Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism

by Natasha Walter

  This emphasis on choice allows people such as Hilton to sidestep any sense of responsibility for the culture they have helped to create. So although Hilton was the editor of Nuts as it moved decisively into this semi-pornographic incarnation, he says the move was decided by readers, not by himself. At first the magazine sold a less sexualised culture – it didn’t show nipples and it kept the sex talk less explicit. But gradually the editors found they could increase sales by pushing at boundaries, and since this is a world in which value is determined by sales, they went with the tide. ‘It’s not that I am abdicating responsibility,’ he said, ‘but it’s not for me to judge. I earn my living by trying to understand what people want, and giving that to them. I’ve given up on judging people.’

  It’s intriguing that the men who have powerful roles in this culture are so eager to explain that it has in fact been shaped by the choices of others. When I went to talk to the creative director of Big Brother, Phil Edgar-Jones, I thought I would hear some recognition about what they did in selling a new kind of ideal to women during their heyday. Big Brother was accustomed to choosing a handful of young women from the thousands who auditioned, and made a habit of picking those who were prepared to continue their careers by posing in a particular way for newspapers and magazines. Of the eleven women in Big Brother 2006 four posed for lads’ magazines after leaving the house: Aisleyne Horgan-Wallace, a model who posed topless for Zoo, Nuts and the Star; Grace Adams-Short, a dance teacher who posed topless for Nuts; Imogen Thomas, a bar hostess and former beauty queen who posed topless for Zoo, and Jennie Corner, a student who posed topless for Zoo. There were also Lea Walker, a pornography model who was said to have the biggest breast implants in the UK, and Nikki Grahame, a woman with smaller breast implants who had been a glamour model and who entered the house dressed as a bunny girl. More than half of them, in other words, made money from having their breasts photographed, while Celebrity Big Brother eagerly promoted glamour models as celebrities.

  Phil Edgar-Jones, like Phil Hilton, is a man with an unassuming, blokish manner who engaged politely with questioning when I met him. ‘Are we reinforcing this trend?’ He pondered for a moment. ‘I’d prefer to think we are reflecting it. We have open auditions and it’s very interesting – most of the women choose Jordan’s autobiography as their favourite book.’ He professed to be surprised that so many of the women who went into Big Brother seemed to end up following the same path. ‘The oddest people end up in newspapers in their bikinis. Kitten – who was in Big Brother 5 – was a complete feminist, or that’s how she presented herself – and then came out and was offered money by a newspaper and appeared in a PVC kitten outfit. I didn’t see that one coming.’ Just like Hilton, Edgar-Jones was reluctant to sound judgemental; choice was once again the operative word. ‘If it is a choice between that, and the glamour of that, and the financial rewards of that, and working in Superdrug for the rest of your life, well, kind of, why not,’ he said, ‘if that’s the choice you want to make for yourself?’

  Both Hilton and Edgar-Jones are clearly right about one thing. As they say, this culture can no longer be seen as one purely created by men for men. Just as women are freely entering the live show that is the Nuts Babes on the Bed competition, and sending in pictures to be used for nothing in the magazines, so women who could work anywhere in the media are choosing to work at men’s magazines that sell themselves on the promise of Big Boobs Special or Blondes in the Buff, or to commission reality television programmes that centre on watching women with big breasts in their bikinis. We cannot pretend that this is all about women as victims, when many women are deeply complicit in creating and selling this culture.

  These are the kind of women that the American writer Ariel Levy has called Female Chauvinist Pigs7 – the women who are happy to work alongside men to promote this waxed and thonged image of female sexuality. I was intrigued when I met a woman who works in this world – Terri White, then the deputy editor of Maxim magazine, now editor of Shortlist. White is a bright, confident woman in her twenties who comes from a working-class Derbyshire background. She first went to work for Phil Hilton as his PA at a shortlived men’s magazine called Later, and laughed when she remembered the interview. ‘Phil was unsure about whether I was the right person for the job,’ she said. ‘Because I mentioned to him that I had done my dissertation on black feminist theory. He thought I might not be comfortable with what went into the magazine.’ Indeed, a young woman with a degree in English literature and feminist theory is not necessarily the person who seems most likely to take to a culture based on the values of soft pornography. Yet for White, men’s magazines turned out to be a very comfortable place to work. In order to succeed, she learned to look at women the way that the men who buy the magazine look at women: ‘I say, do you think that’s sexy, to the men I work with. But I think I’ve learnt what works for them and what doesn’t.’

  In many ways Terri White is what I would call a feminist; she wants to make a good career in an area that she enjoys and finds fulfilling, and she is keen to prove herself as good as the men around her. But rather than trying to discover what sexuality might mean in women’s terms, she has trained her eye to see women in the way that the readers of men’s magazines see them. When I asked White whether she thought that the women who strip for these magazines are being exploited, she bridled. She insisted that the glamour-modelling world respects and celebrates women, and again returned to the theme of free choice. ‘We are never misogynistic about the women who model for us. They sell the magazine for us.’ And she added, ‘I find it really offensive when people say that. It’s their choice. A lot of them have huge ambitions, or they just want to be in a magazine. Who are we to judge them?’

