Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism

by Natasha Walter

  Although the word empowerment is so often attached to this culture, it is a strange distortion of what the term once meant to feminists. When we talked about empowerment in the past, it was not a young woman in a thong gyrating around a pole that would spring to mind, but the attempts by women to gain real political and economic equality. Towards the end of the twentieth century, there was a real optimism that this kind of power genuinely could be within the grasp of more women than ever before, and that women would then be free to attain their true potential without being held back by the weight of inequality.

  It may seem strange to say so after the political disillusion of the last decade, but the early years of the Blair administration in the UK and the early years of the Clinton administration in the US were hailed in many places as offering new hope for women who wanted to enter the corridors of power. Naomi Wolf, the American feminist, wrote in 1993: ‘In 1992 record numbers of women ran for office in the US … The genderquake rattled and reoriented the presidential elections.’7 And I wrote in the Observer just before the 1997 General Election in the UK: ‘If we see a six per cent swing to Labour, the number of women MPs should double … It’s not equality yet, but don’t underestimate what it will mean. We’ll see the gentleman’s club begin to crumble, we’ll begin to see a political culture that responds to women’s priorities … This impending revolution in women’s power is one issue that we shouldn’t be cynical about.’8

  This shift towards greater equality in politics meant that feminist arguments that had long been regarded as marginal could be heard in many political debates. During the first five years of the New Labour government, we heard from policy makers about the need to prosecute crimes against women, such as domestic violence and rape, more effectively. We also heard a great deal about the need to change the working world. New Labour brought in the minimum wage, which affected women far more than men, and also expanded parental leave rights, childcare and flexible working. During these early years the Labour government doubled maternity pay, introduced paid paternity leave, introduced free part-time nursery places for three- and four-year-olds, and its ministers discussed how they could push on a workplace revolution.9 There was an optimism not just about changes in women’s lives, but about changes in men’s lives too. When Tony Blair took a couple of weeks off work when his fourth child was born in 2000, his move was welcomed, since: ‘When one of the world’s most powerful men sets this kind of example, the impact on the workplace and parental leave will be immense.’10

  With this kind of debate happening all around us, it was easy for me to argue in my earlier book, The New Feminism, which was published at the end of the 1990s, that even if the women’s movement may have quietened down, feminism had become part of the very air we breathed. It was also easy for me to argue, and I was glad to be able to do so, that feminists could now concentrate on achieving political and social and financial equality. In the past, feminist arguments had often centred on private lives: how women made love, how they dressed, whom they desired. I felt that the time for this had passed. I believed that we only had to put in place the conditions for equality for the remnants of old-fashioned sexism in our culture to wither away.

  I am ready to admit that I was entirely wrong. While many women relaxed and believed that most arguments around equality had been won, and that there were no significant barriers to further progress, the dolls were on the march again. The rise of a hypersexual culture is not proof that we have reached full equality; rather, it has reflected and exaggerated the deeper imbalances of power in our society. Without thoroughgoing economic and political change, what we see when we look around us is not the equality we once sought; it is a stalled revolution.

  Men and women may still be trying to inch towards greater equality at home as well as at work, but the pressure for change and the sense of optimism has gone. The relentless masculinity of British politics is a marker of wider failure in the attempts to create equality between the sexes. While the 1997 election doubled the number of women in Parliament, from 60 to 120 out of 646, the pace of change then slowed to a standstill. The next two elections increased the number of women in Parliament by only eight, and in the Scottish Parliament the proportion of women actually dropped, from 40 per cent in 2003 to 35 per cent in 2009.11 New Labour gradually began to be associated with a sense of broken promises for women in politics. Many female ministers resigned during the summer of 2009, and one launched a bitter attack on the inability of the prime minister to support women in government, saying that she had been used merely as ‘female window-dressing’.12

  Just as women have not moved forwards as far as was once hoped into the corridors of power, men have not taken the steps into the home that might once have been expected. Although the rhetoric is often spoken about flexible working and shared parental responsibility, in 2009 men were still only entitled to two weeks’ paternity leave at £123 per week. Plans to equalise rights to parental leave by introducing a scheme whereby men and women could share twelve months’ leave between them were shelved by the government in response to ‘tough economic times’.13 Given the discrepancy between women’s entitlement to spend time at home and men’s lack of similar rights, it is hardly surprising that women are still doing the vast majority of domestic work. Even when women work full-time, according to one study, they do twenty-three hours of domestic work a week, as opposed to men’s eight hours, while women who work part-time do thirty-three hours of domestic work per week. The authors of that report commented that the domestic workload that still fell on their shoulders was what prevented many women from working the long hours required for higher-paid jobs.14

