Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (34 page)

10  
Richard Garner, ‘Girls aged six “unhappy with weight”’,
Independent
, 8 March 2005

11  
Dr Jan Stanek, quoted in Bel Mooney, ‘On vanity’,
Daily Telegraph
, 22 July 2000

12  
Survey carried out by Dove in 2006, reported in ‘Quarter of teens considering plastic surgery’,
Daily Mail
, 10 March 2006

13  
J Kelly and S L Smith,
Where the Girls Aren’t: Gender Disparity Saturates G-rated Films
, 2006,
www.thriveoncreative.com/clients/seejane/pdfs/where.the.girls.arent.pdf
, cited in American Psychological Association,
Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls
, American
Psychological Association (Washington DC, 2007), retrieved 16 October 2008 from
http://www.apa.org/pi/wpo/sexualizationrep.pdf

14  
Kate Figes, ‘Hello boys’,
Guardian
, 20 January 2006

15  
K E Dill and K P Thill, ‘Video game characters and the socialization of gender roles: young people’s perceptions mirror sexist media depictions’,
Sex Roles
, 57, 11–12 (December 2007) 851–64

16  
Jess McCabe, ‘Sexual harassment is rife online’,
Guardian
, 6 March 2008

17  
L M Ward and R Rivadeneyra, ‘Dancing, strutting and bouncing in cars, the women of music videos’, paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association (Chicago, August 2002), cited in
Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls
, American Psychological Association (Washington DC, 2007), retrieved 16 October 2008 from
http://www.apa.org/pi/wpo/sexualizationrep.pdf

18  
Retrieved 10 August 2007 from
http://www.lookagain.co.uk/web/main/productdisplay.asp?An=0&A=26K742%5F15&N=428+583+4294967092&Au=P%5FMasterItem&Nu=P%5FMasterItem&Ns=P%5FColour%7C0%7C%7CP%5FSize%7C0

19  
Rachel Bell, ‘It’s porn, innit?’
Guardian
, 15 August 2005

20  
Colin Fernandez, ‘Tesco condemned for selling pole-dancing toy’,
Daily Mail
, 24 October 2006

21  
BHS withdrew the underwear after criticism – ‘Sexy children’s underwear withdrawn’, BBC, 26 March 2003

22  
Next was criticised for selling these T-shirts to young girls – Judith Woods, ‘Girls just need to be young’,
Daily Telegraph
, 20 February 2007

23  
Annie Leibovitz’s photographs of Miley Cyrus were widely criticised – Sheila Marikar, ‘Leibovitz defends provocative Miley Cyrus photos’, ABC News, 26 April 2008

24  
Survey conducted by the NSPCC and
Sugar
in 2006 among 674
Sugar
website visitors. Retrieved 16 October 2008 from
http://www.nspcc.org.uk/whatwedo/mediacentre/pressreleases/ 22_may_2006_unwanted_sexual_experiences_wdn33559.html

25  
Panorama: Kids Behaving Badly
, BBC1, 5 January 2009

26  
BBC
Newsbeat
, 4 August 2009

27  
Christine Barter, Melanie McCarry, David Berridge and Kathy Evans, ‘Partner exploitation and violence in teenage intimate relationships’, executive summary retrieved 10 September 2009 from
www.nspcc.org.uk

28  
‘“Gang-raped girl was glad of the attention,” says barrister’,
Daily Mail
, 18 May 2007.

29  
Statistics from the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, quoted in BBC report, Education ‘prevents underage sex’, 30 November 2001,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1683271.stm
and in Kaye Wellings et al, ‘Sexual Behaviour in Britain: early heterosexual experience’,
Lancet
, 358, 9296 (December 2001), 1851–4

4: Lovers

  
1  
Quoted in Judith Weintraub, ‘Germaine Greer – opinions that may shock the faithful’,
New York Times
, 22 March 1971

  
2  
Germaine Greer,
The Female Eunuch
((1970), London: Harper Perennial, 2006), p275

  
3  
Quoted in Judith Weintraub, op cit

  
4  
Similarly, in her 1973 novel
Fear of Flying
the American writer Erica Jong described how essential the pursuit of the ‘zipless fuck’ was to the narrator as a married woman: ‘Five years of marriage had made me itchy … my response was to evolve my fantasy of the Zipless Fuck. The zipless fuck was more than a fuck … For the true, ultimate zipless A-1 fuck, it was necessary that you never get to know the man very well.’ Even though the zipless fuck turns out to be a chimera, the pursuit itself is worthwhile, as it leads her out of the stalemate of her claustrophobic marriage. Erica Jong,
Fear of Flying
((1973), London: Minerva, 1974), p11

