Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism

by Natasha Walter

  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.’13 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.’14 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.’16

  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.17 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.18 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.’19

  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;20 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;22 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.23 But although we hear sporadic effusions of concern about what this pervasive sexualisati
on 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.

  Some young women are becoming angry that the culture around them values women primarily for their sexual attractiveness, and they are feeling frustrated that their anger is not being more widely heard and supported. Sometimes their voices come through crystal clear. For instance, a young woman called Carly Whiteley emailed me after she read an article in which I criticised lads’ magazines. She was seventeen at the time, and this is what she wrote to me: ‘I just wanted to say thank you. I was starting to think it was time to give up and sit in silence while my friends put on a porno and grunted about whatever blonde, air-brushed piece of plastic was in Nuts this week. What you said gave me back the will not to give in on it all. It’s nice to see someone else saying it, makes me feel like less of a prude type oddball, haha. Keep up the good words.’

  Carly and I went on talking by email and one day I visited her home town to meet her. It was a slight young woman with a purple streak in her blonde hair and a silver stud in her nose who met me at the train station. We walked through the town to a bar where she knew we could get in even though she is underage. Over an orange juice, she talked softly but with confidence, and let me into the lonely world of a young woman who doesn’t enter into the Nuts culture in a world that seems to have gone nuts.

  Carly has felt bullied since the age of eleven into joining this culture that values women and girls only for their sexual attractiveness. She distinctly remembered the moment when she changed from primary to secondary school, and how she was expected to fit in. ‘I remember my first day at secondary school,’ she said, with a note of anger. ‘All the girls were suddenly in short skirts and make-up and I was still in trousers and a shirt. Immediately, I started getting trouble from boys and girls. Boys used to follow me home and spit in my hair.’ She believes that this bullying stemmed from the fact that she wasn’t prepared to buy into the raunch culture that had become the norm. ‘They didn’t say it was because I didn’t fit in with that sexual stuff, but I think it isn’t even a conscious thought process – it’s just if all the other girls are walking around looking like 18-year-olds, in miniskirts and make-up and I don’t, then I don’t fit in and they just knew that was unacceptable.’

  When she was thirteen, Carly’s parents moved to Spain, where she went to an international school for a couple of years. She told me that she felt really happy there, because the peer pressure was so much less and she found a close friend for the first time who also didn’t want to buy into the hypersexual culture she had known in the UK. But then her parents returned to England and, having discovered that there could be an alternative, Carly was determined not to go back to her previous school, which she felt had got even worse in the time she was away. So she decided to educate herself, at home. At seventeen, Carly started working as a gardener, with the ambition of studying garden design. No doubt she’ll do well, but it seems an incredible waste of this girl’s adolescence that she had to leave her education because she couldn’t bear the peer pressure in the Essex schools.

  This pressure on young women like herself is, she thinks, directly created by the magazine, modelling and music industries that are so keen to objectify women. ‘It just starts so early,’ she said. ‘From when I was eleven or twelve I remember going round with my friend to her boyfriend’s – he was older than us – and he would be watching porn on his computer. And then we always had stuff like FHM at home. But it’s everywhere. I mean, if you put on the television every other music video has half-naked women dancing around. It’s just like you don’t have any choice – you feel that as you grow up you have to start dressing that way, acting that way – that there is no other way to behave.’

  ‘It’s just like you don’t have any choice.’ This, I felt, was the crux of Carly’s experience. Although this hypersexual culture is constantly excused by reference to free choice, that is not necessarily how it is experienced by young women. ‘Everything is getting used for one end,’ Carly told me. ‘There used to be this idea that you could look alternative, indie.’ Now Carly finds that even if she dresses the way she does – today, in loose combat trousers and a scoop-neck black top, with a little silver stud in her nose, she can’t suggest an alternative to anyone. ‘I like expressing myself through what I wear. But now – there’s this new Trash Society which sends alternative girls to clubs to do pole-dancing shows and everything. They’ve taken what the alternative scene offered, and made it into just another part of that same old culture. I got chatting to a guy on the train the other day – it was an amazing conversation, we talked about everything, you know, we were talking about life and death. Then I mentioned I was looking for a job, and he said, oh, you should be a Trash Society girl. Like that was a compliment: you should get your boobs out. Is there nothing else that a girl is allowed to do?’

