Lament for a lost ideal

SOCIETY: KATHY SHERIDANreviews Living Dolls: The Return of Sexismby Natasha Walter, Virago, 273pp, £12.99

THIS BOOK is not about sex, or its ubiquity. It is not about the latest trashy label for sexually active, older women (Cougars, eh? And now folks, for a crate of Viagra, give us the popular zoo label for Jack Nicholson and his many elderly, paunchy ilk ? You’re right. There isn’t one). It is not about the behaviour of any particular class, since the theme affects all of us profoundly.

The subtitle of a book should describe the theme but this one is bound to turn off at least half the potential readership and Living Dollsis far too important to confine to a niche. So I'll describe it at one level as a lament for a lost ideal: that emancipation brings responsibility. At another, it is confirmation that across the decades, women have shown a staggering ability to turn their liberation into self-exploitation. Ask anyone who has cringed past the queue for a young Wesley disco night in Dublin, or been distracted by the female bum in a thong on a huge advertising banner in Donnybrook, or seen a teenager in a T-shirt proclaiming herself "Tight like spandex", or watched a rap video or seen a mother smile proudly as her precocious 10-year-old does a chest-thrusting, booty-shaking, rendition of Britany Spears' Toxic ("With a taste of your lips/I'm on a ride") at her daddy's 50th birthday party.

Above all, Living Dollschallenges the prevailing dogma that this is liberation, innit? That doing an amusing pole-dance – but not before acquiring your orange tan/Brazilian wax/ fake boob job, then getting it on with the girls to arouse the boys before delivering a blow job under the table – somehow amounts to empowerment.

Walter interviews a graduate called Ellie, brought up to believe she could do whatever she wanted, but after hitting desperate times, decided to audition for a lap dancing club. After eyeing up this nice little money-earner – standing there, with her clothes off, holding the pole – the hirers were succinct: “Shave your pubes, get a fake tan, sort out your nails, dye your hair, pluck your eyebrows and come back next week. . .”

In the UK, where lap dancing clubs have become a high street feature, Ellie – like most of her generation there and here – had picked up the message that lap dancing was pretty straight-forward, even empowering, for the women who do it.

The demeaning, dehumanising reality was a shock. “There’s something about the club – the lights, the make-up, the clothes you wear, those huge platform heels, the way that so many women have fake boobs. You look like cartoons. You give yourself a fake girlie name, like a doll. You’re encouraged to look like dolls. No wonder men don’t see you as people.”

And if you are not seen as a person, then what are you? Clearly, this is about more that the popular, laisser-fairedoctrine of personal choice. If this compliant, body-hairless, orange, plastic "doll", this humanoid fantasy, has become the feminine ideal for a generation of boys, how does that impact on their female peers? In what way is this empowering? And in whose interest is it to promote that image?

Ellie found out painfully that dolling up her lovely young body every night, to gyrate around a beam in order to give a hard-on to a procession of grubby drunks wasn’t exactly the sexy, power trip promised by popular culture. So why do privileged women – such a hoot for Kate Moss and bored yummy mummies – boast about taking pole-dancing lessons? Why are women once again being programmed to locate their self-worth exclusively in their tits’n’asses? Why have men come to need or expect such pyrotechnics from sex partners ?

Is it because women are now conditioned to accept the porn aesthetic as the norm?

This is of more than academic interest.

The sex industry and its mainstream cheerleaders impact on us all. Ellen O’Malley Dunlop of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre has noted a “direct correlation” between the increased availability of pornography and the rising levels of appalling degradation and violence in sexual assault and rape. Within adult relationships, women are being confronted with porn and told they’re frigid if they refuse to emulate what they see on screen. Walter quotes a 2006 survey which found that a quarter of men aged 25 to 49 had viewed online hardcore pornography in the previous month and that nearly 40 per cent had viewed porn sites in the previous year. Four years on, those figures are undoubtedly huge under-estimates.

Walter is realistic. She holds to her long-standing belief that not all pornography inevitably degrades women: “I do see that the classic feminist critique of pornography is too simplistic to embrace the great range of explicit sexual materials and people’s reaction to them”.

But let’s be honest, she says: “The overuse of pornography does threaten many erotic relationships and this is a growing problem. What’s more, too much pornography does still rely on or promote the exploitation or abuse of women. Even if you can find porn for women and couples on the internet, nevertheless a vein of real contempt for women characterizes so much pornography”.

