Tuesday 2 March 2010

The New Sexism: Porn, Pole dancing and Katie Price


"We have open auditions and it's very interesting - most of the women choose Jordan's autobiography as their favourite book," remarks the creative director of Big Brother, Phil Edgar-Jones, in an interview included in Natasha Walter's new book, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism. The glamour model and celebrity, Jordan (aka Katie Price), offers a warped horizon of aspiration for many women. Jordan is marketed as "living the dream" and with enough silicone and self-exploitation it's a dream that all women can share in. In a hypersexualised culture governed by onanistic desires, women become de-personalised and are sold the idea that if they are anything then they are bodies and fantasy porn bodies at that. My Body is a Big Deal ran the copy line on posters advertising the television series based on Belle de Jour's The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl. In its instrumentalised and commodified form women's bodies have become a big deal and the distorted locus for their self-understanding.

In liberal democracies, the central debate revolves around the concept of choice. If women choose to hang from a pole by their stilettos or pose for lads' magazines such as Zoo or Nuts then that is their choice and some argue, an "empowering" choice. For a time, the leading lights of the Feminist Movement, including Natasha Walter, uncritically accepted and promoted this philosophical position. This was, in part, a reaction to the aggressive polemic found in books such as Pornography: Men Possessing Women by Andrea Dworkin. But recently some feminists (see Ariel Levy's seminal Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture) have voiced their unease at the dominant vision of women as airbrushed, plastic sex dolls. Far from being liberating, they regard this objectification of women as morally claustrophobic and damaging, although they shy away from the judgement that it is "wrong".

In Living Dolls, Walter exposes the widely accepted tenets that underpin a pornified culture by using the testimonies of those involved in the sex industry. A former lap-dancing girl called Ellie counters the argument based on the idea of choice:

I did make a choice. It was a self-destructive, damaging choice, like taking drugs, but nobody forced me. At the end of the day I was lucky, I'm well educated, I'm from a middle class background, and deep down I do fundamentally know I can do something else...I do feel angry that women who could do other things, who are bright and intelligent and driven, but not as well educated, live in a culture now that encourages them to think that this is the best that they can do, that makes them want to aspire to this, and says this is all your worth...We hear a lot about choice or liberation, but it just isn't equal - you know, you just look at the lap-dancing club, and it says so much about culture. The men in there are respectable, they are in suits, they have bank accounts, the women are not respectable, they are naked, they have debts.

Ellie makes two astute points. The first is a political point. Poverty and poor education are significant factors in driving some women into the sex industry and prostitution. With few options in life, using your body in a culture where there is an insatiable demand for women's bodies becomes economically acceptable. Although, as Walter points out, few women (whatever their class) are immune from the all pervasive influence of a hypersexual culture. Middle class women can become neurotically obsessed with their body image as they try to parody some phantom version of Sex and the City. Ellie's second point is philosophical. Our choices are only real if we choose a basic good, such as, the preservation of human life. These choices allow for our human flourishing and well-being. Choices that vandalise and harm the human person are not, in any proper sense, true choices. They are damaging exercises in moral pathology.

Nowhere is such destructive activity more evident, Walter proposes, than in the ubiquity of pornography and its corrosive effects. Sex education has migrated from the family and classroom to the porn sites on teenagers' mobiles and computers. Young women are attune to the fact that their boyfriends' expectations of sex may well have been shaped by pornography with its often sadistic and abusive overtones. Women define themselves in terms of their physical appearance measured against the porn aesthetic. The self-giving and life-giving dimensions of sex have been removed, leaving only carnal performance. Women are often pressurised into having sex with the spurious notion that this is the only way to get or keep a boyfriend. But those women who challenge the hypersexual orthodoxy or say "No" to the demands for sex are caricatured as uptight prudes or made to feel like emotional pariahs. One young women quoted in Living Dolls observes

There is a total detachment from emotion when they (the young women she works with) talk about sex. I remember one young girl I was working with who told me about how she had lost her virginity in the school field at lunchtime one day. She said she had thought, "The bell's about to go, I may as well do it now or I'll not do it." There was this complete detachment from the act itself and what it means. This isn't rape or sexual abuse, but it isn't a positive experience. In some ways I find it quite disturbing. But people have so normalised this kind of sexual activity - it's totally emotionless. The act itself is no longer about intimacy, it's no longer about communication.

Walter's thesis is articulate and stimulating. Many of her arguments are persuasive; some less so. But what this book signals is a tectonic shift in feminist thinking to a place where questions are being asked about the meaning of sex, our bodies and the choices we make. Walter presents a disturbing picture of "many young women being surrounded by a culture in which they are all body and only body." Unfortunately, what she does not seem able to offer is any coherent alternative. Perhaps that must come from some other source?

Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, Natasha Walter, Virago Press, 2010

7 comments:

  1. Working with young people in a university, mainly female, your blog touches many issues.
    The mantra of 'personal choice / autonomy' above all else is a powerful driver but belies the reality of those driven - especially by the desire to 'be like folks' (acceptance). Sadly this seems to require adoption of values (is the word even appropriate hetre?) and behaviours that the individual adopts in order to'be normal'. The alienation at deoth that may result is the unsought pay-off but sadly is seldoim recognised for what it realy is.
    True acceptance of self (with resultant authentic relationships) = true freedom...
    A family motto I have discussed with some is 'dare to be different' - anathema to our inculturated obsession with image etc
    Thanks for a great blog!
    Jim

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  2. It is about time someone challenged the ludicrous notion that the true feminism developed in the 1960s and 70s is somehow extended and enhanced by this Living Doll culture. It is the total antithesis of feminism and has been used relentlessly to drive women back into a subservient role while allowing them to kid themselves that it is somehow liberating.
    Daring to be different is a massive personal challenge that most people do not feel able to accept although I agree with Jim that they should be encouraged to do so. I'm afraid the resumption of progress to a more equal, genuinely free and liberated role for women is going to depend on the emergence of role models and leaders who inspire a new generation of girls.

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  3. I agree that acceptance is perhaps the core issue here. Whether it's a teenager trying to please her boyfriend, a middle-aged woman purchasing a half-gallon tub of anti-aging cream or a young lad boasting about his latest Saturday-night conquest: it's all just another way of trying to feel accepted/affirmed (ultimately loved) by others and by ourselves.

    Feeling sexually attractive is virtually an existential issue when you're a teenager. But society doesn't seem to want us to grow up beyond that! Our youth obsession as a culture seems to stem from the same root.

    More generally the relationship of body image to one's happiness is accepted as a commonplace today. The cosmetics trade isn't the only one on the rise: witness the screening of foetuses for those with possible 'abnormalities'.
    Even those in the fashion industry and media who attempt to challenge prevailing orthodoxy by advocating a preference for 'real women' over air-brushed models, only succeed in reemphasising this link between beauty and value/individual happiness.
    A woman's choice to dress provocatively is often justified as a positive expression of 'confidence', self assurance or played down as merely 'playful'.
    Incidentally, one of the most highly attended events on my university's campus last year was the promotion of the 'exotic-dancing society' - great for self-esteem and for working those abs!
    Bit of a change from the banner-twirling feminist professors of literature in the 60s though.

    Yet there is undoubtedly a huge amount of pressure on young women (and girls from only 8-9 years old) to conform to this code of dress/behavior: much of it peer pressure. It seems to be a classic case of marxist 'false consiousness' or cultural hegemony. Whether or not this belief is sinsterly fostered on women by exploitative big business (to continue the Marxist line) I'm not so sure.

    Tim

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  4. 'Daring to be different is a massive personal challenge that most people do not feel able to accept although I agree with Jim that they should be encouraged to do so'.

    eemmnn not so sure thats a problem

    Being the mother of a 12 year old daughter, I would say that fashion and the vague attention of boys all have a feeble rather flippant part to play in the general day to day routine of school life and social education. As for being different the majority of girls and young ladies that are being magnified here are the minority.

    Look again and see the roses!

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  5. My point is that the majority of young ladies are choosing to be different, there are so many "differents" that they are the ones not being recognised in your comments, being humble, keeping their heads down, working hard. Sometimes this difference only equates to a long term average.

    There were always the Marlyin Monroes of the world. Marginalised young women discovered and put on a pedistal for their pout, figure and endearing quality, that a broken bird has. Not much has changed except that there is a more aggressive vulnerability. It's a fact that if the curvier women of the world, wear something of a similar ilk to a flatter straighter figure, it still looks and more importantly is judged, usually by men, as being more provocative.

    There is no getting away from the fact that times have moved forward, extremes are stretched further, and some people in the name of self-empowering feminism think getting themselves on the pedistal and being in control of earning as much money as possible, believe that they have cracked the system. Without being educated or understanding that they are being exploited or exploiting themselves and other women everywhere. There is a clear difference between choice and thinking you have choice.

    But whilst a priviledged male dominated system has so far controlled this universe, the back lash is that some women feel the urge to control their corner, however distorted.

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  6. Hey Fr! Just found your blog from the cathedral website. Hope Brazil or wherever you were was good!

    I picked this book up a while ago after (shamefully) having read a review in the Telegraph. I enjoyed it a lot (though found the cover annoyingly ironic). I've only really read the first half, but looked at the second half. What I saw I disagreed with. What do you think about the second half?

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  7. Yes, Sean, the book is very much a book in two halfs. The first half I found convincing (although much of this had been surveyed by Ariel Levy in Female Chauvinist Pigs) and I was sympathetic to her observations and analysis. But, the second half I found unconvincing. Her criticisms of what Walter's terms "biological determinism" and her argument that gender is largely a cultural construct seemed intellectually dubious and based more on an ideological stance, than looking at the natures of men and women.

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