  During the hour or two I spend with Carly Whiteley, I am swept along by this one young woman’s anger at having to live in this culture. For her, it is clearly a release to be able to let out all the rage she feels. She hardly ever talks with her friends about how she feels about the culture around her. ‘I try to keep it hidden,’ she said. ‘I think my close friends know how I feel but they would find it too much if I expressed it.’ Both Carly’s sisters have tried glamour modelling, while female friends have participated in porn videos as well as glamour modelling. In other words, she hardly knows any women her own age who have rejected the influence of the hypersexual culture, and she feels that there are no other options around her.

  Carly is uncomfortably aware that this pressure to become sexualised now weighs on younger and younger girls. ‘I was on a website the other day, dontstayin, and they had this picture of a very young girl, a little girl in her pyjamas, in the middle of a sexy shoot of women in lingerie, pushing her boobs up and holding a gun. It was meant to be ironic, but it just is so shocking, the pressure on young girls. You look at Pussycat Dolls – they are marketed to kids, it’s grotesque. I’ve seen little girls, five, six, singing those songs, they don’t realise what they are singing.’ Carly’s niece was then just four, and already she saw her copying the culture around her. ‘She’s into make-up, she imitates the women she sees on The X-Factor. It’s the only ideal that girls have any more.’

  While Carly’s is just one dissatisfied voice, adults who work with young girls kept echoing similar views when I talked to them. For instance, Rachel Gardner is a youth worker who lives and works in Harrow, north-west London. She is an enthusiastic, articulate young woman in her twenties, fashionably dressed on the day I met her in a bright tunic top over skinny jeans. She sees herself as a feminist. ‘The rise of girlpower – I loved all that,’ she said. ‘I thought it was great fun – but then I began to see another, negative side of it. I was running a disco in the local church for young kids in the 1990s and one day a nine-year-old girl came in, I can remember it vividly, wearing a black miniskirt, a tiny boob-tube-type top and high boots and heavy make-up. I was shocked seeing this nine-year-old girl like this, a child in a woman’s outfit, she still had a child’s body.’ Rachel remembered that when her mother came to pick the child up, she stopped her and talked to her. ‘I said, I just want to question what your daughter’s wearing because I think it’s drawn attention from the boys tonight and I don’t think your daughter can handle that. Her mum said, look, I wear this kind of stuff, and I said, yes, but you’re an adult. But it hit me, she was totally unaware that her daughter couldn’t deal with it in the same way.’

  As Rachel suggested, although adult women may well see the hypersex
ual culture around them as connected to their liberation and empowerment, it is harder to say the same about teenage girls. It is not liberating for girls who are just on the cusp of sexual exploration to be seen solely as sexual objects. In fact, such a culture may be contributing to a reality in which many young women still feel that they are not in control of their first sexual experiences. In 2006 the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the teen magazine Sugar carried out a readers’ survey which discovered that nearly half of teenage girls surveyed had had their breasts or bottom groped against their wishes. More than half of girls who had experienced unwanted sexual touching had experienced it more than once. These experiences left girls feeling dirty (47 per cent), ashamed or guilty (39 per cent), worried or insecure (36 per cent), angry (34 per cent), powerless (30 per cent) and frightened (27 per cent). It is telling that, two hundred years after the birth of feminism, so many young women find that their early sexual experiences are accompanied by these negative feelings.24

  Many people who work with schoolchildren bear witness to the fact that sexual bullying is on the rise. Michele Elliott from Kidscape, a UK charity which aims to prevent bullying and child sexual abuse, said recently that there has been a genuine increase in this problem: ‘Certainly over the last four or five years on the Kidscape helpline we used to get maybe one or two calls a year about sexual bullying, but now we are getting two or three calls a week,’ she said on a BBC documentary in 2009.25 Some girls clearly feel that the rise in sexual bullying is tied into this culture in which they are seen as sexual objects. I heard from some young women stories like that of Janine, now aged 17, whom I contacted through her mother who had posted her concerns on a parenting website. She told me that boys in her school started bringing pornography into school from about the age of 13 – on mobile phones, or as printouts from computers. She felt they used this as a way to tease and discomfort girls. When I asked what the teachers did about it, she told me, ‘They said, don’t do that here, they would confiscate it if they saw it. But we never had any discussion about it, it was as though they were just a bit embarrassed about the whole thing which made us more embarrassed. So when boys would touch you or whatever or tease you about your breasts, it wasn’t like you were going to go to the teacher about it anyway. You just learned, let’s not talk about that here.’