Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism Page 3

  Just then I saw three young women at the bar wearing Playboy bunny outfits: pink cuffs, black lace knickers and basques, black stockings, stilettos and pink bunny tails. Assuming they too were here for the competition, I went to chat to them. ‘What competition?’ said one, a smiling, rosy young woman with her bobbed dark hair pushed back under her bunny ears. ‘No, we’re here for Sam’s birthday. She’s twenty today.’ ‘Whose idea was the costume?’ I asked. ‘Mine!’ she said. Two of the women are secretaries, and one is a full-time mother. ‘I’m allowed out on Thursday nights,’ said the mother eagerly. ‘This is my me-time. I get away from the family. I can be myself.’ Then they went into the toilets to check their outfits, and got the bathroom attendant, a tall young black woman in a long-sleeved T-shirt and black trousers, to take photos of the three of them on their digital camera. I watched as they stood close together, pouting with hands on hips, breasts thrust out, before they went back to the bar.

  I returned to the cluster of young women who stood around the Nuts team. One of the girls to be chosen, Tania, was wearing a blue lace dress that started low on her breasts and ended just below her knickers, and was saying goodbye to her friends, Nikki and Katie, who wished her luck and perched outside the changing room. Nikki, in a black minidress and silver wedge sandals, had the face of a Botticelli madonna, with a pointed chin and wide-apart blue eyes. I asked her if she was entering the competition. ‘No, I already do modelling,’ she smiled. ‘I’m in a final for a big competition on Monday. I’m here for Tania – she wants to break in now.’ Katie joined in. ‘I’ve been modelling for a couple of years,’ she said. ‘I’ve got an agent, he found me online.’ In this context, modelling means glamour modelling, the coy words for posing almost naked for men’s magazines. ‘I’ve done a shoot for FHM,’ Katie said. ‘My boyfriend’s a bit protective of me – he doesn’t like people seeing me as an object.’ I wondered if she also worried about that. ‘I did at first, but you get used to it, honestly.’ When I asked who their role models are, their responses were immediate: ‘I’d have to say Jordan,’ said Katie, naming the woman most famous for her huge breast implants and appearances on reality television. ‘I really admire what she’s done.’ Tania came out of the changing room, her exquisite hourglass body now clothed in red hotpants and crop top. She’s already done some modelling, but not yet topless. ‘I will do,’ she said, ‘when the time is right.’

  Although sales of Nuts and Zoo have entered a real decline since their early heyday,1 their influence is as real as ever. They have contributed to an ongoing cultural shift, in which the business of what is coyly called glamour modelling – in which women may be naked, but won’t expose the genitals – has massively expanded in Britain. When Nuts was launched in 2004, the belief was that the young men who would buy it would want articles about football and cars, rather than pictures of women – and if there were to be women, they should be the acknowledged beauties of the film and television world. But its direction changed quickly. The editors found that while readers might say they wanted to see Jennifer Lopez on the cover, actually the editions with ordinary-looking girls – girls from reality television, girls who were photographed in their local nightclubs, girls who sent in photographs of themselves in their bedrooms – sold and sold. The magazines began to make images and words far more explicit, with pages crowded with pictures of young women in thongs. Nuts became a shorthand for a certain kind of culture, a laddish, explicit culture in which women were seen in their underwear or not at all. Together with its main competitor, Zoo, it dragged all the men’s magazines in the UK, including the once more restrained monthly magazines such as FHM, into a constant competition as to which could be the most explicit, without quite stepping into pornography. The circulations of all these magazines have fallen in the last few years, but in 2009 Nuts still sold over 180,000 copies every week in the UK, and the change it has created in the culture around young men and women has not gone away. Much of its energy has shifted over to the internet, and on the Nuts website you can find a constant stream of men commenting on the photographs women post of themselves in glamour-style poses.2

  For Gavin Lloyd, a deeply tanned young man who runs the PR for Mayhem club, Nuts epitomises the changing culture in which he swims. ‘Girls come in here every night wearing just their underwear,’ he explained to me. ‘The sort of thing you might expect just to see in your bedroom on a special night once upon a time. They’re all getting boob jobs now – 18-year-olds who a few years ago would be saving for their first car, they’re all saving for a boob job. I know six, seven girls who’ve had it done in the last six months. They all think it’ll be a route to their fortune. For some girls it is – you look at Jordan or Melinda Messenger or Jodie Marsh. That’s what they are all thinking of. That’s where they’d all like to be.’

  While the phrase ‘glamour modelling’ may be coy, the culture that its resurgence has spawned is far from coy. As the minutes ticked by in the Mayhem nightclub, men began to get themselves in the right position, near to the big bed, which by then had become half screened from view by photographers with their lights and reflective shades. The first woman to get on the platform was a confident girl with long fair hair, in high-heeled boots and hotpants, holding a microphone. ‘This is Cara Brett!’ shouted the DJ. ‘She’s on the cover of Nuts this week! So buy her, take her home and have a wank.’ The men around me cheered, an animal roar that took me by surprise as it issued from a hundred throats at once.

  At that point Gavin Lloyd reappeared at my elbow. ‘I think you ought to go now,’ he said to me breathlessly. ‘I don’t think Nuts would like you around.’ ‘Can’t I just watch the show?’ I asked. The poor man looked as if the last thing he wanted was a confrontation. ‘OK – but be discreet.’ And I nodded, though unsure what discretion would look like in a club where the style was one of pure display.

  The crush around me became intense as the girls got on the bed one by one, accompanied by the constant thump of music. Cara began to direct them into more and more suggestive poses. ‘Why not on all fours?’ ‘Let’s see your arse in the air!’ You might have thought it would be tricky to get young women to take up openly sexual poses in this brightly lit club in front of this crowd of yelling, drunk young men, but the girls seemed to know what was expected of them, and if they became too reluctant, Cara threw herself into the task of encouraging them with some gusto. ‘Let’s get those off,’ she urged impatiently. ‘If you’re going to be a winner, you’ve got to show some skin.’ One plump young woman in mauve bra and knickers was one of the first to slip off her bra and joggle her breasts at the cameras. As the display became more sexual, the underwear unpeeling from the smooth skin of teenage women, the men in the club began to chant, heavily and fast, and to press nearer and nearer to the stage, and the women they had come with drifted back, ignored, to the bar area where they ordered more alcohol. The men were using their phones to video and photograph the girls as they took off their clothes. One girl, who was a bit too fleshy around the middle and not fleshy enough around the chest, came in for boos rather than cheers. She looked tearful as she went back into the line. ‘Come on, girls,’ Cara said fiercely to the next one, Tania, who was defiantly keeping her bra on – 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 sho
rtlisting 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-pants off 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 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 of a 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 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 thongs for 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 – the magazine 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 how things have changed. This raucous fun-loving working-class culture, this take-me-or-leave-me attitude, it’s really taken off. It’s the women who are driving this. It’s all changed. Once glamour modelling might have been about some fat sinister guy with a cigar tricking young girls into taking their clothes off, but now women are queueing up to do it – they’re as drunk and lairy as the guys. Honestly, I think that to people of my age, it’s bizarre to see young women being so confident sexually at such an early age – the amount they drink and the sexual confidence they seem to have. This incredible hedonism. Basically these girls see that before marriage and children, these are their golden years – they want to have a whole bunch of adventures. That’s their choice.’