Anne Summers review of Natasha Walter’s Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism was published in the Australian’s Review section on the weekend.

In the review, titled ‘The tyranny of self-perfection’, the long-time Australian feminist campaigner for women’s equality admits she had “no idea” about how bad things were for girls in a hypersexualised culture:

…This reviewer has to confess a comparable ignorance….I had no idea.

For feminists such as me who have been preoccupied with statistics and watching public indicators of progress such as women breaking barriers in politics, in business and other public domains, the cultural revolution that has enveloped girls and young women during the past decade or so was completely off my radar.

I kept fobbing off questions about whether I thought raunch culture was incompatible with feminism: how relevant was that, I thought, compared with the important stuff….?

So Walter’s book was quite an eye-opener.

She documents a culture in which sexual allure is equated with empowerment and girls are driven to strive for an air-brushed perfection that is as artificial as it is unattainable. Every aspect of the culture seems to reinforce this message, from the normalisation of the sex industry via the explosion of lap-dancing clubs throughout Britain to magazines directed at girls that “relentlessly encourage their readers to measure up to a raft of celebrities whose doll-like looks are seen as iconic and whose punishing physical regimes are seen as aspirational.”

Girls today, says Walter, think sexual confidence is the only confidence worth having and will do anything to achieve the mandated appearance… the information I found most distressing was how young women feel obliged to shape themselves according to the expectations of the idealised female their boyfriends have acquired from pornography…

All this is especially germane because 10 years ago Walter wrote a book The New Feminism that argued that feminists should not be concerned about the growing sexual objectification of women…Walter has now changed her mind. Big time.

Summers goes on to say that she finds the material in Walter’s book “sobering” and “challenging”.

While I find it somewhat difficult to understand how so many prominent women actively working to raise the status of women failed to notice  the wrecking ball impacts of a pornified culture which constricts the freedom of women and girls by reducing them to sexy dolls while dressing it all up as ‘choice’, I am glad they see it now.

But while Summers started so well, her conclusion is unfortunate – and wrong.

She writes: “No one — not Walter, not me — wants to be thought a prude, so no one is going to actually take on the hypersexualised culture that is supposedly spoiling the life chances of girls today…”

Summers had “no idea”, as she says, about what was happening.  But is seems she also has “no idea” about the global movement against it.

No one is going to take on the hypersexualised culture? That’s a big call and contradicted by the facts.

There are many of us who have taken it on. Some key players appear in my book Getting Real: Challenging the sexualisation of girls (one of a number of books on the subject in recent years, including Living Dolls, The Sexualisation of Childhood, The Lolita Effect, So Sexy So Soon, Pornified, What’s Happening to Our Girls?, Female Chauvinist Pigs, Bodies, etc). Then there’s  Kids free 2B Kids, the Australian Council on Children and Media, The Australian Childhood Foundation, Choices for Children, and the dynamic new counter cultural agitator movement Collective Shout: for a world free of sexploitation (www.collectiveshout.org).

Then there are individuals who have come together to lobby for change, including Julie Gale, Maggie Hamilton, The Hon Alistair Nicholson, Steve Biddulph, Dr Michael Carr-Gregg, Noni Hazlehurst, Professor Clive Hamilton, Dr Emma Rush, Professor Louise Newman, Dr Cordelia Fine, Dr Renate Klein and others.  We are all part of a global movement against sexualisation/objectification, led overseas by activists, advocates and academics such as Dr. Jean Kilbourne, Dr Diane Levin, Professor Gail Dines, Professor Ros Gill, Professor Catharine A. MacKinnon, Dr Melissa Farley, the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood in the US, Object and Pink Stinks in the UK, and many others. The American Psychological Association’s Taskforce on the sexualisation of girls took the issue on, with a major report, and more recently, the UK Home Office, with a compelling examination of the problem.

Propelled by evidence of harm, all have acted together to bring about change. They haven’t given a stuff about being labelled “prudes” or anything else, recognising the vested interests at play that would try to shut them down.

Given the major battles Summers has engaged in over decades, I would have thought she was made of sterner stuff.