  The reality is that although girls still do as well as boys at every level of education, the workplace has not seen the changes that were once expected. While men and women with young children have the right to request flexible working, for women the decision not to work full-time still carries a huge penalty. The hourly pay gap for women working full-time is around 17 per cent, but it is around 35 per cent for women working part-time – in other words, an average woman who works part-time earns only two-thirds of the money that the average full-time male worker would earn each hour.15 And what is most worrying is that there is evidence that progress on the pay gap has stalled; from 2007 to 2008 it actually widened.16 For women in senior management, equality may be more elusive than ever, as research carried out in 2007 showed: ‘The Price Waterhouse Coopers research found that among FTSE 350 companies in 2002 almost 40% of senior management posts were occupied by women. When that research was repeated for 2007, the number of senior management posts held by women had fallen to just 22%.’17 One female manager, who was interviewed about why so many of her peers had left, tried to put her finger on the problem. While people may understand the need for equality issues on intellectual grounds, ‘It’s what they get in their hearts that matters.’

  What do we get in our hearts? It is time to make the links between the cultural changes we have seen over the last ten years and this stalled revolution. Although opportunities for women are still far wider than they were a generation ago, we are now seeing a resurgence of old sexism in new guises. Far from giving full scope to women’s freedom and potential, the new hypersexual culture redefines female success through a narrow framework of sexual allure.

  What’s more, alongside the links that are made between this kind of exaggerated sexual allure and empowerment, we have recently seen a surprising resurgence of the idea that traditional femininity is biologically rather than socially constructed. A new interest in biological determinism now runs throughout our society. Indeed, the association between little girls and everything that is pink and glittery is being explained in many places not as a cultural phenomenon, which could therefore be challenged, but as an inescapable result of biology, which is assumed to be resistant to change. Some neuroscientists recently carried out an experiment which, they claimed, suggested that girls are biologically predisposed to prefer pink. This experim
ent consisted of presenting men and women with differently coloured pairs of rectangles and asking them to pick out their favourites. The researchers found that women liked reddish hues more than men did, and concluded by suggesting that this difference in colour preference could be explained by biological differences between men and women, which would have been created by their different occupations way, way back in the past. Since women, they speculated, would have been more likely to be gathering ripe red fruit than hunting big game under blue skies many millennia ago, women had evolved to respond more enthusiastically to pink than men would.18

  This suggestion was picked up uncritically by much of the national press. ‘Boys like blue, girls like pink, it’s in our genes,’ was the Independent newspaper’s headline on their report.19 ‘Pink for a girl and blue for a boy – and it’s all down to evolution’, was the headline in the Guardian.20 The writer in the Guardian linked the study immediately to the accessories of modern childhood: ‘The theory is encouraging for Barbie enthusiasts, who have seen the doll attacked for her “anti-feminist” pink clothes and decor.’ Yet, as a couple of lone commentators pointed out, there was nothing in the study that could prove that this preference for pink was a difference that had been hardwired into women’s brains aeons ago, rather than one that is simply being encouraged by our current culture.

  This is just one study, but its suggestions and its reception typify much contemporary research on this subject. There has been a great flurry of research into sex differences over recent years, in disciplines from neuroscience to linguistics to psychology. Some of this work has looked into the structure and activity of male and female brains, some has looked into the influence of differing levels of hormones, some has looked into differences in the intellectual aptitudes and achievements of men and women, some has looked into their abilities to empathise and nurture. Conclusions have been mixed, but the way that such research is reported in the media and by popular writers constantly reinforces the idea that the differences we see between male and female behaviour must be down to biology.

  These beliefs have now penetrated much of the culture that surrounds our children. The educational establishment often reproduces them uncritically, so that, for instance, the website of the Girls’ Schools Association states that ‘Research in the last 10 years or so on brain development suggests that gender differences are as much to do with the chemistry and structure of the brain as the way in which girls and boys are raised. The tendencies of girls to be more contemplative, collaborative, intuitive and verbal, and boys to be more physically active, aggressive, and independent in their learning style seems to stem from brain function and development.’21 And while teachers and parents are picking up these ideas, toy companies reinforce them with alacrity. As a spokesperson for Disney said recently, when explaining the recent success of the Disney Princess brand, which encompasses dolls, dressing-up clothes and accessories: ‘We believe it is an innate desire in the vast majority of young girls to play out the fantasy of being a princess. They like to dress up, they like to role-play. It’s just a genetic desire to like pink, to like the castle, to turn their dads into the prince.’22

