Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism Read online

  Natasha Walter is author of The New Feminism. She is a journalist and broadcaster, and the director of Women for Refugee Women.

  ‘This is the book that everyone should be reading’ Sophie Dahl, Elle

  ‘Coolly devastating … Living Dolls is a call to arms … At this crucial moment in women’s history, Walter provides a crystal-clear enunciation of the hypocrisy, shallowness and misogyny of our age’ Bidisha, New Statesman

  ‘Copies of Living Dolls have been dispatched to my fifteen-year-old goddaughter and my twelve-year-old granddaughter. Should they roll their eyes, I’ll tell them it is a survival manual for negotiating an increasingly confusing world … Their road to freedom will doubtless be as potholed as the one we took, with as many disappointments and wrong turnings. But I can think of no more reliable and steadfast guide than Natasha Walter’ Susan Dowell, Tablet

  ‘She does a brilliant job of demolishing [scientists’] arguments and showing how scientifically contentious their conclusions are. We don’t expect our scientists to be driven by ideology, but Walter makes an irrefutable case that they are’ Susie Orbach, Mail on Sunday

  ‘An important book’ Sarah Vine, The Times

  ‘Elegant and thought-provoking’ Antonia Senior, The Times

  Natasha Walker’s gripping book Living Dolls … does a wonderful job of bringing into sharp focus a sea change that’s been creeping up on us over the past decade’ Amy Jenkins, Independent

  ‘A very intriguing and worrying read’ Dominic Savage, Observer ‘Paints a frightening picture … Walter is especially scathing about the way that our culture’s antagonism towards women is being framed, of all things, as feminist … It is when focusing on our hypersexualised culture that Walter truly shines … She does an excellent job of walking a controversial line … Walter skilfully takes apart a growing market for journalism that joyfully promotes this men-are-from-Mars mentality, even at the cost of accuracy. It’s hard to disagree with anything Walter writes … Walter’s passion is stirring’ Jessica Valenti, Observer

  ‘In Living Dolls, Walter makes a compelling case that we need feminism more than ever … This book makes a disturbing, passionate and compelling case for revisiting our notions of equality … Everyone who cares anything about the kind of society we are currently creating should read this book’ Sunday Business Post

  ‘A provocative and passionate reassessment of women’s liberation’ Sunday Times

  ‘A welcome addition to the feminist bookshelf’ Kira Cochrane, Guardian

  ‘Living Dolls challenges the prevailing dogma of liberation … She holds on to her longstanding belief that not all pornography inevitably degrades women … This book is required reading for everyone who cares about our humanity, and that means all of us … A valuable book’ Kathy Sheridan, Irish Times

  ‘Living Dolls does an excellent job of exposing the brutal reality behind the sex industry’s increasingly sophisticated façade’ Charlotte Raven, Guardian

  ‘A lively polemic’ Terri Apter, Times Literary Supplement

  ‘Worth reading – and thinking about, long and hard. To tell the truth, it makes me want to cry. In a year or two, when I can pry my daughter away from Twilight and Bridget Jones’s Diary, I’m going to beg, cajole and demand that she reads it too’ Meg Rosoff

  Also by this author

  The New Feminism

  Copyright

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 978-0-748-13206-5

  Copyright © Natasha Walter 2010

  Cartoon copyright © Kipper Williams / The Sunday Times / nisyndication.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  For Harriet Gugenheim, with thanks

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to Cassie Browne and Flo Nicoll, who gave so much time and energy to checking facts and sources with me. I was lucky to meet you at the beginning of what will no doubt be brilliant careers.

  I am grateful to everyone I interviewed, as without their insights into so many different areas of experience I could never have written this book. And I am very grateful to the many people who gave me interviews and whose words do not appear here, as they often provided invaluable insights which informed my work even if I was unable to quote them by name. They include Bernice McCabe and staff and students at North London Collegiate School; Charlotte Tan and friends at St John’s College, Cambridge University; Lee Eggleston and Sheila Coates at the South Essex Rape and Incest Crisis Centre, Dan Burke, Kimberley Firth Jones, Daisy Leitch, Charlie Little and Flora and Miranda Thomas, and Rebecca Jewell, who sparked one particularly fertile train of thought. Thank you, too, to all those who helped me in contacting individuals to interview, particularly Bernard Bulaitis and Annie Griffiths at City and Islington College, Rachel Bell and Emine Saner.

  Thank you to those scientists and academics, including Lyn Craig, Janet Frick, Wendy Hill, Nancy Hopkins, Janet Shibley Hyde, Diane Quinn, Elizabeth Spelke, Sonya Thompson, Ed Tronik and Catherine Weinberger, who patiently answered my queries about their work and checked my references to their research; to Susan Morrissey, who translated sources from the German for me; and especially to Deborah Cameron and Mark Liberman, who read through drafts of the second half of this book and generously gave me the benefit of their knowledge. Above all I am grateful to Melissa Hines, who saved me from some particular errors and gave me invaluable insights into her fascinating field of work. Any errors that remain are, obviously, mine.