Women buying men for sex is not equality

Women, we’ve arrived. We’re equal now with men. The conditions for equality have been met. Am I talking about political, social and financial equality? No.

Access to maternity leave, child care, the opportunity to balance work and family life? No. The ability to live free from harassment and sexual bullying. No.

We know we are empowered because now we can buy men like they buy women. Men can be prostituted to provide sexual services for women. Here is proof of our newly won freedom: we can participate in the sexual objectification of men in the same way we have been objectified through history.

Free from restriction, the sex industry is now open to all. And there’s lots of pseudo-feminist rhetoric to make us all feel good about it. It’s all there in a piece in The Age, which reads like a free plug for a new male escort service (”She needs more Melbourne-based men and older men, in their late 30s and 40s”).

But just because it’s women doing the buying — and the pimping — doesn’t make it liberating. Being able to trade in human flesh doesn’t mean that emulating the sexual behaviour of men and their sense of entitlement to women’s bodies, is progress.

This move is part of a capitalist celebration of the female sexual consumer who can choose to buy dildos, botox, pole-dancing classes, new breasts, Brazilians, surgically altered and coloured labias – and men. These are the tokens of our emancipation? This is what ”freedom of choice” has delivered?

This is a parody of liberation in which women become a mere participant in a mass-marketed orgy of so-called sexual freedom.

I do have some sympathy, however, with the argument that women cannot find men they want to be with intimately. In our pornified culture we are raising men who are callous and insensitive to the needs and desires of women. We knock tenderness out of them with a diet of brutality from the earliest of ages. Boys’ role models are celebrities and sporting figures who see women as conquests, there for the taking.

But buying a man won’t fix that. It is a reflection of distance, disconnection, a lack of intimacy and a subtraction of emotion from sex.

And it’s dishonest to tell women who want something more than a quick $500 f— that they can have ”the whole boyfriend experience” — hair stroked, hand held and even a walk in the park with her, her kids and her dog. For a mere $1200-$1500 a day. That’s a lot of money for simulated intimacy. That’s a pretend boyfriend, not a real one. How does that ”make a woman feel special”?

Hiring prostitutes remains fundamentally a male preserve, which is why we don’t see huge line-ups of women wanting to buy the bodies of boys and men. When women pay men for sex, it doesn’t have the same social effect because there is no history of women enslaving men, the porn industry is still primarily driven by men’s sexual demands. And there’s no social construction of men as sluts who enjoy their own degradation.

The rise of male ”escort” services reflects a devaluation of sex because of the primacy of exchange and commodification of another person.

All we’re seeing with this new men-for-sale business is the democratisation of objectification. Buying and selling male or female bodies for sex will always be reducing them to a means to an end; a denial of their full humanity.

Published today online in the National Times.

Youth Minister Kate Ellis wrote a terrific endorsement for my book Getting Real: challenging the sexualisation of girls. I was – and am – very grateful to her for doing so. Ms Ellis wrote:

Young women and girls today face extraordinary pressures to meet body image expectations that are unhealthy, unhelpful and unrealistic. The contributors to this book make a valuable contribution to an important national debate on how we can help young women to grow up with a healthy self-image and with the freedom and strength to be their real selves.

I believe the Minister is sincere in her commitment to addressing this issue. But her photo shoot for Grazia – which goes on sale today – raises questions about whether her message needs to be more consistent and whether there are a few dots still to be joined up.

Lydia Turner, a Sydney psychologist specialising in eating disorder prevention and who I’ve published here before argues that the Grazia shoot is problematic on a number of levels: sending conflicting messages about body image, encouraging judgement and surveillance of other women’s bodies and reducing a member of parliament to her sexual desirability.

Yet again we’ve seen another body image blunder pushed into the spotlight with Minister for Youth, Kate Ellis, donning tight-fitting leather clothes and dominatrix-style 8-inch heels in a bid to improve body image in Australian women.

According to the Courier Mail in the shoot done on an athletics track in her electorate of Adelaide, the 32-year-old minister sports a pair of killer $1790 Gucci heels and a curve-hugging $695 leather Karen Millen dress and looks more like a runway model than a Member of Parliament.

“I really enjoyed it!” she said of the experience. “I didn’t think it would be so much fun – I didn’t want it to stop.”

