Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (3 page)

This suggestion was picked up uncritically by much of the national press. ‘Boys like blue, girls like pink, it’s in our genes,’ was the
Independent
newspaper’s headline on their report.
¹⁹
‘Pink for a girl and blue for a boy – and it’s all down to evolution’, was the headline in the
Guardian
.
²⁰
The writer in the
Guardian
linked the study immediately to the accessories of modern childhood: ‘The theory is encouraging for Barbie enthusiasts, who have seen the doll attacked for her “anti-feminist” pink clothes and decor.’ Yet, as a couple of lone commentators pointed out, there was nothing in the study that could prove that this preference for pink was a difference that had been
hardwired into women’s brains aeons ago, rather than one that is simply being encouraged by our current culture.

This is just one study, but its suggestions and its reception typify much contemporary research on this subject. There has been a great flurry of research into sex differences over recent years, in disciplines from neuroscience to linguistics to psychology. Some of this work has looked into the structure and activity of male and female brains, some has looked into the influence of differing levels of hormones, some has looked into differences in the intellectual aptitudes and achievements of men and women, some has looked into their abilities to empathise and nurture. Conclusions have been mixed, but the way that such research is reported in the media and by popular writers constantly reinforces the idea that the differences we see between male and female behaviour must be down to biology.

These beliefs have now penetrated much of the culture that surrounds our children. The educational establishment often reproduces them uncritically, so that, for instance, the website of the Girls’ Schools Association states that ‘Research in the last 10 years or so on brain development suggests that gender differences are as much to do with the chemistry and structure of the brain as the way in which girls and boys are raised. The tendencies of girls to be more contemplative, collaborative, intuitive and verbal, and boys to be more physically active, aggressive, and independent in their learning style seems to stem from brain function and development.’
²¹
And while teachers and parents are picking up these ideas, toy companies reinforce them with alacrity. As a spokesperson for Disney said recently, when explaining the recent success of the Disney Princess brand, which encompasses dolls, dressing-up clothes and accessories: ‘We believe it is an innate desire in the vast majority of young girls to play out the fantasy of being a princess. They like to dress up, they like to role-play. It’s just a genetic desire to like pink, to like the castle, to turn their dads into the prince.’
²²

This reliance on ‘the chemistry and structure of the brain’ and the ‘genetic desire’ as the explanation for stereotypically feminine behaviour is not only being used to explain how little girls play and learn, it is also being used to explain away the inequalities we see in adult life. Writers such as Simon Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychopathology at Cambridge University, have written extensively on how they believe that the differences we see between the sexes in adult life are attributable as much to biology as they are to social factors. In his book
The Essential Difference
, Simon Baron-Cohen argues that having a ‘female brain’ or a ‘male brain’ will not only influence the way you behave as a child, but will also influence your choice of occupations as an adult. He starts with anecdotes about a typical girl child and a typical boy child, and tells us that the typical girl is ‘into dolls and small toy animals. She would spend hours dressing and undressing Barbie dolls.’
²³
He then goes further, and suggests that on average grown-up females also have superior social talents to males, and that this is reflected in the occupations they will naturally choose. ‘People with the female brain make the most wonderful counsellors, primary-school teachers, nurses, carers, therapists, social workers, mediators, group facilitators or personnel staff … People with the male brain make the most wonderful scientists, engineers, mechanics, technicians, musicians, architects, electricians, plumbers, taxonomists, catalogists, bankers, toolmakers, programmers or even lawyers.’
²⁴

It’s striking that the occupations judged suitable for the female brain, by Simon Baron-Cohen and other followers of biological explanations for gender differences, would have been seen as women’s work by old-fashioned chauvinism as much as by fresh research. Indeed, if you look closely at the evidence for this kind of biological determinism, it is hard to escape the conclusion that its popularity often relies as much on bad old stereotypes as on good new science. There is science on either side of this debate,
yet it is often the case that the media will rush to embrace only one side. This means that biological determinism is often assumed to be the new consensus throughout the academy. In fact, many scientists are now raising their voices to dissent from the use of biological explanations for the continuing gender divisions in society. If this dissent were more widely heard, we might be inclined to challenge not only those apparently trivial differences between boys’ and girls’ toys, but also the continuing existence of serious inequality in men’s and women’s adult lives.

I think it is time to challenge the exaggerated femininity that is being encouraged among women in this generation, both by questioning the resurgence of the biological determinism which tells us that genes and hormones inexorably drive us towards traditional sex roles, and by questioning the claustrophobic culture that teaches many young women that it is only through exploiting their sexual allure that they can become powerful. Of course, it has to be a woman’s own choice if she makes a personal decision to buy into any aspect of what might be seen as stereotypically feminine behaviour, from baking to pole-dancing, from high heels to domestic work. I am just as sure as I ever was that we do not need to subscribe to some dour and politically correct version of feminism in order to move towards greater equality. But we should be looking for true choice, in a society characterised by freedom and equality. Instead, right now a rhetoric of choice is masking very real pressures on this generation of women. We are currently living in a world where those aspects of feminine behaviour that could be freely chosen are often turning into a cage for young women.

In examining these aspects of women’s experiences, I am well aware there are places this book does not go. I have spent much of the last few years talking to women who come from places outside mainstream Western feminist debate. I have travelled to Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran to find out how women view their rights in different parts of the world, and in the UK I
have been working alongside women who have fled here for refuge from other countries. I have learned, and I am still learning, a great deal from these individuals about the importance of working across cultures. This book does not attempt to cover such ground; here I stay not only within Western culture, but also primarily within British, heterosexual experience. In doing so, I am not suggesting that other experiences are not just as valid and vital.

