Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (6 page)

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.’

From a handful of clubs in the 1990s, there were an estimated three hundred clubs in the UK in 2008.
¹
The way that lap-dancing clubs have been classified in licensing laws since 2003 means that such clubs do not have to register under the same regulations as sex shops, but are simply treated in the same way as bars or restaurants. Although this was not a deliberate policy to relax the regulation of the sex industry, but rather an unintended consequence of plans to simplify licensing laws, the
effect has been to make it almost impossible for local authorities or concerned residents to do anything to prevent lap-dancing clubs opening. As they have expanded, lap-dancing clubs have become an unexceptional part of many men’s social lives, from city workers to men on stag nights. As one online organiser of stag weekends states: ‘No stag night would be complete without a lap-dancing club.’
²
Their ubiquity makes possible the kind of scenes that I watched in Mayhem club in Southend, since girls stripping down to their thongs for nothing in one club is seen as so acceptable partly because everyone knows that just down the road women are stripping fully for a few pounds. The Muse lap-dancing club in Southend, near to the Mayhem nightclub, offers ‘fully nude dancing’ for £10, and a dress code that is unequivocal: ‘You keep yours on, the girls take theirs off.’
³

The way that lap-dancing clubs are now seen so much as part of the mainstream has also filtered through to the new popularity of pole-dancing. Pole-dancing is usually offered in clubs where girls dance naked for customers, but it is no longer seen as part of a seedy sex industry – rather, it has become seen more as a cheeky part of the entertainment industry and classes in pole-dancing have sprung up throughout the UK. I’m certainly not going to stand in judgement over any individual woman who chooses to learn any kind of dancing, but it is intriguing how young women have chosen to make fashionable a style of dancing that is so closely associated with stripping and sex work. While women who are desperate for cash do a pole-dancing show as part of their work in lap-dancing clubs, successful models, singers and actresses do it to show how daring and sensual they are. For instance, Kate Moss did a pole-dance in a video for White Stripes, and the Spice Girls went to a Soho club to learn how to pole-dance for their 2007 comeback tour. As quoted in the
Sun
, a source said, ‘The girls all agreed that a pole-dancing section in the show would be fabulous and sexy. And they wanted to get some proper lessons from professional
dancers. They chose the Soho Revue Bar with all its fabulous kitsch decor and they liked the idea of something a bit seedy.’
⁴
Similarly, the Sugababes have been praised in the tabloids for participating in the dance culture associated with sex clubs: ‘The Sugababes nipped into a nude lap dancing bar this week – then kicked off their shoes for a go on the poles. The girls got hot and steamy at Boutique gentlemen’s club following their after-show party at Manchester’s Red Rooms. And it seems the girls are big exotic dancing fans. Gorgeous Keisha Buchanan told a fellow clubber she had blown thousands of pounds in a lap dancing club in Atlanta in the US.’
⁵

As we see from these examples, some women are using the dancing associated with ‘seedy’ clubs to enhance their sexiness in the public eye, while others boast about taking the behaviour of the lap-dancing club into their private lives. The actress Emilia Fox, who has starred in Jane Austen adaptations, said in 2008, ‘I’ve mastered the art of removing my knickers. I wanted to know exactly how to do it in the most provocative way possible so I took striptease lessons. You can’t just pull off a pair of knickers. That’s not sexy. You have to take off your knickers in such a way as to get every man in the room watching you. You do it slowly. Carefully. You hook your thumbs into the top of your knickers and start to slide up and down, then down a bit more. It’s the stepping out of them that is the real triumph. It’s like a dance. One leg first, then the other, effortless but naughty. It’s something every woman should learn how to do. It’s amazing how much confidence you get, how good you can feel about your own body. My husband paid for my lessons. I think he was thrilled that he was getting a wife who wanted to know how to do these things.’
⁶
Obviously there is nothing unusual about a woman stripping for her partner. But it is notable that for this woman the idea is to perform to her own husband as though she were performing to a room full of men with whom she had no relationship. Clearly, the new acceptability of lap-dancing clubs
is having an impact both on women’s public and their private lives.

While stripping has become more mainstream through the rise of lap-dancing clubs, there are also much more upmarket strip shows, including burlesque, which cater to a more middle-class audience. The close association of burlesque and stripping is a phenomenon of recent decades – once upon a time burlesque simply meant a comedy show that parodied high art. But now performers such as Dita von Teese and Immodesty Blaize have helped to create an inescapably sexy view of burlesque, even if it doesn’t have to involve full nudity. While lap dancing is generally seen as pretty seedy, great claims are made for burlesque as art. The art often seems to centre simply on the use of vintage accessories, such as feathered fans and nipple tassels, huge martini glasses and corsets. But as burlesque dancers can come in various shapes and sizes, and can wear more unusual costumes and construct more complicated narratives around the striptease act, burlesque is often seen as a truly creative way for women to take their clothes off.

No wonder, then, that this is where the undressing-as-empowerment rhetoric really seems to come into its own. Indeed, the word empowerment rarely seems to be far away when burlesque dancers talk about their work. Immodesty Blaize has said: ‘I find burlesque empowering because instead of all being told we have to be one type, showgirls all have individual characters and body shapes.’
⁷
Michelle Baldwin, who performs as Vivienne VaVoom, has said, ‘Our performances, persona, costumes, all of it comes from us. Before, women were given their persona and even their stage names by men. This time women are in control of their own image and that’s empowering.’
⁸
When former Spice Girl Mel B starred in a burlesque show, her role was described by promoters as a ‘bold, sexy icon of female empowerment’.
⁹
Such a view of burlesque can be very attractive even to feminists.

Laurie Penny is a writer who was attracted by the idea of
trying this kind of stripping as part of a creative stage act when she started studying English at Oxford University in 2005. Penny had identified herself as a feminist since she was ten years old – since she read Germaine Greer’s
The Whole Woman
, she told me. But she had been severely anorexic in her teens – so severe that she was hospitalised – and was still looking for a way to feel positive about her body. She joined a burlesque group that was run by two male students, and at first she found that displaying her body on stage felt both powerful and fun. ‘To be honest, people yelling for you to take your clothes off does sometimes feel positive,’ she told me when we met. ‘We were all young, amateur performers and trying out different ways of playing with our sexuality. To have that appreciated by men and women in the audience can make you feel powerful. It’s the one kind of power that is sanctioned for women – the power to look sexy, to draw attention to your sexiness – and it can feel very good to succeed on that ground.’

But gradually Laurie found that far from liberating her, the structure of the burlesque acts began to feel restrictive. She began to realise that the audience’s reactions made her deeply uncomfortable. Once she was at the Edinburgh Festival and one of the acts was a Little Bo Peep number in which she, as Bo Peep, ended up in nipple tassels and a sheep’s tail. ‘After the show some guys came backstage, shouting, “Where’s Miss Bo Peep, she’s really hot,” and I realised I just didn’t like the way they were seeing me. It felt creepy. Another time when I was doing a ball in Oxford and the audience just saw it as a strip show, they were shouting “Get them off” through my act, and I felt absolutely awful. Afterwards I got incredibly drunk.’ As time went on, the creative, comic acts in the show diminished and the stripping increased. ‘That’s what they wanted to see. It drew in audiences. But it just began to feel so limiting to me. Even if this power to command attention through stripping can be enjoyed by women, it is such a circumscribed sort of power.
In the end it felt more like we were serving up misogyny with a tasteful package of feathers.’