Celebrity magazine, Grazia, had approached Ellis to model for its annual ’Body Image Special’. They thought she would say no. She gave an “enthusiastic yes.”

Grazia tells us Ellis was voted the sexiest MP by her male colleagues and recently “chuckled” when invited to pose for lads mag Zoo.

Ellis said her reason for modelling was to “spark a debate on body image” (she said similar when posing in a bikini for The Daily Telegraph not too long ago). She wanted to draw attention to the results of the body image survey in Grazia. But something just doesn’t sit right.

When Ellis was asked whether or not her images were airbrushed, she dodged the question, replying that she had made her views about airbrushing “clear” to the magazine editors. Ellis avoided disclosing whether or not the images were airbrushed, yet disclosure of airbrushed images was one of the key recommendations put forward by the National Advisory Board on Body Image – a board Ellis initiated.

Flipping through the magazine, it’s hard to understand how Grazia’s editors could possibly think they were doing women any body image favours – and harder to understand why Ellis would want to support a magazine like this.

The cover itself shouts “Jen: You voted her BEST BODY. Posh: You voted her TOO THIN. Beyonce: You voted her KEEPING CURVY COOL.” On page 16, four female celebrities are lined up side-by-side, each with numbers scrawled across their image indicating the percentage of readers who approve of their bodies. Beyonce scores a lousy 13%.

Yet when discussing the results of the body image survey, the headline of the article screams “Why are we our own worst enemies? 71% of [women] judge other women based on their bodies” as though it was oblivious to fact that it actively promotes women monitoring and surveillencing other women’s bodies.

In her opening editorial, Editor-in-Chief Alison Veness-McGourty announces that “curves are back” and that women should rush out to buy pencil skirts so they won’t have to be “endlessly watching [their] weight.” Yet the top four out of five most popular articles listed on Grazia’s website focus on dieting. Fad dieting. Dieting to make you “thin by Friday.”

Throughout the ‘Body Image Special’, article after article features celebrities talking about why they loathe their bodies. Sienna Miller confesses that she is “all in favour of airbrushing” and that in ten years time she will “probably be stuffed full of botox and fillers … with fake lips!” How is this supposed to be empowering?

While Ellis says she intends to “work with industry” to improve women’s body image, it’s difficult to imagine how effective this approach might be given that the fashion industry’s profits are significantly inflated by instilling a sense of inadequacy in its consumers. It is also unlikely that a voluntary code of conduct will ever be adhered to.

How will corporations agree to something that runs contrary to their profit margins? Just look at the Weight Council of Australia. It is a voluntary body that requires businesses in the weight loss industry to adhere to a set of guidelines, designed to protect the health of Australians and the quality of weight loss product. Of the tens of thousands of weight loss businesses in Australia, only five are members.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone when Grazia quotes Jennifer Aniston, “looking good is the best revenge!”. But what is Ellis doing supporting this tokenistic stunt? Having recommended, through her National Advisory Board, that a diverse range of body sizes and shapes should be portrayed in magazines, it is rather odd to then engage in a photoshoot that upholds current beauty standards and allowing images of oneself that are most likely airbrushed. Perhaps she just wants to look glamorous in a fashion shoot but needs to cover it in tokenistic body image/self-esteem jargon?

Perhaps most frustrating is that young, smart, high-profile women are routinely subjected to sexualised scrutiny, regardless of their profession. Natasha Stott-Despoja, Stephanie Rice, Julia Gillard, Penny Wong, Gabriella Cilmi – who recently stripped to “prove” she’s “all grown up” – the list is endless.

One of the functions of sexualising powerful women is that they become less threatening. Their abilities fade into the background while whether they are ‘hot-or-not’ becomes the only focus.

It seems the message girls and women are continually sent is that until you’re hot, you don’t count. Girl With a Satchel Erica Bartle summed it up well when she wrote, “…even smart MPs have to fit the fashion mould to become successful”.

Instead of giving in to the pressure to sexualise herself, Ellis could have taken the offer to pose for Zoo and later Grazia, as opportunities to speak out against the pressures on women to consent to objectification. She could have highlighted this as a problematic message sent to girls.

