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