Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (10 page)

What makes these messages particularly attractive to young women is that they constantly return to the language of empowerment and opportunity. So fashion experts tell girls: ‘We’ll show you how to be the star of your own show,’
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while diet gurus exhort, ‘Embrace yourself, hold your chin up high and remind yourself who is in charge here – you’re gonna make it,’
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and advice books such as
The Girls Book of Glamour
will state, ‘Be confident, be gorgeous, be glamorous.’
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Susie Orbach, the psychoanalyst who wrote the influential book
Fat is a Feminist Issue
in 1978, returned to an exploration of women’s relationships with their bodies in her last book,
Bodies
, in 2009. In an interview Orbach described the way that women are encouraged to aspire to physical perfection through a rhetoric of power: ‘It’s about transforming that sense of feeling powerless into feeling powerful. It transforms the image of you as the victim into thinking, “Oh, this is a real opportunity! I could do it this time!”’
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By drawing attention to this phenomenon, I am certainly not saying that narcissism should be rejected altogether by young girls. In the past, feminists have often seen only the negative aspects of the beauty and fashion industries. I still believe that there is great enjoyment in these pursuits, and when I watch my daughter revelling in her dressing-up box, and changing herself from cat to mermaid to warrior princess, I can sympathise utterly with the pleasure that is involved with transforming one’s appearance. As she grows up, I’d be very happy to see her continue that pleasure by exploring the joys of fashion and cosmetics. But there is a huge difference between taking pleasure in such pursuits and believing that the only route to confidence and power for a woman lies through constant physical vigilance.

If we were seeing a growth of individualistic, pleasurable engagement in fashion and beauty, then the culture for young girls would not feel so punishing. Surveys have discovered that nearly three-quarters of adolescent girls are dissatisfied with their body shape and more than a third are dieting
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; one study found that even among 11-year-olds, one in five is trying to lose weight
⁹
; another study found that most six-year-olds would prefer to be thinner than they are.
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It is often shocking to see how narrow the physical ideals held up to young women truly are. I have loved magazines since I was a child, starting with
Jackie
and then graduating through
19
and
Elle
to
Vogue
, but when I look at the magazines aimed at young girls now I can see a definite shift. While the magazines I read at school were never feminist tracts, they were not littered, as girls’ magazines are now, with page after page of expensively dressed and made-up young girls exposing such skinny, airbrushed bodies. They did not so relentlessly encourage their readers to measure up to a raft of celebrities whose doll-like looks are seen as iconic and whose punishing physical regimes are seen as aspirational. They did not so viciously dissect other women’s failures, as those
magazines do that showcase embarrassing snaps of celebrities’ weight gain and poor clothes choices. And they never touched on plastic surgery as a strategy towards self-perfection.

Plastic surgery has been boosted in recent years by the rise of stars such as Victoria Beckham or Jordan who are obviously reliant on the needle and the knife for their transformations and by the trend for television makeover shows, such as
10 Years Younger
and
Make Me Beautiful, Please
, which encourage the view of surgery as an easy fix for self-improvement. These programmes tend to use the language of choice and freedom; as one of the plastic surgeons who likes to participate in these shows put it: ‘What’s wrong with plastic surgery? It’s a matter of choice.’
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The influence that this culture has on young women is such that even teenagers now see plastic surgery as an answer to their anxieties about their bodies. One survey carried out in 2006 found that one in four girls were considering plastic surgery by the age of sixteen.
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The power of this body project is clearly tied to the sexualisation of women. Of course, young girls as well as mature women are sexual beings, and it is great that young girls need no longer experience the shame and embarrassment that girls felt in the past about their sexual feelings. But the liberation that feminists once imagined as involving an honest acceptance of girls’ sexuality has now morphed into something altogether less enabling. Although there is now a genuine and understandable taboo around the idea of underage sexual activity, there is paradoxically a real pressure on girls to measure up as sexually attractive at a young age. The rhetoric of choice may have burgeoned in this generation, but in many ways the range of female characters and role models available for young girls has narrowed. Sexualised images of young women are threatening to squeeze out other kinds of images of women throughout popular culture.