How awkward would it be if you found out that all the men in your workplace had voted you the sexiest worker? If every time you spoke you had to worry about whether they were actually paying attention or just checking out your breasts? Your boss would be strapped for sexual harassment for handing out the survey to begin with.

Yet Ellis accepted the ‘honour’ of being voted sexiest and has allowed herself to be presented in a sexualised manner. And she still wants to be taken seriously as a MP with a portfolio caring for young people.

‘Mick of Brisbane’ provides an example of how some men see the Grazia shots. He commented online in the Courier Mail April 4: 

“She is the sexiest politician I have ever seen!!! I wonder if she would do a photo shoot for Penthouse? With all funds raised going to the community of course!!! I think she could pull off a centrefold with ease!!!”

Yes, Mick, as long as it’s for a good cause. So many of the comments posted in response to Ellis’ photoshoot have been about whether she is ‘hot or not.” Because that’s what counts.

There are no easy solutions to our current plague of body image problems. At the same time, none of us should have to put up with faux attempts to put things right. Grazia is merely giving the appearance of wanting to empower women. Ellis’ participation only upholds existing beauty standards while catering to the sexual fantasies of men.

Given that girls and women are already taught that their worth is measured by how sexually desirable they are, having our youth minister reiterate that message just trivialises an issue she seems to care deeply about.

Emma Rush, who co-wrote the Australia Institute reports Corporate Paedophilia: The sexualisation of children in Australia and Letting Children be Children: Stopping the sexualisation of children in Australia  and who I’ve published here before, wrote a response to a piece by Emma Tom in The Australian last weekend. It didn’t get published there, but it will get published here.

It is a matter of grave concern that children continue to suffer sexual abuse, and in large numbers. And it is understandable that survivors such as Emma Tom (The Australian, March 20) have strong opinions about what does and does not cause child sexual abuse. But her suggestion that the sexualisation of children has no impact on the prevalence of child sexual abuse is at odds with the views of Australian leaders in child health, welfare and development. 

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Dannielle Miller from Enlighten Education, who I’ve run here before, has blogged on Channel 10 and its allegedly PG-rated show ‘So you think you can dance’. It brought to mind a clip I saw last week of Pamela Anderson on ‘Dancing With the Stars’. The male judge , totally beside himself, shouted: “All I could think about was sex, sex and more sex!” I don’t recall him saying anything  about her dancing ability. Maybe that’s irrelevant. Maybe she’ll win.

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“I was startled by what some young women were saying to me about their inability to access dissent; their inability to hear voices that were presenting an alternative” – Natasha Walter

I’m half way through Natasha Walter’s new book Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism. It is a compelling read, laying bare the forces of sexualisation, objectification and raunch culture and their destructive influence on the health and wellbeing of women and girls everywhere. So much of the book echoes the findings of Getting Real: Challenging the sexualisation of girls. It is encouraging to see a coalescing of global concern around the pornification of culture and it’s wrecking ball impact on girls’ lives.

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Nice to know I’m not the only one with a negative critique  (also published in On Line Opinion Friday)of the Lady Gaga machine. Here’s an extract from a piece by Jim Schumacher and Debbie Bookchin titled ‘What’s Next From Lady Gaga: A snuff film?’  recently published on Huffington Post:

What if glitzy Lady Gaga is exactly what she appears to be: The latest manifestation of a culture industry that pushes the boundaries of civility and sexuality to the extreme in order to make a buck? And worse, pushes it on our kids long before they want or need to be presented with some middle-aged ad executive’s personal sadomasochistic sexual fantasies?

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US pop juggernaut Lady Gaga is bursting on to Australian stages this week. The much hyped tour began in Sydney last night with the first of 13 all but sold-out concerts.

The 24-year-old New Yorker, christened Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, has sold eight million albums. While she’s here, we’ll hear all about how she’s avant-garde. Cutting edge. Risque. Experimental. Transgressive.

But Lady Gaga isn’t pushing boundaries. She’s a conformist. This is demonstrated in the nine-minute video clip for her new hit single, Telephone. It’s revered by frenzied Gaga lovers across the globe as the next Thriller. Popular blogger Mia Freedman, recently lamenting the sexualisation of girls, “adores” it. It’s filed under “cool clips” on her blog.