  This reliance on ‘the chemistry and structure of the brain’ and the ‘genetic desire’ as the explanation for stereotypically feminine behaviour is not only being used to explain how little girls play and learn, it is also being used to explain away the inequalities we see in adult life. Writers such as Simon Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychopathology at Cambridge University, have written extensively on how they believe that the differences we see between the sexes in adult life are attributable as much to biology as they are to social factors. In his book The Essential Difference, Simon Baron-Cohen argues that having a ‘female brain’ or a ‘male brain’ will not only influence the way you behave as a child, but will also influence your choice of occupations as an adult. He starts with anecdotes about a typical girl child and a typical boy child, and tells us that the typical girl is ‘into dolls and small toy animals. She would spend hours dressing and undressing Barbie dolls.’23 He then goes further, and suggests that on average grown-up females also have superior social talents to males, and that this is reflected in the occupations they will naturally choose. ‘People with the female brain make the most wonderful counsellors, primary-school teachers, nurses, carers, therapists, social workers, mediators, group facilitators or personnel staff … People with the male brain make the most wonderful scientists, engineers, mechanics, technicians, musicians, architects, electricians, plumbers, taxonomists, catalogists, bankers, toolmakers, programmers or even lawyers.’24

  It’s striking that the occupations judged suitable for the female brain, by Simon Baron-Cohen and other followers of biological explanations for gender differences, would have been seen as women’s work by old-fashioned chauvinism as much as by fresh research. Indeed, if you look closely at the evidence for this kind of biological determinism, it is hard to escape the conclusion that its popularity often relies as much on bad old stereotypes as on good new science. There is science on either side of this debate, yet it is often the case that the media will rush to embrace only one side. This means that biological determinism is often assumed to be the new consensus throughout the academy. In fact, many scientists are now raising their voices to dissent from the use of biological explanations for the continuing gender divisions in society. If this dissent were more widely heard, we might be inclined to challenge not only those apparently trivial differences between boys’ and girls’ toys, but also the continuing existence of serious inequality in men’s and women’s adult lives.

  I think it is time to challenge the exaggerated femininity that is being encouraged among women in this generation, both by questioning the resurgence of the biological determinism which tells us that genes and hormones inexorably drive us towards traditional sex roles, and by questioning the claustrophobic culture that teaches many young women that it is only through exploiting their sexual allure that they can become powerful. Of course, it has to be a woman’s own choice if she makes a personal decision to buy into any aspect of what might be seen as stereotypically feminine behaviour, from baking to pole-dancing, from high heels to domestic work. I am just as sure as I ever was that we do not need to subscribe to some dour and politically correct version of feminism in order to move towards greater equality. But we should be looking for true choice, in a society characterised by freedom and equality. Instead, right now a rhetoric of choice is masking very real pressures on this generation of women. We are currently living in a world where those aspects of feminine behaviour that could be freely chosen are often turning into a cage for young women.

  In examining these aspects of women’s experiences, I am well aware there are places this book does not go. I have spent much of the last few years talking to women who come from places outside mainstream Western feminist debate. I have travelled to Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran to find out how women view their rights in different parts of the world, and in the UK I have been working alongside women who have fled here for refuge from other countries. I have learned, and I am still learning, a great deal from these individuals about the importance of working across cultures. This book does not attempt to cover such ground; here I stay not only within Western culture, but also primarily within British, heterosexual experience. In doing so, I am not suggesting that other experiences are not just as valid and vital.

  Above all, this is no time to succumb to inertia or hopelessness. Feminists in the West have already created a peaceful revolution, opening many doors for women that were closed to them before, expanding opportunities and insisting on women’s rights to education, work and reproductive choice. We have come so far already. For our daughters, the escalator doesn’t have to stop on the dolls’ floor.

  I

  The New Sexism

  1: Babes

  One spring night in the Mayhem nightclub in Southend, young men and women were moving tentatively onto the dance floor
through drifts of dry ice, lit amethyst and emerald by flashing lights. ‘Five minutes left!’ the DJ’s voice rang out over the thumping music. ‘Five minutes left to enter the Babes on the Bed competition. We’re looking for ten of the fittest, sauciest birds here today. Remember, it’s not just about tits, it’s about personality too.’ To the side of the DJ a large, empty bed, looking like a Tracey Emin installation, sat waiting.

  Almost all the women in the club that night, with their tiny hotpants and towering wedge heels, their dark fake tans and shiny straightened hair, looked as though they could be planning to take part in a modelling contest. About a dozen of them began to make their way over to a group of men who were standing by the bed and choosing who should enter the Babes on the Bed competition. There were sixteen of these nights in the spring of 2007, up and down England, Scotland and Wales, and of the hundreds of women who chose to pose on beds in nightclubs, one would be given a modelling contract with Nuts magazine. ‘I want to do it to make my mum proud,’ said one young woman, Lauren, in denim hotpants and tight, yellow crop top. ‘She should win,’ said her best friend, who was standing with her. ‘She works out, she’s really keen, and she’s gorgeous.’ Lauren was given the once-over by the men from Nuts and told to go into the changing room to be given the competition uniform – red hotpants and crop top with the Nuts logo. When she came out, her friend whooped and started taking pictures of her on her mobile phone.