And that’s just the adults. What effect is it likely to have on children, armed with their personal, permanently on-line laptops and iPhones?

A Canadian study showed that 90 per cent of boys and 70 per cent of girls aged 13 and 14 had viewed pornography. “Reality sex” emails – sometimes featuring gang rapes – often filmed and disseminated by schoolchildren, ping regularly into the phones and inboxes of other children.

“The voyeur’s view of sex has been normalized, even for children,” writes Walter. Before they have even touched another person intimately, many will have seen hundreds of strangers having dead-eyed sex with panting, dead-eyed dolls. What will they know of intimacy and sexual tenderness when they hit their adult years?

The ripples are deep and far-reaching. A final year university student on a Guardian comment site talks about “club nights called ‘Open your legs’, club competitions where girls get on stage and demonstrate sexual positions for a free drink, fancy dress nights entitled ‘Hookers and Policeman’ and ‘Tennis hoes and tennis pros’. Women who engage in this objectification promote it.

And while you can pose all sorts of arguments about choice, it is important to remember how hard it is to go against the grain – so hard that most people do not fight a political cause, but stay silent. Far easier and socially acceptable for a young woman or girl to partake in the usual ritual of short skirts, low cut tops, self-objectification and casual sex than be labelled a prude and a spoil sport.”

But the conviction that this is empowering and liberating is deeply entrenched. Worse, some influential female voices seem to regard it as a) inevitable and/or b) a well-earned smack in the mouth to feminists foolish enough to dream that when emancipation was achieved, old-fashioned sexism would wither away.

Guardiancolumnist, Deborah Orr, argues that "feminists are disappointed in the behaviour of emancipated women, because they just didn't understand very much about how women who were not committed to feminism might behave, given emancipation.

“In an interview, Walter said she was inspired to write her book by a young woman who confessed she found it hard to find the courage to criticise the routine submission to male fantasy that her peers engaged in. Fair enough. Many women do feel that way. But many other women are happy to achieve validation via their ability to arouse the sexual interest of men. This sort of behaviour is not just the fantasy of (some) males, but of (some) females too. Some people, whatever their gender, simply have very crude, even deluded, ideas about what constitutes a fun time. That’s just one of many human facts that feminism, for all its manifest virtues, overlooked.”

This is a classic example of setting up a straw man (or woman) merely to knock it down. The existence of a certain attitude, regardless of the number of people who engage with it, hardly validates that attitude. Is it not enough to have the passion and insights to form a conviction, then the courage, determination, energy and intellect to get out there and do the research and write the book that starts a debate? Or is that way too elitist a concept? In any event, what do the hoary old arguments matter when the "young woman" referred to by Orr – actually a child of 17 – told Walter that until she came upon a column of hers, she was in despair: "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, airbrushed piece of plastic was in Nutsthis week. What you said gave me back the will not to give in. . . It's nice to see someone else saying it, makes me feel like less of a prude-type oddball."

But how can a 17-year-old – still less a 13-year-old – be expected to stand up for herself, if even grown-up, female, national newspaper columnists are hesitant to admit that something deeply corrosive is eating away at the whole of society ?

And what about the women who – in Orr’s word – “are happy to achieve validation via their ability to arouse the sexual interest of men”, who in other words, make the choice to validate themselves via their breasts and vagina? Who believes that all those women buying into the Jordanesque raunch culture are truly happy in their choices?

A quick glance at the levels of eating disorders, grotesque cosmetic surgery (the latest manifestation of which is labiaplasty, designed to give women’s genitals a porn-like, air-brushed appearance) and sexually-transmitted diseases, should be a hint.

Add to that a recent NSPCC (UK) report on the violence experienced by teenage girls within relationships.

The off-putting subtitle of Walter's book is Return of Sexism. "It's as though something crept in by the back door – and we turned around and it's everywhere, and you just think, 'OK, we've got to deal with this again", she explains in an interview.

But you don’t have to be a marauding, feminist harpie to see that the dolls (and their puppeteers) are on the march. This book may not be long on answers, but it is required reading for everyone who cares about our humanity, and that means all of us.

Kathy Sheridan is an Irish Timesjournalist