But the clip endorses and entrenches some of the worst stereotypes about women and sexuality. And littering the film with a range of brands suggests Gaga and the media moguls who run her empire are more about profit than art.

Her clip, viewed millions of times since last week’s release, is set in a women’s prison filled with prostitute-styled nasty girls. As one yells: “Gonna make you swim outta here in your own blood!” (how adorable), Gaga is thrown into a cell by two tough female guards and stripped. Naked, she throws herself against the cell bars. Her barely pixilated genitals and breasts are freeze-framed. Her boyfriend calls but she tells him she’s “kinda busy right now”, then cavorts with her sexy inmates in skimpy bra and knickers. Some argue this is the radical bit. She wants to be herself and have “fun with the girls” and not be bothered by a man.

This fun includes watching two jailbirds fight, one kicking in the other’s head with her stilettos and punching her in the face as inmates cheer. It includes being submissive to a heavily tattooed butch lesbian (I hate to spoil the surprise, but she’s in leather) in the prison yard, who touches Gaga up while pulling a mobile out of her pants. Cue lingering camera shot on Virginmobile.

If Gaga is so radically different, why is her clip one big advertisement? Virginmobile, Polaroid, LG, Diet Coke, some kind of fast-food something. Pro-Gaga cultural analysts respond that this is an ironic take on the power of capitalism and advertising. “Give us more irony!” say the corporations.

Our heroine is then bailed out (by Beyonce, no less) who tells her: “You’ve been a bad bad girl, Gaga.” Did you get the S & M reference? How daring.

They then go on a mass poisoning spree (Beyonce’s breasts make a special appearance) before driving off Thelma and Louise style, although T and L didn’t have “Pussy Wagon” sprayed across the back of their car, a yellow Chevrolet Silverado SS borrowed from Kill Bill: Volume 1. That’s where all the cool Quentin Tarantino references come in. It really is one big Macy’s parade mess of Midnight Express meets Kill Bill meets Thelma and Louise meets Zoo magazine meets Pulp Fiction meets Martha Stewart on crack. All these pop-culture references make it a masterpiece, apparently.

The clip is just one more thing catering to pornographic male fantasies, part of a broader cultural story being read by young people forming their understanding of relationships and sexuality.

Women, aka bitches, love being violent to other bitches. Girl-on-girl action, lesbian cliches. Nakedness. Voyerism. Exhibitionism. Objectification. It’s a carnival of spread legs and pubes shaved to within an inch of the performer’s life and inanimate objects as phallic symbols. Because, as we know, women can’t help sucking things that have any distant resemblance to the male organ. And what’s so counter-cultural about groin-emphasising costumes, shredded fishnet stockings and a leopard-skin body suit? That has never been done before?

This is not about being edgy. It’s about playing to sex industry-inspired scripts. Fetishising sexual violence isn’t all that imaginative. It’s standard fare.

The film ends with the feminist symbol. Now this is audacious. In attaching this liberation symbol to her video, the film sends a deceptive message about what feminism is. Is not answering the phone to be seen as some radically defiant act? Does feminism mean violence is so democratised that women are free to hurt each other and men as well? Is baring your body the way you strike a blow for women? Is taking a ride on a disco stick a sign of true womanhood?

That’s what some women think the film is about. One wrote in an online forum about the clip: “What’s wrong with a girl having her boobs out in a confident and completely sexy, self-assured way?” And another wrote: “Gaga’s clip shouts girl power with its nakedness.”

Gaga is contributing to the distorted, one-dimensional cultural script about girls and women that is spread with zeal under a veneer of liberation. It not only constricts their freedom but takes the focus off what needs to happen for true freedom to be realised.

Published in 

Melinda Tankard Reist is editor of Getting Real: Challenging the Sexualisation of Girls and a founder of Collective Shout: for a world free of s*xploitation (www.collectiveshout.org).