  This idea that the growth of glamour modelling and its effect on women’s ambitions is all down to the operation of free choice seems to have silenced many potential critics. I can certainly understand why it is that many people would like to believe that the changes we have seen in our culture are a marker of women’s increased liberation. My first book, The New Feminism, argued that feminists should no longer be too anxious about the sexual objectification of women. I believed that we should concentrate on pragmatic advances in terms of economic and political equality and let people behave as they liked in their sexual and private lives. I honestly believed that as women became more equal, any sexism in the culture would easily wither away, that if such objectification remained characteristic of our culture it would apply to men as much as women. But for the last few years, I have been watching this hypersexual culture getting fiercer and stronger, and co-opting the language of choice and liberation, and I realise that I was wrong to be so nonchalant about it ten years ago.

  It is time to look again at how free these choices really are. After all, real, material equality still eludes us. Women still do not have the political power, the economic equality or the freedom from violence that they have sought for generations. This means that women and men are still not meeting on equal terms in public life. And the mainstreaming of the sex industry reflects that inequality. It is still women who are dieting or undergoing surgery on their bodies; still women stripping in the clubs while the men chant and cheer; still women, not men, who believe that their ability to reach for fame and success will be defined by how closely they conform to one narrow image of sexuality. If this is the new sexual liberation, it looks too uncannily like the old sexism to convince many of us that this is the freedom we have sought.

  Even many of the people who at first seemed so keen to shrug off criticism of the glamour-modelling industry gradually began to talk to me about the ways in which the so-called choices made by women to join this industry were not always very free or very informed. Cara Brett herself, who on that night in Southend strutted the stage looking as happy as anyone with the feast of flesh that she was serving up, could not be sure that everything was rosy in her world. ‘Once a girl who was entering a competition said to me, do you think this is a dodgy
way to get into the industry, and I said, yes, it is,’ she told me. ‘Once they are up there in their skimpy vest top and the thong, I’m there with the microphone saying to the guys, give us some encouragement, and they’re all yelling, and the girls on the bed basically get naked, they are so desperate.’

  This desperation, she thought, too often led to exploitation. ‘So many girls do it for nothing,’ she said. ‘A magazine says, do a shoot for us, and we won’t pay you, but you’ll get the publicity. They just do it. If you sell yourself at a low price, then you’re stuck. There are so many, to be honest. If you go into any club, I guarantee ninety per cent of the girls in there would go, I’m a glamour model. You get down to the bottom of it and they’ve appeared in the Sport once.’ She curls her lip. ‘That paper, it’s filth, get it away from me. The Sport is degrading to women. I wouldn’t touch it, I’d run a mile from it. It makes girls look like cheap sluts.’

  And although Cara Brett was so scathing about the feminist protests in front of the clubs, at one point, suddenly becoming thoughtful, she unexpectedly echoed their views. Do you think this is just what women choose to do, I asked. ‘No, not really,’ she said. ‘A lot of girls don’t know how to make choices. They think that because one girl’s doing it, and everyone’s going wild, they should do it. Maybe that will change one day.’

  Dave Read, the head of Neon Management, Cara’s agency, is an upbeat man, used to selling his business – but he too could not prevent a tone of realism, which even turned to disgust at times, when he talked about what he’s seen in his business over the last fifteen years. For him, too, it is clear that these so-called choices are often fuelled more by desperation than liberation. ‘There’s this desperation, there are so many girls coming through,’ he said honestly. ‘They churn them through. They don’t have to look like a Pirelli calendar, it’s this girl-next-door thing – just a sexy girl who puts pictures of herself in her knickers online or in a magazine. You don’t even have to pay those girls. You go to Chinawhites any night of the week and you see all these girls milling around, all desperate to bag a footballer and be a glamour model. They come down to London on the strength of one shoot, with stars in their eyes, and they end up up to their ears in debt, pulling pints, lap dancing, prostitution, you name it.’

  Other people in the glamour-modelling industry also admit that many of the women who set out into this industry may have few other routes in front of them which they feel will lead to any equivalent success. As Phil Hilton said to me at one point: ‘In reality, if you’re a young working-class woman from the provinces who sends your picture into these magazines, you’re not likely to become incredibly successful. It’s like the young working-class guys who all want to be professional footballers – these are unlikely ambitions. But what I’m very reluctant to do is to judge other people’s ambitions and choices very differently from how they would judge themselves.’ He recognised that he is often talking about choices that are already restricted, but he didn’t see that as the magazine’s problem. ‘Let’s be realistic, and take an honest class perspective here – are you going to say to those girls, why do you want to be Jordan – why don’t you want to be a cabinet minister?’

  Although Hilton may have said this as a throwaway remark, I think it is telling. The mainstreaming of the sex industry has coincided with a point in history when there is much less social mobility than in previous generations. No wonder, then, if the ideal that the sex industry pushes – that status can be won by any woman if she is prepared to flaunt her body – is now finding fertile ground among many young women who, as Phil Hilton says, would never imagine a career in, say, politics.

