Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism Read Free Page B

thought of singing or dancing or acting, but she shrugged. ‘I’m not that good at that kind of thing.’ But through a friend she met an agent, and very quickly became one of the half-dozen models in the business who make a good living out of this work.
    Her kind of work – posing in white stockings or pink thongsfor the Nuts Boob Bonanza or Blondes in the Buff special issues – she describes as ‘classy’. ‘You shouldn’t be doing this job if you’re uncomfortable with it,’ she said. ‘I’m getting my boobs out, but so what?’ Cara was spending the day with her best friend, Helen Reynolds, who was at university, studying law, in Leeds. ‘We’re inseparable. She’s been on endless shoots with me, I’m always going to see her in hall.’ ‘It’s a laugh, isn’t it?’ Cara said to Helen at one point, describing what work it is for her to get ready for a night out clubbing – in order to keep up the glamour-model fantasy, her agency provides her with clothes, hair and make-up. ‘Fantastic,’ Helen agreed.
    At one point I turned to Helen to understand more about how she felt about her best friend’s work. She was keen to express her support for it. ‘Women are now in much more dominant roles in society, and they can say, you know what, I’m doing this for myself. It’s something to be proud of,’ she said. And how does that make other women feel? I wondered. ‘Well, if you’re happy with how you look, why shouldn’t you be happy with how other women look? Cara chooses to do this work, and it’s in a magazine that people choose to buy – you don’t have to buy it.’
    This emphasis on choice is key. Anyone who would like to criticise this culture that sees women primarily as sexy dolls will find themselves coming up against the constantly repeated mantra of free choice. At one Babes on the Bed club night in Scotland, the club was picketed by a feminist group, and Cara’s nose wrinkled with scorn when she described them. ‘I had them – I had them outside one of my club nights, in Scotland somewhere. To be honest, I think it’s stupid, the feminists coming round, throwing eggs and that, I think they should grow up. The girls that are entering, are entering out of choice, they are not being forced, and so let them.’
    When I spoke to other people who have worked to make glamour modelling more acceptable in the mainstream – themagazine editors and television executives who have driven this shift in our culture – I heard much the same views. These powerful figures are, very often, men and women who came of age in the 1980s. That was the time when young women were going on the early Reclaim the Night marches and reading books such as Pornography: Men Possessing Women , in which the writer Andrea Dworkin argued that pornography was a form of violence against women. As the launch editor of Zoo magazine, Paul Merrill, put it once in an interview: ‘I was at Loughborough University when people were trying to ban the Sun because of Page 3 . They’d recoil if they knew I was now organising competitions to find the sexiest student.’ 6 How did people like him make this journey, from being students in university bars discussing why women shouldn’t be objectified, to being executives who make their money out of images of women with big breasts wearing thongs?
    They have done it, by and large, by arguing, just like Cara and Helen, that the deluge of these images is a symbol of how far we have come rather than how far we still have to go on the road to equality. They too constantly return to the key word: choice. For instance, Phil Hilton was the editor of Nuts when it launched. He is politely defensive of the new direction in the culture that has given him such success. ‘You can’t put old-fashioned sexual politics from another era on to this generation of young women,’ he said to me when we met in the Holborn office where he was working on new magazine launches. ‘You have to understand