On the weekend – on the eve of International Women’s Day – I wrote about a Facebook slut page, arguing it enabled cyber bullying, stalking and harassment. On the page, photos were posted of girls and women who were labelled ’sluts’. One was 10-years-old. Another had been bashed (she deserved it, she was a slut). A later image showed a woman bound, with her head decapitated. Many were just smiling young women at home or having fun with girlfriends. And so it went on, image after image of girls and women branded with this virtual scarlet letter.

The piece got a run in On Line Opinion today.

It appears that Facebook has responded to criticism. The site has been removed. Thanks to all who reported it.

 Of course, that’s not the last of the bullies. Dannielle Miller from Enlighten Education blogged on bullying and social networking sites this week. You can read her piece here. 

 My friend Anita had her own experience with on-line abusers this week, who demanded their entitlement to child pornography. Anita set up a Facebook site to find 3 billion people willing to add their voice to a global campaign against child porn. The site was inundated with comments by men extolling the pleasures of child rape and posting links to child porn. (She has removed them). Please support Anita’s efforts against the production of and demand for child sexual assault images and sign up.  

Below is a comment on my original blog  by Merryn Smith. It’s so good I wanted to give it more prominence.  

“I think the problem with social networking sites and a great deal of internet is that people assume that it merely reflects socio/cultural reality. Actually it produces reality, as does all discourse. So it’s easy to reduce the meanings generated by groups like these as mere ‘words’. Hence men (and a small proportion of young naive girls) always call forth the freedom of speech argument to conceal one of purposes of this type of ‘othering’ discourse. Women are the largest group that are targeted as the ‘other’ inhuman ‘thing’ through this type of ancient discursive act. But of course ethnic groups and the working classes are also kept in place through these ‘othering’ discourses. This is of course about power. The power to dehumanise comes hand in hand with physical acts of violence. But we know that young women suffer terribly high rates of domestic violence and sexual assault in our cultures. Yes these groups reflect that, but they also produce a cultural climate and language that condones, encourages and applauds the dehumanisation of half of the worlds population. Of course these groups hide behind notions of freedom and the separation of bodily acts and psychological acts, or body and mind, body and speech. But of course these young men and boys (mostly) are passing through their right of passage-their right to dehumanise woman and girls. This is how men bond. It is through the ‘othering’ process that makes them feel that they belong. We need to fight this by creating spaces for young women where they can ‘go’, real and virtual, where they are not used as a symbol of male belonging and bonding. We need to create spaces where woman and girls (especially girls) can create their own embodied and disembodied world realities. But it aint easy. Happy Women’s Day…”

 

Just because it’s almost International Women’s Day, doesn’t mean a woman shouldn’t be reminded of her rightful place.

She may have overcome innumerable workplace obstacles to get where she is today. She may be allowed to join the boys in the boardroom. But that doesn’t mean her primary role has changed. She is still valued for her ability to turn them on.

This role of catering for a man’s sexual fantasies is central to the Crazy Domain advertisement made by The Brand Agency in Perth. The ad depicts a male work colleague drooling over Pamela Anderson (ooh porn-star-as-office-seductress, how original) and her assistant. Both women are wearing tight fitting business suits with lace trimmed cleavage revealed.

One of the men fantasises about the two women cavorting in gold bikinis while milk (get it) is sloshed all over them. When he snaps back into reality from his dairy spraying spree, the assistant leans forward asking him if he would like “cream” in his coffee. Because even in real life, it’s the women who pour his beverages. Naturally he gets a face full of breast as she bends over him.

As a result of complaints, the Advertising Standards Board has told the company to remove the ads. The web hosting company is now complaining, blaming “feminist bloggers” for stirring up a fuss. Of course, no-one else cares less, just those crazy feminist bloggers. Go Feminist Bloggers.

Crazy Domains managing director Gavin Collins said the decision made “no sense and is completely un-Australian”. Because, you see, the Australian thing to do is to present women as imposters in the boardroom who distract men from very important work with their seductive ways, leading them down fantasy lane as it rains milk and cream.

I do agree with Gav though about the inconsistencies of the ASB in allowing other sexist ads such as recent one for Coke depicting a woman covered in chocolate and whipped cream and Lynx (who haven’t met a sexist stereotype they don’t like) with their airhostesses meeting every male need.