Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (11 page)

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 hypersexual 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.’

This idea that sexual bullying is often seen as just something that girls have to put up with was confirmed to me by other women working in this field. Hannah White, who runs a project at Womankind Worldwide that seeks to tackle sexual bullying, told me: ‘I wouldn’t say it was anything new, I think boys have always behaved in this way. But what I would say is that it’s been normalised in this generation in a way that makes it very hard to challenge.’ She raised to me the fact that technology has enabled the circulation of very sexualised images of young girls. So, for instance, the rise of what is called ‘sexting’ – circulating sexual images by mobile phone – bears witness to the strange, sad reality that the sexualisation of young girls often becomes the shaming of young girls. As Helen Penn from the Child Exploitation and Protection Centre told the BBC in 2009, ‘We are getting more reports of teenagers being bullied, called names and strung up in front of their whole school.’
²⁶

Such evidence suggests that the sexualisation of young women is taking place in a world in which old imbalances of power still operate, often harshly. In 2009 the NSPCC worked with researchers at the University of Bristol to uncover truly shocking truths about the sexual experiences of young women. In a survey of young people aged 13 to 17, they found that nine out of ten had been in an intimate relationship, and that of these one third of the girls had experienced sexual violence from their partner.
²⁷
Adults who might once have seen the need to protect girls from sexual bullying and assault may be confused by the way that girls themselves can seem to be complicit in their own sexualisation. At a recent trial of three young boys accused of raping two teenage girls, the barrister who was defending the boys suggested that the way that girls wanted to live up to media and fashion images of sexiness had to be taken into account. ‘I am afraid cold stark reality is that things are not the way they used to be,’ the defending barrister, Sheilagh Davies, said. ‘The clothing available for young girls is so provocative. There is pressure on girls from eight to wear these stomach-revealing outfits, skinny jeans worn way down on the hips. They are learning to be sexually attractive, perhaps before their time. It’s about, “Let’s try it, let’s get on with it.” I am afraid information in the media tells us that some girls do comply, maybe to gain attention, maybe to gain affection, and go along with it quite willingly.’
²⁸
The confusion between sexual liberation and the sexual objectification of young girls means that there is a danger that young girls might not be seen as in need of protection from unwanted attention and even assaults.

If this early sexualisation of young women was all about their liberation, and they were in control of it, we would not see large numbers of women saying that they regretted their first sexual experiences. But just as the number of girls having sex early has grown, so has the number of girls who look back with regret. Eighty per cent of girls who had sex aged thirteen or fourteen
said they regretted it in a survey carried out in 2000, compared to 50 per cent in 1990.
²⁹
Since one in four girls has sex below the age of sixteen, that’s a lot of regrets. Rachel Gardner is trying to encourage girls and boys to challenge this reality through a project she has set up called the Romance Academy, where young people get together to try to work through an alternative view of intimacy. ‘I don’t talk about abstinence,’ Gardner says, ‘as that has such negative connotations. We talk about delaying sexual experience.’ Abstinence does indeed have very negative connotations. Any voices that have challenged our highly sexualised culture in recent times have generally come from the religious right, which means that liberals have become uneasy about joining them.