Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (4 page)

For Gavin Lloyd, a deeply tanned young man who runs the PR for Mayhem club,
Nuts
epitomises the changing culture in which he swims. ‘Girls come in here every night wearing just their underwear,’ he explained to me. ‘The sort of thing you might expect just to see in your bedroom on a special night once upon a time. They’re all getting boob jobs now – 18-year-olds who a few years ago would be saving for their first car, they’re all saving for a boob job. I know six, seven girls who’ve had it done in the last six months. They all think it’ll be a route to their fortune. For some girls it is – you look at Jordan or Melinda Messenger or Jodie Marsh. That’s what they are all thinking of. That’s where they’d all like to be.’

While the phrase ‘glamour modelling’ may be coy, the culture that its resurgence has spawned is far from coy. As the minutes ticked by in the Mayhem nightclub, men began to get themselves in the right position, near to the big bed, which by then had become half screened from view by photographers with their lights and reflective shades. The first woman to get on the platform was a confident girl with long fair hair, in high-heeled
boots and hotpants, holding a microphone. ‘This is Cara Brett!’ shouted the DJ. ‘She’s on the cover of
Nuts
this week! So buy her, take her home and have a wank.’ The men around me cheered, an animal roar that took me by surprise as it issued from a hundred throats at once.

At that point Gavin Lloyd reappeared at my elbow. ‘I think you ought to go now,’ he said to me breathlessly. ‘I don’t think
Nuts
would like you around.’ ‘Can’t I just watch the show?’ I asked. The poor man looked as if the last thing he wanted was a confrontation. ‘OK – but be discreet.’ And I nodded, though unsure what discretion would look like in a club where the style was one of pure display.

The crush around me became intense as the girls got on the bed one by one, accompanied by the constant thump of music. Cara began to direct them into more and more suggestive poses. ‘Why not on all fours?’ ‘Let’s see your arse in the air!’ You might have thought it would be tricky to get young women to take up openly sexual poses in this brightly lit club in front of this crowd of yelling, drunk young men, but the girls seemed to know what was expected of them, and if they became too reluctant, Cara threw herself into the task of encouraging them with some gusto. ‘Let’s get those off,’ she urged impatiently. ‘If you’re going to be a winner, you’ve got to show some skin.’ One plump young woman in mauve bra and knickers was one of the first to slip off her bra and joggle her breasts at the cameras. As the display became more sexual, the underwear unpeeling from the smooth skin of teenage women, the men in the club began to chant, heavily and fast, and to press nearer and nearer to the stage, and the women they had come with drifted back, ignored, to the bar area where they ordered more alcohol. The men were using their phones to video and photograph the girls as they took off their clothes. One girl, who was a bit too fleshy around the middle and not fleshy enough around the chest, came in for boos rather than cheers. She looked tearful as she went back into the line.
‘Come on, girls,’ Cara said fiercely to the next one, Tania, who was defiantly keeping her bra on – clearly that night was not the right time for her to start topless modelling, ‘if you’re going to be a glamour model, you’ve got to get your boobs out.’ The next girl, with huge, perfectly spherical, siliconed breasts perched high on her slender chest, got the loudest roar. ‘Oh, there are two things I like about her!’ shouted the DJ. ‘How about you, boys? She doesn’t swim, but she doesn’t sink.’

As the show went on, the women became more ambitious. One jumped on the bed and bent straight over, looking through her wide-apart legs, presenting her crotch in stretchy, tight red pants to the cameras, before pumping her rear at them and slipping off her bra, ending up with the splits. ‘This is Angel!’ called the DJ. ‘Isn’t she fit? She’s on a porn channel too, so you can catch her on telly too.’ The shortlisting was done at top speed – only women who flashed their breasts or their thongs for the crowd were called back for the final four, so Tania wasn’t in that line-up, although they all went on standing on the stage, a rejected half-naked chorusline. ‘Now we’re going to judge your girl-on-girl action,’ said the DJ to cheers all round. ‘Let’s see you get a bit friendly, come on, how about some kissing. What do you think, boys? Some of the fittest girls in Southend getting on with each other.’

