British feminist Natasha Walter says it was more acceptable to complain about sexism in the 80s than it is today. Have women really sacrificed feminism for “fake nails, fake tan and, finally, fake breasts?”
According to a profile by Kira Cochrane of the Guardian, Walter once believed feminists could ignore women’s “private lives: how women made love, how they dressed, whom they desired . . . I believed that we only had to put in place the conditions for equality for the remnants of the old-fashioned sexism in our culture to wither away.” But it didn’t wither — Walter now thinks it may have flourished. She’s written a book called Living Dolls (we wrote about one excerpt from the Times of London), and she tells Cochrane,
You know, when I was at university [in the 80s] it was OK to be annoyed about sexism, to take it quite seriously – if you argued about it, it didn’t make you the subject of mockery. Even if you didn’t particularly identify yourself as a feminist, you could choose where you wanted to be on a spectrum, and you could still say, ‘I really don’t want Page 3 in the common room,’ or, ‘I really hate the idea of porn’ . . . I was surprised when I was interviewing young women that they felt uncomfortable engaging in that way. Of course, a lot them would say, ‘It’s fine, we can choose whether to [interact with the sexist culture] or not,’ and then you dig a little deeper, and you realise that it is more problematic than that.
Cochrane paraphrases the thesis of Living Dolls thus:
Walter takes on the notion that, for example, stripping and pole dancing are empowering, liberating choices; instead, she suggests, it has become increasingly difficult for young women to opt out of this culture, to take any path other than that which leads inexorably to fake nails, fake tan and, finally, fake breasts. And, if they do, there are serious social penalties.
Were these penalties imposed by a society threatened by the successes of feminism? Walter seems to think so — Cochrane writes that her book is “an anatomy of regression, of a culture that has responded to the assent of women with a reassertion of sexist values: the objectification of young women, the suggestion that men and women are simply programmed to behave in certain ways, and that inequality is therefore inevitable.” Certainly these sexist values will be familiar to anyone who’s picked up a magazine lately — it doesn’t have to be Maxim, since pop evolutionary psychology has injected the gender programming argument into articles on everything from relationships to weight. And the rise of pole-dance-power has been documented by Ariel Levy and others. But have things really gotten worse?