endviolenceagainstwomen.org.uk), to women in the media and pop culture (bitchmagazine.org). It isn’t easy to give a comprehensive account of such a rich and moving picture: some websites prove ephemeral, others take deep root and thrive, but the
array is dazzling.

  One example of how quickly feminist campaigning has been changing under the influence of new media was the Slutwalk campaign of 2011. What began as a dispute in Canada quickly turned into a series of protest marches across the world. Early in 2011, women in Toronto were outraged when a local police officer suggested to a group of law students that girls might lessen their chances of being subjected to violent rape by not ‘dressing like sluts’. Tired of hearing the victims of sex crimes blamed for their own sufferings, and determined to reclaim the right to dress however they chose, over 3,000 women gathered in the local park before marching in protest to Toronto police headquarters. Many of the women chose to march in ‘provocative’ clothing, joyously flaunting their fishnets and cleavage bras. They hoisted banners asserting ‘My Dress Is Not a Yes’ and ‘Slutpride’. Assured of massive media coverage, the idea spread like wildfire. There were Slutwalks in New York, London and Melbourne. They stimulated plenty of controversy. In Britain, the right-wing columnist Melanie Phillips denounced ‘these silly girls’ for what she described as ‘an international explosion of self-indulgent and absurd posturing’. In Phillips’s view, Slutwalks exposed feminism for being ‘well past its sell-by date’.88 Jessica Valenti, on the other hand, celebrated both the energy with which women rejected the ‘dangerous myth’ that they invited rape through their ‘suggestive’ clothing and the exhilarating speed with which a new generation of feminists could now translate their anger into action.89