The girls clambered on top of one another, looking vaguely back at the camera. ‘What about the bra? Is that coming off?’ asked Cara Brett. The crowd chanted heavily, breathily, ‘Get your tits out, get your tits out, get your tits out for the lads.’ They pressed around the stage, roaring as the girls rubbed their breasts against each other. The crowd became so big that I could no longer see the women whole – just flashes of breast and thigh on the screens of the phones that were held high in the air.

‘Yeah, Gav’s got a stiffy now,’ shouted the DJ about the PR manager. ‘Come on,’ said Cara impatiently, ‘let’s show some skin, girls. Let me help you out of these.’ She dragged the hot-pants
off one girl, showing her sequinned thong riding precariously on a shaved crotch. The crowd erupted, and that girl was judged the winner. Sweatily, the crowd dispersed. I saw the two young women who had come with Tania. ‘Did you enjoy it?’ I asked them. ‘Not really,’ said Katie, running long nails through blonde hair, looking uneasy. ‘It was a bit degrading, to be honest.’ I would have liked to stop and talk more to them, but the PR manager was desperate for me to leave as he seemed to think the men from
Nuts
would be angry at him for letting me in. He could hardly escort me to the door fast enough. The next day I looked on a club website,
www.dontstayin.com
, to see if anyone had commented on the night at Mayhem. The only comment was laconic. ‘Lots of quality Southend fanny.’

As I saw that evening in the Mayhem nightclub, and as one can see any night of the week in clubs up and down the UK, images that a previous generation often saw as degrading for women have now been taken up as playful and even aspirational. ‘Me-time’ for a young homemaker now can include dressing as a Playboy bunny; breaking into a respectable career that would make your mum proud can start with stripping for nothing in a crowded nightclub. Although for many people this culture may seem quite marginal, it may be more mainstream than we think. In 2006, a survey was carried out among teenage girls that suggested that more than half of them would consider being glamour models and a third of them saw Jordan as a role model.
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The growth of a culture in which so many women feel that their worth is measured by the size of their breasts rather than by any other possible yardstick arrived in the UK apparently out of nowhere. When I was at university in the late 1980s, that sniggery British culture of Benny Hill and page three seemed to be on the way out – it looked dated and rather absurd, and young women didn’t talk about stripping as a means of empowerment or look to lap dancers for their role models. But the revitalisation of glamour modelling has become the symptom of
a wider change in our culture, in which the images and attitudes of soft pornography now come flooding in at young women from every side of the media: monthly magazines, weekly magazines, tabloid newspapers, music videos, reality television, and almost every aspect of the internet, from social networking sites to individual blogs.

University students are just as likely to meet this culture as are young women in an Essex nightclub. At Loughborough University in 2007, the student union held a Playboy night – House Party at the Playboy Mansion – advertised by posters with drawings of women in Playboy costumes, no faces, with their legs apart. The club night promised pole-dancing and live shows and, according to photos posted on students’ MySpace pages, quite a few young women were keen enough to attend wearing their bunny ears and pink tails, and not much else. York University’s Goodricke College also hosts Playboy nights and the university is home to a pole-dancing exercise club. A few years ago I was struck when I received an email from a student who was complaining about the sexism she felt she encountered at her university. She had just received a copy of the 2005 college magazine for Pembroke College, Cambridge, which announced that it was to ‘celebrate 21 years of women at Pembroke College’. It did so by giving over
page 3
of the magazine to eleven young women posing in their knickers alone on the ‘High Table’ in the college hall. Although the articles throughout the magazine celebrated the fact that women now outnumber men at Pembroke, and that in 2004 women at Pembroke got more firsts than men, the message about the way that women should be seen was unequivocal.
⁴
Three years later a student magazine at the same university,
Vivid
, included a picture of a female undergraduate in nothing but black thong and stockings, posing with her legs apart on Clare College bridge.
⁵

The aesthetic of this kind of modelling has obviously also affected the ways that women present themselves socially.
Online social networking often foregrounds similar images of young women. One woman I interviewed, Suraya Singh, said to me, ‘Of course we all think, I want to be cool, and the answer to that for so many young women seems to be, I know, I’ll have a picture of myself in my pants on Facebook.’