Even those heroines that are part of a very childish culture
have begun to take on a more sexualised look than in the past. For instance, if you compare the image of Disney’s Snow White, created in 1937, to Cinderella, created in 1950, you are moving from a young girl in a high-necked dress to Barbified blonde. But then, if you move on to Ariel, created in 1989, and to Jasmine, created in 1992, the type has become much more exaggeratedly sexy. Ariel and Jasmine have obviously made-up faces and skimpy costumes that show a lot of their prominent breasts. When my daughter was six years old, some other very popular figures for her and her friends – heroines whose DVDs were passed around and whose narratives were played out in the playground – were the girls of W.I.T.C.H., five schoolgirls who have inner magic powers. This Disney-branded narrative sounds innocent enough, and indeed at least the girls get to have real adventures, with magic and drama and strong themes of bravery and comradeship. Yet the moment they take on their magical personas these girls also transform into absurdly sexy images – they sprout breasts and sprint around in crop tops and miniskirts. I have watched the programmes with my daughter and her friends in puzzlement, wondering why these girls have to look like Lara Croft to appeal to six-year-olds.

Many parents might note these sexy heroines but assume that alongside them will still be a wealth of other female characters for our daughters to identify with, and indeed there are alternatives available if one seeks them out. But the clever, brave, physically unselfconscious heroines often require some effort to be found and celebrated, while the narrowness of much popular culture is increasingly obvious. For instance, take a look at these statistics, which I found frankly shocking. In the 101 top-grossing family films (films rated G in the US, where the research was carried out, the equivalent to our U certificate) from 1990 to 2004, of the over 4,000 characters in these films 75 per cent overall were male, 83 per cent of characters in crowds were male, 83 per cent of narrators were male, and 72 per cent of speaking
characters were male. In addition, there was little change from 1990 to 2004. When the American Psychological Association commented on this research, they said, ‘This gross under-representation of women or girls in films with family-friendly content reflects a missed opportunity to present a broad spectrum of girls and women in roles that are non-sexualised.’
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In this context, in which there is such a narrow range of female characters to identify with, the visibility of sexy female heroines – such as the Bratz or the W.I.T.C.H. girls – has a disproportionate impact.

This narrow view of what a woman must look like to be visible is often reinforced by children’s television. The female presenters on children’s television conform far more now than they did in the past to a limited vision of what is acceptably feminine, as we saw when Zoe Salmon, a ‘full-size Barbie’ as the feminist Kate Figes put it in 2006, became one of the presenters of
Blue Peter
. And as Kate Figes furiously said, ‘Just before Christmas, in the
Blue Peter
panto, she appeared stripped down to a skimpy bra and knickers, twirling provocatively from male presenter to male presenter singing “Material Girl” in a highly suggestive manner. It was a terrible performance and entirely unnecessary. There are countless Christmas pantomime scenarios without turning a female presenter on the BBC’s flagship editorial programme for children into a sex symbol. What sort of an example does this set? … Salmon is encouraged by the programme editors to present herself as a sexual bimbo.’
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Although Salmon is an egregious example, the tendency of many presenters on children’s television is to conform to a narrow frame of femininity.

