Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism Read Free Page A

young women didn’t talk about stripping as a means of empowerment or look to lap dancers for their role models. But the revitalisation of glamour modelling has become the symptom ofa wider change in our culture, in which the images and attitudes of soft pornography now come flooding in at young women from every side of the media: monthly magazines, weekly magazines, tabloid newspapers, music videos, reality television, and almost every aspect of the internet, from social networking sites to individual blogs.
    University students are just as likely to meet this culture as are young women in an Essex nightclub. At Loughborough University in 2007, the student union held a Playboy night – House Party at the Playboy Mansion – advertised by posters with drawings of women in Playboy costumes, no faces, with their legs apart. The club night promised pole-dancing and live shows and, according to photos posted on students’ MySpace pages, quite a few young women were keen enough to attend wearing their bunny ears and pink tails, and not much else. York University’s Goodricke College also hosts Playboy nights and the university is home to a pole-dancing exercise club. A few years ago I was struck when I received an email from a student who was complaining about the sexism she felt she encountered at her university. She had just received a copy of the 2005 college magazine for Pembroke College, Cambridge, which announced that it was to ‘celebrate 21 years of women at Pembroke College’. It did so by giving over page 3 of the magazine to eleven young women posing in their knickers alone on the ‘High Table’ in the college hall. Although the articles throughout the magazine celebrated the fact that women now outnumber men at Pembroke, and that in 2004 women at Pembroke got more firsts than men, the message about the way that women should be seen was unequivocal. 4 Three years later a student magazine at the same university, Vivid , included a picture of a female undergraduate in nothing but black thong and stockings, posing with her legs apart on Clare College bridge. 5
    The aesthetic of this kind of modelling has obviously also affected the ways that women present themselves socially.Online social networking often foregrounds similar images of young women. One woman I interviewed, Suraya Singh, said to me, ‘Of course we all think, I want to be cool, and the answer to that for so many young women seems to be, I know, I’ll have a picture of myself in my pants on Facebook.’
    It is not easy to understand how the glamour-modelling culture became so acceptable in such a short space of time. Although dissent is now being articulated in some quarters, it is easy for many people in this culture to dismiss such dissent entirely. Before going to Mayhem I had talked to Dave Read, the head of Neon Management, the agency that promotes these club tours and that represents some of the most successful models in this business. ‘Do you ever find people saying that glamour modelling is degrading any more?’ I asked him, and he snorted with laughter. ‘I haven’t heard that for I don’t know how long. That argument, that, whatever, feminist thing, it doesn’t have anything left in it now. You’d really struggle to find anyone who’d say that now.’
    A few weeks later I met up with Cara Brett, the model who introduced the show, in a bar in Islington. Sitting at a scrubbed wooden table, she was a diminutive Barbie with long, wispy hair bleached white and a gold aliceband, a low-cut cream sweater over jeans. She had begun doing glamour modelling eight months previously, and with the kind of peachy body and doll face that is wanted by the industry, she is already top of her profession. Less than a year before, she was stuck in her rural home in the Midlands, wondering how on earth she could fulfil her ambition of being famous without having any obvious talents. ‘I knew I was going to be famous,’ she said, and I asked if she had