  Thank you to Lennie Goodings and her colleagues at Little, Brown and to Derek Johns and his colleagues at A P Watt. I am also very grateful to Linda Grant, Liz Jobey and Ruth Walter, who read and commented on drafts of the book with great care and intelligence.

  And thank you to Mark Lattimer, whose constant support and interest in the project sustained me.

  Contents

  Also by this author

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  Dolls

  I The New Sexism

  1 Babes

  2 Pole-dancers and prostitutes

  3 Girls

  4 Lovers

  5 Pornography

  6 Choices

  II: The New Determinism

  7 Princesses

  8 Myths

  A Babies

  B Words

  C Maths

  D Hormones

  E Brains

  9 Stereotypes

  10 Changes

  Notes

  Give your support

  Index

  Note on Names

  Where individuals are identified by first name and surname in this book, this is their real name. Where individuals are identified only by first name, this is a pseudonym.

  Dolls

  I didn’t expect we would end up here, I thought to myself a few years ago during a visit to a toy shop in London. I had moved up through the shop on the escalator, from the multicoloured bustle of the ground floor, stuffed full of the warm tints and round shapes of soft toys, and into the dream world of the third floor. Here, it was as though someone had jammed rose-coloured spectacles over my eyes, and yet the effect was nauseating rather than beautifying. Everything was pink, from the sugared-almond pink of Barbie, to the strawberry tint of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, to the milky pink of Baby Annabell, to the rose pink of Hello Kitty. There was a pink nail bar where little girls could paint their
nails, a pink ‘boutique stand’ with earrings and necklaces, and dolls in pink boxes that came with pink ‘manicure bedrooms’ and pink ‘salon spaces’.

  Many feminists in the past argued that girls and boys should be encouraged to play across the boundaries laid down by their sex, and that there was no reason for girls to be confined to this pastel sphere. But not only does this division between the pink girls’ world and the blue boys’ world still exist, it is becoming more exaggerated than ever in this generation.

  It often seems now that the dolls are escaping from the toy shop and taking over girls’ lives. Not only are little girls expected to play with dolls, they are expected to model themselves on their favourite playthings. The glittering pink aesthetic now extends to almost every aspect of a girl’s life. The all-encompassing nature of modern marketing techniques means that it is now possible for a little girl to sit at home watching her Sleeping Beauty DVD, playing with a Sleeping Beauty doll complete with the same costume, while dressed herself in a shiny replica of Sleeping Beauty’s dress. She can then trip off to school with Barbies or Bratz on everything from her knickers to her hair clips to her schoolbag, and come home to look at her reflection in the mirror of a Disney Princess dressing table. The brilliant marketing strategies of these brands are managing to fuse the doll and the real girl in a way that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.

  This strange melding of the doll and the real girl can continue way beyond childhood. Living a doll’s life seems to have become an aspiration for many young women, as they leave childhood behind only to embark on a project of grooming, dieting and shopping that aims to achieve the bleached, waxed, tinted look of a Bratz or Barbie doll. The characters they watch in romantic comedies are women who make such exaggerated femininity seem aspirational, and the celebrities they read about in fashion and gossip magazines are often women who are well known to have chosen extreme regimes, from punishing diets to plastic surgery, to achieve an airbrushed perfection.

  The fusion of the woman and the doll at times becomes almost surreal. When the singers in Girls Aloud launched Barbie doll versions of themselves in 2005, you could look – to paraphrase George Orwell – from doll to girl and girl to doll, and it was almost impossible to see which was which. Both real and plastic women were so eerily perfect in their painted skin, nylon-glossy hair and hard bodies. When two young twins entered the reality television show Big Brother in the UK in 2007, dressed in identical pink miniskirts and bleached hair, they said Barbie was the inspiration for their lives. The actress and singer Hilary Duff has said, ‘When I was younger, I was so inspired by Barbie. She has been a role model for my friends and me. I love her style and her spirit!’1 Even when the link between women and dolls isn’t made so explicit, many of the so-called role models that strut under the contemporary limelight, from Paris Hilton to Victoria Beckham, take the plastic look so far that they seem to have been created by Mattel.

  For more than 200 years, feminists have been criticising the way that artificial images of feminine beauty are held up as the ideal to which women should aspire. From Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in 1949, to Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch in 1970, to Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth in 1991, brilliant and angry women have demanded a change in these ideals. Yet far from fading away, they have become narrower and more powerful than ever. What’s more, throughout much of our society, the image of female perfection to which women are encouraged to aspire has become more and more defined by sexual allure. Of course wanting to be sexually attractive has always and will always be a natural desire for both men and women, but in this generation a certain view of female sexuality has become celebrated throughout advertisements, music, television programmes, films and magazines. This image of female sexuality has become more than ever defined by the terms of the sex industry.