Similarly, the DVD and computer games that children play contribute to a world view in which girls must be sexy to be visible. A recent academic analysis of video-game characters from top-selling American gaming magazines showed male characters are more likely than female characters to be portrayed as
aggressive – 83 per cent against 62 per cent, and that female characters are far more likely than male characters to be portrayed as sexualised (60 per cent versus 1 per cent) and scantily clad (39 per cent versus 8 per cent).
¹⁵
But you don’t really have to look at the numbers to pick up on the narrow way that women are portrayed in computer games. As Jess McCabe, a journalist who loves gaming, put it in an article in 2008, ‘Anyone who has played video games with any regularity will know that character design is one of those areas where gender stereotypes run riot. Most pre-packaged characters are white, male and buff. Female characters are few and far between, and when they do appear they are usually highly sexualised or passive, or both. Game architects just don’t seem to be able to look beyond those pneumatic breasts.’
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The sexual content in the imagery produced by the music industry is just as striking. In one recent analysis of popular music videos, researchers found sexual imagery, usually women dancing very sexily, in 84 per cent of the videos. Seventy-one per cent of women in the videos were seen to be wearing provocative clothes or not many clothes, compared to 35 per cent of the men.
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But again, you don’t really need the number-crunching to know what you are looking at when you see music videos on television or the internet. Most public condemnation of the depiction of women in music focuses on hip-hop musicians with their endless images of women in thongs. But what’s perhaps more striking is that almost all the female singers that young girls are encouraged to look up to, from Girls Aloud to Britney Spears, trade so heavily on their sexiness, their raunchy costumes and suggestive routines. Whether they are looking at Cheryl Cole in stockings and a corset for her music videos, or Beyoncé in a leather catsuit for a Pepsi advertisement, or Britney Spears in fishnet tights and hotpants, the young girls who are their fans learn quickly that in order to be visible, female musicians will need to fit into a narrow image of female sexuality.

This culture is not just one that young girls are expected to be spectators in; as young as possible, they are expected to present themselves in a similar way. The online social networking that forms an intrinsic part of almost all young women’s lives relies on careful self-presentation, and this often conforms to an aesthetic shaped by the semi-pornographic images they find elsewhere in their culture. ‘They are all taking photographs of each other,’ one mother of a teenager said to me, ‘and it’s so often this very sexual, provocative type of photography. These 11-, 12-year-old girls – all of a sudden they look like a 16-year-old advertising herself for sex.’

Many brands of clothing sold to young girls allow them to buy into this kind of sexiness, so, for instance, you can purchase a ra-ra miniskirt for an 11-year-old with ‘Golddigga’ written across her bottom, advertised by a teenage girl in high heels, one hand on hip, pouting at the camera.
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One of the most striking ways in which brands have exploited the growing acceptability of the sexualisation of young girls is the new use of the Playboy logo, which once was the symbol of the sexually knowing man. Now, it’s used to decorate the pencil cases and erasers of young girls who know there is something a little naughty in the brand but are encouraged to buy into its cheeky, marketable sexuality. High-street stores such as W H Smith and Stationery Box have sold the Playboy logo on all sorts of accessories from pencil cases to notebooks. While many parents have felt disconcerted that their daughters are being seduced by a brand that is based on selling pornographic images of women, teenage girls buy into the brand because it suggests something aspirational. ‘I like the brand because it’s posh,’ 14-year-old Tatiana explained to the journalist Rachel Bell. ‘It makes you feel like you’re worth something.’
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There is now some evidence of real anger about this sexualisation of young girls. For instance, we may hear a sudden panic about, say, the placement of a pole for pole-dancing in the ‘toys’
section of a supermarket website;
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the marketing of padded bras and saucy knickers to under-tens in one shop,
²¹
or T-shirts saying ‘So many boys, so little time’ to girls under six in another;
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or we might pick up a sudden unease about a photograph of a 15-year-old star, in a sexy half-naked pose for a particular magazine.
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But although we hear sporadic effusions of concern about what this pervasive sexualisation is doing to young girls, concerted dissent is absent. I think this is because, just as with the sexualisation of women, these developments are often assumed to be the result of choice rather than exploitation. But when it comes to the sexualisation of young girls, the language of choice seems particularly misplaced. For girls who are still trying to find out what behaviour will bring them approval and admiration, the relentless direction of their energies towards their physical allure is likely to narrow rather than enlarge their options.