Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism Read Free

– clearly that night was not the right time for her to start topless modelling, ‘if you’re going to be a glamour model, you’ve got to get your boobs out.’ The next girl, with huge, perfectly spherical, siliconed breasts perched high on her slender chest, got the loudest roar. ‘Oh, there are two things I like about her!’ shouted the DJ. ‘How about you, boys? She doesn’t swim, but she doesn’t sink.’
    As the show went on, the women became more ambitious. One jumped on the bed and bent straight over, looking through her wide-apart legs, presenting her crotch in stretchy, tight red pants to the cameras, before pumping her rear at them and slipping off her bra, ending up with the splits. ‘This is Angel!’ called the DJ. ‘Isn’t she fit? She’s on a porn channel too, so you can catch her on telly too.’ The shortlisting was done at top speed – only women who flashed their breasts or their thongs for the crowd were called back for the final four, so Tania wasn’t in that line-up, although they all went on standing on the stage, a rejected half-naked chorusline. ‘Now we’re going to judge your girl-on-girl action,’ said the DJ to cheers all round. ‘Let’s see you get a bit friendly, come on, how about some kissing. What do you think, boys? Some of the fittest girls in Southend getting on with each other.’
    The girls clambered on top of one another, looking vaguely back at the camera. ‘What about the bra? Is that coming off?’ asked Cara Brett. The crowd chanted heavily, breathily, ‘Get your tits out, get your tits out, get your tits out for the lads.’ They pressed around the stage, roaring as the girls rubbed their breasts against each other. The crowd became so big that I could no longer see the women whole – just flashes of breast and thigh on the screens of the phones that were held high in the air.
    ‘Yeah, Gav’s got a stiffy now,’ shouted the DJ about the PR manager. ‘Come on,’ said Cara impatiently, ‘let’s show some skin, girls. Let me help you out of these.’ She dragged the hot-pantsoff one girl, showing her sequinned thong riding precariously on a shaved crotch. The crowd erupted, and that girl was judged the winner. Sweatily, the crowd dispersed. I saw the two young women who had come with Tania. ‘Did you enjoy it?’ I asked them. ‘Not really,’ said Katie, running long nails through blonde hair, looking uneasy. ‘It was a bit degrading, to be honest.’ I would have liked to stop and talk more to them, but the PR manager was desperate for me to leave as he seemed to think the men from Nuts would be angry at him for letting me in. He could hardly escort me to the door fast enough. The next day I looked on a club website, www.dontstayin.com , to see if anyone had commented on the night at Mayhem. The only comment was laconic. ‘Lots of quality Southend fanny.’
    As I saw that evening in the Mayhem nightclub, and as one can see any night of the week in clubs up and down the UK, images that a previous generation often saw as degrading for women have now been taken up as playful and even aspirational. ‘Me-time’ for a young homemaker now can include dressing as a Playboy bunny; breaking into a respectable career that would make your mum proud can start with stripping for nothing in a crowded nightclub. Although for many people this culture may seem quite marginal, it may be more mainstream than we think. In 2006, a survey was carried out among teenage girls that suggested that more than half of them would consider being glamour models and a third of them saw Jordan as a role model. 3 The growth of a culture in which so many women feel that their worth is measured by the size of their breasts rather than by any other possible yardstick arrived in the UK apparently out of nowhere. When I was at university in the late 1980s, that sniggery British culture of Benny Hill and page three seemed to be on the way out – it looked dated and rather absurd, and