  That’s not to say that everyone who has chosen to go into glamour modelling is being exploited or disappointed. On the contrary, this kind of sexual display clearly does deliver a true charge of excitement and energy to many women who participate. Some women in this industry make a point of emphasising that they have freely chosen the work. Jodie Marsh, for instance, a glamour model and star of reality-television programmes, has drawn attention to her good A-level results and that she could have been a lawyer if she hadn’t chosen to strip instead. And clearly many other women who have not had to clamber up through the glamour-modelling industry itself may enjoy taking on some of its attitudes and poses, whether that means singers such as Rachel Stevens or Alesha Dixon posing in underwear for men’s magazines, or actors such as Maggie Gyllenhaal modelling in handcuffs and black satin underwear for lingerie manufacturer Agent Provocateur, or women with many other options ahead of them, such as the Cambridge undergraduates, being photographed in glamour-model style for student magazines.

  Yet those young women who long for the club competition or the online glamour shot to bring them fame and fortune are likely to find that the huge, beckoning influence of the glamour-modelling industry promises much but, as people such as Phil Hilton, Dave Read and Cara Brett admitted, delivers little. And although women may find themselves individually drawn to this work, the overall effect of the growth of glamour modelling is to de-individualise the women involved, whether they are university students or girls in an Essex nightclub. Nuts runs a section on its website called ‘Assess my breasts’, where people can upload pictures of their own breasts or others’ – with no faces – and viewers hit the button, assessing them with marks up to ten. Once the magazine produced a poster to go with the website. Even Terri White, who can see nothing wrong with her career in assessing women’s bodies through the lens of the boys who want to reduce women to the size of their breasts, was brought up short when she saw the poster. ‘It was …’ she struggled to put it into words, ‘all these rows of breasts without faces – it was so … depersonalising.’

  The effect of these choices, when we look across society, is now to reduce rather than increase women’s freedom. And it is not just the women who are directly involved who find their individuality threatened by the glamour-modelling industry. The marketplace is taking up and reinforcing certain behaviour in a way that can make it hard for many young women to find the space where other views of female sexuality and other ways for women to feel powerful are celebrated. By co-opting the language of choice and empowerment, this culture creates smoke and mirrors that prevent many people from seeing just how limiting such so-called choices can be. Many young women now seem to believe that sexual confidence is the only confidence worth having, and that sexual confidence can only be gained if a young woman is ready to conform to the soft-porn image of a tanned, waxed young girl with large breasts ready to strip and pole-dance. Whether sexual confidence can be found in other ways, and whether other kinds of confidence are worth seeking, are themes that this hypersexual culture cannot address. While no one would express unease if there were a few women expressing their sexuality in this style in a society which was also happy to celebrate with similar verve and excitement the myriad other achievements of other women, the constant reinforcement of one type of role model is shrinking and warping the choices on offer to young women.

  2: Pole-dancers and prostitutes

  When Ellie came to London in 2002, after graduating from a respected university, she was going to be an actor. This in itself felt to her like a rebellious choice, since she came from a middle-class family who had sent her to an academic girls’ private school where the expectation was that she would go into a safe profession. Ellie went to lots of auditions, but work was hard to find. She started to become obsessed with her body for the first time in her life, and by eating very little, taking cocaine and going to the gym every day, she achieved the hard and slender look she wanted. But she still wasn’t getting the roles. She was temping in office jobs to make ends meet, but she couldn’t put her heart into the work and one day her temp agency fired her.

  She had just moved into a new flat in north London, the rent was high and she didn’t know how to meet the bills. A friend of hers had worked as a lap dancer, and although this woman hadn’t said much about the work to her, she had always implied
it was pretty straightforward. What’s more, there was a lap-dancing club just round the corner from her flat. One day Ellie saw an advertisement for the club in The Stage, saying, ‘Table dancers wanted, full training given’. So she went for the audition. ‘You just had to stand there and hold the pole and take your clothes off,’ Ellie remembered. ‘I don’t think I’d thought it through. I was surprised when I saw what the other girls were wearing – I was just in a skirt and T-shirt and when they asked me to take my clothes off I was like, uh-oh, I’m wearing really bad pants. But they said, shave your pubes, get a fake tan, sort out your nails, dye your hair, pluck your eyebrows, come back next week. So I said OK, and I went and made myself orange. I did it for about six months, every night.’

  When I meet Ellie in her shabby bedsit, I can say for sure that if there is a stereotype of what a lap dancer would look like, she doesn’t fit that stereotype. She is a fragile-looking young woman with an unassuming manner, who speaks very thoughtfully about her experiences. For her it didn’t feel like a big step at first to go into the sex industry. This is because of the way that lap dancing has become an unremarkable part of British urban life in an incredibly short space of time. When lap-dancing clubs started up in the UK in the mid-1990s, they were seen as so sleazy that few people wanted to promote them or be seen in them. Dave Read, who runs Neon Management, which manages the careers of a number of glamour models, remembers, ‘When the first lap-dancing club opened, they asked us to send some models along to the opening night, but no one wanted to go – it was so seedy. Now, of course, everyone wants to be associated with that kind of thing.’