  
5  
Doris Lessing,
The Golden Notebook
((1962), London: Flamingo, 1993), p36

  
6  
Statistics from the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles 2000, quoted in Anne M Johnson et al, ‘Sexual behaviour in Britain: partnerships, practices and HIV risk behaviours’,
Lancet
, 358, 9296 (December 2001), 1835–42

  
7  
Abby Lee,
Girl with a One-track Mind
(London: Ebury, 2006), pp110–13

  
8  
Abby Lee, op cit, p103

  
9  
Catherine Townsend,
Sleeping Around
(London: John Murray, 2007), pp207 and 222

10  
Zoe Williams, ‘I don’t write to titillate’,
Guardian
, 11 August 2006

11  
Mary Wollstonecraft, Letter to William Godwin, 4 October 1796, in
The Collected Letters
, Janet Todd ed (London: Penguin, 2003), p371

12  
Emma Goldman,
Living My Life
, Volume 1 (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1931), p441

13  
Michèle Roberts,
Paper Houses
(London: Virago, 2007), p67

14  
Michèle Roberts,
Paper Houses
, op cit, p295

15  
Michèle Roberts,
Paper Houses
, op cit, p67

16  
Anaïs Nin,
Henry and June
(San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), p66

17  
Abby Lee, op cit, p113

5: Pornography

  
1  
Leo Benedictus, ‘Extreme close up’,
Guardian
, 12 May 2007

  
2  
Adam Thirlwell,
Politics
(London: Jonathan Cape, 2003), p216

  
3  
Robin Morgan, ‘Theory and practice, pornography and rape’, (1974) in
The Word of a Woman
(London: Virago, 1993), p88

  
4  
Andrea Dworkin, ‘Why pornography matters to feminists’,
Sojourner
, 7, 2 (1981)

  
5  
At one protest in 1978 in Soho, sixteen feminists were arrested. ‘Women in porn demo acquitted’,
Guardian
, 3 May 1979

  
6  
For a good discussion on the lack of evidence to link pornography and sexual violence, either through laboratory studies or through observational research, see Nadine Strossen,
Defending Pornography: Free Speech, Sex and the Fight for Women’s Rights
(London: Abacus, 1996), Chapter 12; and Lynne Segal and Mary McIntosh (eds),
Sex Exposed: Sexuality and the Pornography Debate
(London: Virago 1992)

  
7  
For a good discussion of the range of feminist reaction to pornography, see Nadine Strossen, op cit,
Chapter 7

  
8  
Nina Power, ‘The dirty girl: Charlotte Roche brings Wetlands to the English-speaking world’,
Der Spiegel
(online English version), 6 April 2009

  
9  
Zoe Margolis, ‘Something for the Ladies’,
Guardian
, 29 November 2007

10  
Survey carried out by Nielsen NetRatings for the
Independent on Sunday
, 28 May 2006

11  
Janis Wolak, Kimberly Mitchell and David Finkelhor, ‘Unwanted and wanted exposure to online pornography in a national sample of youth internet users’,
Pediatrics
, 119, 2 (February 2007), 247–57

12  
Sonya Thompson, ‘One in three boys heavy porn users, study shows’, University of Alberta, 23 February 2007. Report retrieved 22 October 2008 from
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-02/uoa-oit022307.php;
full unpublished study supplied by Sonya Thompson in personal correspondence

13  
In 2004–5 eight hundred labial reductions were carried out on the NHS, double the number of six years earlier. One private cosmetic surgery business, Surgicare, reported in 2009 that labia reduction procedures increased 300 per cent in the last year. Retrieved 20 September 2009 from
www.surgicare.co.uk

14  
Retrieved 18 February 2009 from
http://www.channel4embarrassingillnesses.com/about/episodes/teen-bodies/teens-below-the-belt/