Above all, this is no time to succumb to inertia or hopelessness. Feminists in the West have already created a peaceful revolution, opening many doors for women that were closed to them before, expanding opportunities and insisting on women’s rights to education, work and reproductive choice. We have come so far already. For our daughters, the escalator doesn’t have to stop on the dolls’ floor.

I

The New Sexism

1: Babes

One spring night in the Mayhem nightclub in Southend, young men and women were moving tentatively onto the dance floor through drifts of dry ice, lit amethyst and emerald by flashing lights. ‘Five minutes left!’ the DJ’s voice rang out over the thumping music. ‘Five minutes left to enter the Babes on the Bed competition. We’re looking for ten of the fittest, sauciest birds here today. Remember, it’s not just about tits, it’s about personality too.’ To the side of the DJ a large, empty bed, looking like a Tracey Emin installation, sat waiting.

Almost all the women in the club that night, with their tiny hotpants and towering wedge heels, their dark fake tans and shiny straightened hair, looked as though they could be planning to take part in a modelling contest. About a dozen of them began to make their way over to a group of men who were standing by the bed and choosing who should enter the Babes on the Bed competition. There were sixteen of these nights in the spring of 2007, up and down England, Scotland and Wales, and of the hundreds of women who chose to pose on beds in nightclubs, one would be given a modelling contract with
Nuts
magazine. ‘I want to do it to make my mum proud,’ said one young woman, Lauren, in denim hotpants and tight, yellow crop top. ‘She should win,’ said her best friend, who was standing with her. ‘She works out, she’s really keen, and she’s gorgeous.’ Lauren was given the once-over by the men from
Nuts
and told to go into the changing room to be given the competition uniform – red hotpants and crop top with the
Nuts
logo. When she came out, her friend whooped and started taking pictures of her on her mobile phone.

Just then I saw three young women at the bar wearing Playboy bunny outfits: pink cuffs, black lace knickers and basques, black stockings, stilettos and pink bunny tails. Assuming they too were here for the competition, I went to chat to them. ‘What competition?’ said one, a smiling, rosy young woman with her bobbed dark hair pushed back under her bunny ears. ‘No, we’re here for Sam’s birthday. She’s twenty today.’ ‘Whose idea was the costume?’ I asked. ‘Mine!’ she said. Two of the women are secretaries, and one is a full-time mother. ‘I’m allowed out on Thursday nights,’ said the mother eagerly. ‘This is my me-time. I get away from the family. I can be myself.’ Then they went into the toilets to check their outfits, and got the bathroom attendant, a tall young black woman in a long-sleeved T-shirt and black trousers, to take photos of the three of them on their digital camera. I watched as they stood close together, pouting with hands on hips, breasts thrust out, before they went back to the bar.

I returned to the cluster of young women who stood around the
Nuts
team. One of the girls to be chosen, Tania, was wearing a blue lace dress that started low on her breasts and ended just below her knickers, and was saying goodbye to her friends, Nikki and Katie, who wished her luck and perched outside the changing room. Nikki, in a black minidress and silver wedge sandals, had the face of a Botticelli madonna, with a pointed chin and wide-apart blue eyes. I asked her if she was entering the
competition. ‘No, I already do modelling,’ she smiled. ‘I’m in a final for a big competition on Monday. I’m here for Tania – she wants to break in now.’ Katie joined in. ‘I’ve been modelling for a couple of years,’ she said. ‘I’ve got an agent, he found me online.’ In this context, modelling means glamour modelling, the coy words for posing almost naked for men’s magazines. ‘I’ve done a shoot for
FHM,’
Katie said. ‘My boyfriend’s a bit protective of me – he doesn’t like people seeing me as an object.’ I wondered if she also worried about that. ‘I did at first, but you get used to it, honestly.’ When I asked who their role models are, their responses were immediate: ‘I’d have to say Jordan,’ said Katie, naming the woman most famous for her huge breast implants and appearances on reality television. ‘I really admire what she’s done.’ Tania came out of the changing room, her exquisite hourglass body now clothed in red hotpants and crop top. She’s already done some modelling, but not yet topless. ‘I will do,’ she said, ‘when the time is right.’

Although sales of
Nuts
and
Zoo
have entered a real decline since their early heyday,
¹
their influence is as real as ever. They have contributed to an ongoing cultural shift, in which the business of what is coyly called glamour modelling – in which women may be naked, but won’t expose the genitals – has massively expanded in Britain. When
Nuts
was launched in 2004, the belief was that the young men who would buy it would want articles about football and cars, rather than pictures of women – and if there were to be women, they should be the acknowledged beauties of the film and television world. But its direction changed quickly. The editors found that while readers might say they wanted to see Jennifer Lopez on the cover, actually the editions with ordinary-looking girls – girls from reality television, girls who were photographed in their local nightclubs, girls who sent in photographs of themselves in their bedrooms – sold and sold. The magazines began to make images and words far more explicit, with pages crowded with
pictures of young women in thongs.
Nuts
became a shorthand for a certain kind of culture, a laddish, explicit culture in which women were seen in their underwear or not at all. Together with its main competitor,
Zoo
, it dragged all the men’s magazines in the UK, including the once more restrained monthly magazines such as
FHM
, into a constant competition as to which could be the most explicit, without quite stepping into pornography. The circulations of all these magazines have fallen in the last few years, but in 2009
Nuts
still sold over 180,000 copies every week in the UK, and the change it has created in the culture around young men and women has not gone away. Much of its energy has shifted over to the internet, and on the
Nuts
website you can find a constant stream of men commenting on the photographs women post of themselves in glamour-style poses.
²