Living Dolls. The Return of Sexism by Natasha Walter, Virago (ISBN 978-1-84408-484-5), Reviewed by Professor Susan Hogan
“More of a polemic than a scholarly endeavour, this book is nevertheless highly entertaining”.
Walter starts off by asserting that in Britain, ‘The image of female sexuality has become more than ever defined by the sex industry’. It is pole dancing, in particular, that she believes has been particularly significant in terms of the predominant popular look, with its staff of large-breasted, underwear-clad, exhibitionists. The ‘sex industry’ has become increasingly acceptable, she says, and, with that acceptance, what it means to be sexy has narrowed.
Call me old-fashioned, but I was surprised to pick up the Michaelmas termcard of The Cambridge Union Society to discover an Ann Summers Party amongst its activities; this was, however, a woman-only event, unlike the audition for NUTS magazine[1] ‘glamour modelling’, which took place in various nightclubs across Britain in front of a braying, chanting mob of inebriated men, vividly described by Walter – well, maybe the Cambridge crowd can hot it up next year: after all, don’t they want to know if the sexy lingerie or furry handcuffs will have the desired effect?
Young women are encouraged to see their sexual allure as ‘their primary success’, says Walter, and, as she points out in her case study Cara Brett, (a top NUTS model), it is an alluring route for otherwise talentless working-class women, who have the checkout at Asda as a career alterative. And this is the point that is often sidestepped in all the talk about ‘free choice’, as poverty and deprivation are important motors for the pole, and lap-dancing, and burgeoning porn industries.
However, it’s not just social inequality at play here, as Walter points out. We are bombarded with images of soft porn. I encourage my teenage daughter to think and study, but she spends hours primping, preening and parading in front of her mirror. Surely, she is emulating something she is seeing out there? Frightening is Walter’s example of Pembroke College, Cambridge, celebrating 21 years of women students at the college with a magazine featuring, on page 3, aptly enough, eleven topless female students sitting at the high table (p.26). It is sad that privileged, successful women would feel the need to demean themselves in this way. Walter is right to question whether all aspects of what she calls ‘the current hypersexual culture’ should be viewed as proof of women’s growing freedom and power.
But perhaps my daughter’s preening is genetic? Walter is also concerned about a worrying rise in biological determinism (biological explanations for differences in behaviour between women and men which are actually culturally determined); this is evident in many spheres, especially in the media. She also frets, whilst making these valid points, about not wanting to push a ‘dour and politically correct version of feminism’ (p.14) in expressing her craving for greater equality, and thus lapses into media fantasy – a Daily Mail fantasy of political correctness. I’ve been a feminist all my adult life, and most of my friends and acquaintances would describe themselves as feminists, and none of them is the least bit dour! Feminists are a heterogeneous lot, and there really isn’t a ‘correct’ line. Even my unshaven, lesbian, separatist friends are great fun – just don’t leer at a woman’s tits when you are out with them…
Perhaps too many people would shut the book if Walter were more strident? Certainly, her highlighting an Manchester Evening News survey which illustrated that half of the sample of young women surveyed would consider ‘glamour modelling’ (a euphemism for stripping off in front of the camera), and a third of the sample regarded Jordan as a ‘role model’ is utterly disturbing. But why should be we surprised when Katie Price’s autobiography sold over a million copies? Yet I think Walter is saying something valid about the way that soft porn is saturating our lives; on the internet it is hard to avoid: passing through Red Hot Housewives, and other soft porn channels, on my way to another TV channel (as my children sit at my side), or any weekend evening on Division Street (where I live in Sheffield), it is possible to see women dressed as Playboy Bunnies or virtually naked on their way to pubs and clubs.
Walter looks at the way women slide from lap-dancing and pole-dancing into prostitution, and the very thin line between these, as the ‘no touch’ rule in many clubs is non-existent and sex is often offered at such clubs, which is perhaps not too surprising, but the link between lap-dancing clubs in a geographical vicinity and increased incidents of rape and sexual assault is perhaps not so well known and challenges liberal tolerance of such venues (p.47).
Walter then moves on to discuss an increasingly casual attitude towards prostitution in general. A surprising one in ten men now has been with a whore (p.55).[2] Websites now rank women like books on Amazon. Walter presents personal testimony from dancers and prostitutes about the violence and constant fear of violence, and misogyny, which are tolerated as part of the job. The majority of prostitutes started working as such before they were eighteen years of age, and the vast majority have violent home backgrounds – of familial sexual abuse, or assault, or both (p.57). In some areas research is available to show that 96% of working prostitutes are heroin addicts. Walter is keen to illuminate how degrading, and damaging, the work is for women who do it ‘voluntarily’, and worries that too much attention on abducted children and young women, who are trafficked and prostituted as sex slaves, distracts from the daily violence which constitutes the working life of these women who are ordinary sex workers.
The author is articulate about how feminist notions of independence and self- expression are presented to young women ‘as the narrowest kind of self-objectification’ (p.65). Walter, as a mother, is very concerned about the effects of all this on children who are increasingly likely to yield to unwanted and then regretted sexual attention before they are adults. They are also likely to suffer from body-image dissatisfaction, and one in four girls may be considering plastic surgery by the age of sixteen (p.68). She also looks at a survey of the 101 top-grossing U.S. family films, and found that 83% of narrators were male, and 72% of speaking parts overall were also male (p.68). Young women and girls are constantly bombarded with sexualised and passive images of themselves.
The rise of pornography in general, and the ubiquity of it, mean that by the age of fourteen 70% of children have been subjected to ‘unwanted online pornography in the form of pop-ups or spam’ (p.106), and teenage children are necessarily curious and likely to blunder into hardcore and brutalising images of sex on the internet. Walter avers that there has been a ‘massive colonisation of teenagers’ erotic life by commercial pornographic materials’, something, she says, which ‘it is hard to feel sanguine about’ (p.107). Terrifying aesthetic orthodoxies have been stimulated by porn, with teenage girls worrying about the shape of their vaginas. Young women are undergoing surgery on their labia: ‘Many women bring us Playboy and say they want to look like this,’ reports one plastic surgeon quoted by Walter.
Although Walter, in her chapter on pornography, distances herself from the classical feminist position that pornography is intrinsically damaging to women, one of her interviewees, called Jim, articulates a view along these lines: “I think that kind of violence associated with sex lodges in your mind and you never forget it, however much you want to. It’s always there” (p.105). This is actually one of the arguments put forward by the well-known North American feminist, Catherine MacKinnon, that a pornographic consciousness is carried into other spheres of life, affecting interpersonal relations there. I think this is a powerful and persuasive point of view. I am not at all convinced that my male boss can afford me equality in the workplace if he has been using pornography in his lunch break, or if he has popped down to the local ‘massage parlour’ for a quick blow-job. How can this not affect his relations with his female employees? We can compartmentalise only so far.
This book challenges complaisance; women have got far to go to achieve equal rights.
To conclude, this is an intelligent and highly articulate exposition, and swingeing indictment, of sexism in our culture. More of a polemic than a scholarly endeavour, this book is nevertheless highly entertaining. I’d like to make this compulsory reading for all undergraduates who say, “I’m not a feminist but…” and then proceed to articulate a set of feminist values and beliefs.
Susan Hogan is Professor of Cultural Studies. My latest research is on representations of older women in British culture, in collaboration with the Department of Sociological Studies of the University of Sheffield.
[1] Babes on the Bed Competition.
[2] The validity of some of her sources is worth questioning, and she generalises from small newspaper surveys at several points in the book.