15  
Retrieved 23 March 2009 from the website of the Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation Institute,
http://www.cosmeticgyn.net/dlv.htm

16  
Zadie Smith,
On Beauty
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005), p316

17  
Zadie Smith, op cit, p397

6: Choices

  
1  
Rod Liddle, ‘Harriet Harman is either thick or criminally disingenuous’,
Spectator
, 5 August 2009

  
2  
Comment retrieved 12 August 2009 from
http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/features/5244693/ harriet-harman-is-either-thick-or-criminally-disingenuous.thtml

  
3  
Retrieved 24 October 2008 from
http://www.herobuilders.com/

  
4  
India Knight, ‘Aah, what a relief’,
Sunday Times
, 7 September 2008

  
5  
The Graham Norton Show
, 23 October 2008, described in ‘The BBC fills our living rooms with more smutty and degrading obscenities’,
Daily Mail
, 31 October 2008

  
6  
‘The best of Breastminster’,
Sun
, 12 October 2007

  
7  
India Knight, ‘Pity the women who come within range of Brand and Ross’,
Sunday Times
, 2 November 2008

  
8  
For instance, one intriguing study showed how women’s over-preoccupation with their appearance may ‘drain their mental energy’. Barbara Fredrickson, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, asked 40 male and 42 female undergraduates to put on a sweater or swimsuit, and then take a mathematics test. Each participant tried on the swimsuit or sweater and completed the surveys and tests alone in a changing room. What concerned Fredrickson was the women’s tendency to score lower than men on the maths tests when wearing bathing suits, which she believed was because baring their bodies made them think more about how they looked than what they were doing. Men who were asked to bare their bodies did not find that their maths performance was impaired. ‘It appears that asking themselves the question, “How do I look?” becomes disruptive to women’s math performance. By comparison, men have an easier time ridding their minds of that sort of cultural baggage.’ B L Fredrickson et al, ‘That swimsuit becomes you: sex differences in self-objectification, restrained eating and math performance’,
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
, 75, 1 (1998), 269–84; quotation retrieved 18 February 2009 from APA online,
http://www.apa.org/monitor/nov98/looks.html

  
9  
In one study published in 2005, psychologists asked groups of young men and young women to view television commercials before putting themselves forward for a leadership role or a subordinate role in a psychological test. One group viewed gender-neutral commercials, in which objects were sold impersonally, with no humans in the frame. Another saw two commercials that showed women in more stereotypically feminine and sexy roles, such as a female college student who dreams of being a homecoming queen. When the students went on to do the test in which they were asked to put themselves forward for a leadership or ‘problem solver’ role in a test, the women who had viewed the stereotypic commercial were more likely to avoid the leadership role, while the men were as likely in either group to think themselves fitted for leadership. The women who had seen only the impersonal commercials were as likely as the men to put themselves forward to be leaders. Paul G Davies, Steven J Spencer and Claude M Steele, ‘Clearing the air: identity safety moderates the effects of stereotype threat on women’s leadership aspirations’,
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
, 88, 2 (2005), 276–87

7: Princesses

  
1  
Retrieved 22 October 2008 from
www.marksandspencer.com

  
2  
Retrieved 21 January 2009 from
www.boots.com

  
3  
Retrieved 22 October 2008 from
www.hiya4kids.co.uk

  
4  
Retrieved 10 March 2009 from
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Magnetic-Words-complement-National-Literacy/dp/B000CDFTHE/ref=pd_bxgy_k_h_b_cs_img_b

  
5  
Hamleys catalogue, autumn/winter 2006

  
6  
Retrieved 15 August 2007 from
www.hamleys.com

  
7  
Simone de Beauvoir,
The Second Sex
((1949), London: Vintage, 1997), p306

  
8  
Sales of Disney Princess brand retrieved 22 October 2008 from
http://www.laughingplace.com/News-ID506950.asp
and 14 October 2008 from
https://licensing.disney.com/Home/display.jsp?contentId=dcp_home_ourfranchises_disney_princess_uk& forPrint=false&language=en&preview=false&imageShow=0&pressRoom=UK&translationOf=null®ion=0

  
9  
Retrieved 10 October 2008 from
http://www.shareholder.com/mattel/news/20021022-93103.cfm