  Throughout our society, female sexuality now tends to be seen in a very narrow light, often defined by slender exhibitionists with large breasts gyrating around poles in their underwear. The narrowing of what it means to be sexy arises from the way that the sex industry has become more generally acceptable. The movement of the sex industry from the margins to the mainstream of our society can be seen in many places – from the unexpected resurgence of glamour modelling, which means that many young women have been encouraged to believe that stripping to their knickers for lads’ magazines is their best possible route to success; to the sudden growth of lap-dancing clubs in town centres; to a new fashion for the style of dancing associated with those clubs, pole-dancing; to the popularity of memoirs of prostitution that suggest selling sex is a great way for a woman to earn her living; and, above all, to the much greater presence of pornography in the lives of many young people, driven by the internet. This latter development has affected magazine and newspaper publishing, advertising, television and music, many areas of which have begun to share the aesthetic values of soft pornography. The messages and values of this revitalised sex industry have reached deep into the hearts of many young men and women.

  This association of femininity and sexiness starts early: while it’s hardly new for women to want to be sexy, it’s new that even childhood playthings should look so sexy. Although feminists in the 1970s deplored Barbie’s tiny waist, large breasts and perfect features, she could be marketed to girls as a pilot, a doctor or an astronaut, with accessories to match her roles. Bratz dolls, who recently toppled Barbie from her throne as the best-selling fashion doll, were created with a wardrobe for clubbing and shopping, dressed in fishnet and feathers, crop tops and miniskirts, with heavily painted faces that look as if they have been created by Jordan’s make-up artist.2

  When you wander into a toy shop and find this new, altogether more slutty and sultry ideal pouting up at you from a thousand figurines, you realise that there has been a genuine change in the culture aimed at young girls. While girls have always been encouraged to see self-decoration as a central part of their lives, today they are also exposed to a deluge of messages, even at an early age, about the importance of becoming sexually attractive. These dolls are just a fragment of a much wider culture in which young women are encouraged to see their sexual allure as their primary passport to success.

  This highly sexualised culture is often positively celebrated as a sign of women’s liberation and empowerment. It was indeed an aim of the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s that women should be released from conventional morality around sex, which had confined them to idealised chastity on the one hand or contemptible promiscuity on the other. The fact that women can now be sexually active and experienced without being condemned is a direct result of second-wave feminism. And this is clearly something to be celebrated. But it is strange that all aspects of the current hypersexual culture are often now seen as proof of women’s growing freedom and power. So the renaissance of glamour modelling is seen by many who participate in the industry as a marker not of persistent sexism, but of women’s new confidence. For instance, as one ex-editor of a lads’ magazine said to me, ‘It’s the women who are driving this. It’s all changed…. I think that to people of my age, it’s bizarre to see young women being so confident sexually at such an early age.’ Similarly, the fashion for pole-dancing classes is talked about as if it were liberating for women. The website for Pole Dancing Hen Weekends states that, ‘Pole dancing classes are all about freeing yourself from the restrictions imposed on you in your everyday life and empowering yourself.’3 Even occupations such as lap dancing and prostitution are often now surrounded by this quasi-feminist rhetoric. One young lap dancer quoted in an interview in The Times in 2008 said, ‘I have never had a job where I felt so empowered,’4 and the actor Billie Piper, who starred in a television adaptation of the memoir by ‘Belle de Jour’, a prostitute working in London, said in an interview, ‘When I am playing Belle I have to play a sexually liberated, empowered young prostitute.’5

  This means that rather than b
eing seen as negative for women, the mainstreaming of the sex industry is now often presented as a culmination of the freedoms that feminists have sought. As one female writer who was looking at the mainstream appeal of pornography put it in an article in the Guardian: ‘Instead of desperately longing for the right to be seen as human beings, today’s girls are playing with the old-fashioned notion of being seen as sex objects. This is not terrible news. In fact, to me, this is the ultimate feminist ideal.’6

  This equation of empowerment and liberation with sexual objectification is now seen everywhere, and is having a real effect on the ambitions of young women. When I interviewed women who have worked in the sex industry for this book, I was struck to find that some of them had been seduced by the idea that this work could enhance their sense of individual power. Ellie is an articulate, well-educated woman who had gone to private school and a good university, and had been brought up to believe she could do anything in any profession – law, medicine, politics. Instead, she had decided she wanted to be an actor, but when jobs were hard to find and she found herself financially desperate, she took a sideways step in her twenties by going to work in a lap-dancing club in London. She didn’t feel, at first, that it would be very difficult. She told me she had picked up messages from our culture that lap dancing was pretty straightforward and even empowering for the women who do it. ‘People say that, don’t they,’ she said to me thoughtfully when we met. ‘There’s this myth that women are expressing their sexuality freely in this way, and that as they can make lots of money out of it, it gives them power over the men who are paying.’

  This was not what she found herself, however. She was shocked to discover quite how demeaning and dehumanising she found the work. In the situation of the club, women became more like dolls than people. ‘There’s something about the club – the lights, the make-up, the clothes you wear, those huge platform heels, the way that so many women have fake boobs,’ she said. ‘You look like cartoons. You give yourself a fake girly name, like a doll. You’re encouraged to look like dolls. No wonder the men don’t see you as people.’