It is not easy to understand how the glamour-modelling culture became so acceptable in such a short space of time. Although dissent is now being articulated in some quarters, it is easy for many people in this culture to dismiss such dissent entirely. Before going to Mayhem I had talked to Dave Read, the head of Neon Management, the agency that promotes these club tours and that represents some of the most successful models in this business. ‘Do you ever find people saying that glamour modelling is degrading any more?’ I asked him, and he snorted with laughter. ‘I haven’t heard that for I don’t know how long. That argument, that, whatever, feminist thing, it doesn’t have anything left in it now. You’d really struggle to find anyone who’d say that now.’

A few weeks later I met up with Cara Brett, the model who introduced the show, in a bar in Islington. Sitting at a scrubbed wooden table, she was a diminutive Barbie with long, wispy hair bleached white and a gold aliceband, a low-cut cream sweater over jeans. She had begun doing glamour modelling eight months previously, and with the kind of peachy body and doll face that is wanted by the industry, she is already top of her profession. Less than a year before, she was stuck in her rural home in the Midlands, wondering how on earth she could fulfil her ambition of being famous without having any obvious talents. ‘I knew I was going to be famous,’ she said, and I asked if she had thought of singing or dancing or acting, but she shrugged. ‘I’m not that good at that kind of thing.’ But through a friend she met an agent, and very quickly became one of the half-dozen models in the business who make a good living out of this work.

Her kind of work – posing in white stockings or pink thongs
for the
Nuts
Boob Bonanza or Blondes in the Buff special issues – she describes as ‘classy’. ‘You shouldn’t be doing this job if you’re uncomfortable with it,’ she said. ‘I’m getting my boobs out, but so what?’ Cara was spending the day with her best friend, Helen Reynolds, who was at university, studying law, in Leeds. ‘We’re inseparable. She’s been on endless shoots with me, I’m always going to see her in hall.’ ‘It’s a laugh, isn’t it?’ Cara said to Helen at one point, describing what work it is for her to get ready for a night out clubbing – in order to keep up the glamour-model fantasy, her agency provides her with clothes, hair and make-up. ‘Fantastic,’ Helen agreed.

At one point I turned to Helen to understand more about how she felt about her best friend’s work. She was keen to express her support for it. ‘Women are now in much more dominant roles in society, and they can say, you know what, I’m doing this for myself. It’s something to be proud of,’ she said. And how does that make other women feel? I wondered. ‘Well, if you’re happy with how you look, why shouldn’t you be happy with how other women look? Cara chooses to do this work, and it’s in a magazine that people choose to buy – you don’t have to buy it.’

This emphasis on choice is key. Anyone who would like to criticise this culture that sees women primarily as sexy dolls will find themselves coming up against the constantly repeated mantra of free choice. At one Babes on the Bed club night in Scotland, the club was picketed by a feminist group, and Cara’s nose wrinkled with scorn when she described them. ‘I had them – I had them outside one of my club nights, in Scotland somewhere. To be honest, I think it’s stupid, the feminists coming round, throwing eggs and that, I think they should grow up. The girls that are entering, are entering out of choice, they are not being forced, and so let them.’

When I spoke to other people who have worked to make glamour modelling more acceptable in the mainstream – the
magazine editors and television executives who have driven this shift in our culture – I heard much the same views. These powerful figures are, very often, men and women who came of age in the 1980s. That was the time when young women were going on the early Reclaim the Night marches and reading books such as
Pornography: Men Possessing Women
, in which the writer Andrea Dworkin argued that pornography was a form of violence against women. As the launch editor of
Zoo
magazine, Paul Merrill, put it once in an interview: ‘I was at Loughborough University when people were trying to ban the
Sun
because of
Page 3
. They’d recoil if they knew I was now organising competitions to find the sexiest student.’
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How did people like him make this journey, from being students in university bars discussing why women shouldn’t be objectified, to being executives who make their money out of images of women with big breasts wearing thongs?