http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article7015560.ece
Today's sexually aggressive young women are not betraying feminism,
but enjoying its greatest achievement choice
Antonia Senior
February 5, 2010
There it was, nuzzling up to the A to Zs in a newspaper stand at
Embankment station. The Adult Guide to London. It sat there, waiting
for a casual commuter, or a tourist, to say: "I'll have an Evening
Standard, a packet of chewing gum, and a user's guide to London's
tarts please. Oh, and a Kit Kat."
The Adult Guide to London's website is an extraordinarily detailed
guide to our capital's boys and girls in the service industry. I
gleaned that much in the furtive ten seconds that I had it open on my
work computer, expecting sirens to go off as the paper's internet
police abseiled into my office screaming: "Pervert!".
We are constantly bombarded by sex in newsagents, online, in lurid
headlines. Young women prowl in sexually aggressive packs and dress
like on-duty hookers. They appropriate the language of 1970s feminism
to describe their sexual excesses lapdancing is empowering,
sleeping around liberating.
The term "raunch culture" was coined by the writer Ariel Levy to
describe this sexual saturation. The latest feminist to be troubled
by this hypersexualised version of femininity is Natasha Walter, in
her elegant and thought-provoking new book, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism.
Feminism has a problem with women who spray themselves orange,
enlarge their breasts, squeeze into Lycra and chase footballers
around clubs. Their existence is a blight on the intellectual
tradition of feminism. Its pioneers never imagined that their
granddaughters would use their freedom to sprawl on pavements,
hairless, botoxed, siliconed, sprayed and buffed, vodka-vomit
dribbling into the gutter.
But modern woman is not only this creature who emerges on weekend
nights, feral and tanked up. She has a job and economic freedom to
order her own life. She can leave an abusive or useless husband. She
has rights over her own children. She can choose to be educated, or
not. She can be who she wants, decide whom to love, wear what pleases her.
We have become transfixed by the first version of womanhood the
living dolls and forgotten to celebrate the second. It's too easy
to view raunch culture as a mark of failure of the whole feminist project.
The most important achievement of the women's movement is the triumph
of choice. Women have free will, and the power to exercise it. For
all its successes, feminism has failed to rid women of the burden of
being sex objects, because lots of women, some of the time, like
being sex objects.
The voluntary burka wearer and the enthusiastic glamour model present
feminism with a similar conundrum. Is a women objectified if she
chooses to be a sex object? Is a woman oppressed if she chooses to
adhere to a patriarchal ideology?
In the fight against raunch culture there are two troubling relics of
a 1970s-style feminism at play. The first is the idea that all women
are potential victims. The second is that if women are victims, men
are the enemy, and their natural inclination is to form themselves
into an evil patriarchy. This credits men with more organisational
capacity to be Machiavellian than they collectively possess. Besides,
men have, on the whole, been pretty decent about the feminism project.
In Ancient Sparta, if the Helots revolted they were killed without
trial. Women, men's domestic chattels for millennia, revolted 50
years ago, and Western men have relinquished their hegemony. We
needn't be pathetically grateful, but we could be a little less suspicious.
The women's movement is hobbled by lumpy, lazy generalisations. Not
all women who work in the sex industry are coerced; not all women who
want to marry a footballer are betraying the sisterhood. Human nature
is more complicated and men and women's experiences are more textured
than the ideology allows for.
In a discussion this week on feminism in the 21st century on Night
Waves on Radio 3, I argued that there has never been a better time or
place to be a woman. Kat Banyard, author of The Equality Illusion,
disagreed, saying you wouldn't think that if you were one of the many
women raped in the past year. Clearly there is never a good time or
place to be raped. But proponents of the new feminism espouse the
view that if any women, anywhere, are oppressed, all women's
liberation is a myth.
There are huge issues about the role of women in non-Western
societies; but propagating the myth that our crusade to be liberated
has been soured by raunch culture or the sexual crimes of some men
does not help. We cannot force liberation on non-Western women who do
not believe they need liberating; we can, however, shout about our successes.
Men have always been interested in looking at women as sexual
objects. Samuel Pepys spent his Sundays roaming London's churches
looking for women to fantasise about and accidentally frot. Fifty
years ago he would have spent his Sundays locked in a shed with a
copy of Penthouse. Today, he'd be in the study "checking his e-mails".
Some men have always paid for sex, and some always will. The Adult
Guide to London follows in a long tradition. Its most famous
precursor is Jack Harris's bestselling List of Covent Garden Ladies,
an 18th-century guide to London's brothels, which describes the women
in detail and with relish.
What an exhausting waste of time it is to bewail the existence of
prostitution and pornography. We should concentrate instead on
distinguishing between those women violently forced into the sex
industry and those who choose to join it. The idea that economic
pressure takes away women's free will is adolescent there are
always other ways to make money, just not necessarily as much. The
exuberant honesty of today's sexualised society ought to make these
distinctions easier to make, not harder.
And, by the way, lots of those girls who choose to spend a few
careless years of their youth drinking themselves ragged and shagging
around are, frankly, having a marvellous time.
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