Burlesque - empowering or problematic for feminists?

I got to thinking about cultural phenemona that regularly get condemned as anti-feminist yet are largely supported by women, when I went to see *that film* recently in order to review it. Sitting in the cinema on a freezing, windy, wet British Friday morning, I noticed that I was surrounded by women. Some couples, but the audience was at least 85% female, if not more. Women of all ages, from 18 to at least 65. Women of all races, all shapes and sizes, varying socioeconomic backgrounds, all united in a desire to see the film of *that book* and find out what all the fuss was about. Some might have been there for that sole reason, others because they genuinely enjoyed the book and thought they would enjoy the film. Those who were there with their partners may have expected the film to enhance their erotic life, or simply give them something to laugh about as a couple. Others, like myself, may have been there as cultural commentators (with admittedly a little personal curiosity thrown in), trying to report on *that film* in a way that avoided lazy condemnation, pearl-clutching or snobbery. I saw very quickly that it was going to be women who made or broke this film, and if this audience - plus the opening weekend stats - were anything to go by, women were going to make it a roaring success.

This made me think about how, despite their strength as a consumer group, women are still strangely often treated as a minority group, or a "special interest". When they do come out in force and make a book or a film a huge success, it's given a patronising label ("chick flick" "mommy porn" anyone?) and treated as a trivial, fluffy, empty-headed preoccupation. And, perhaps more disappointingly (because we at least expect sexist dismissal from the mainstream media), it's sometimes treated with disdain or outright hostility by feminists too. 

I talk at length in my review of *that film* about how I feel there is an elitist and prejudiced element at work in the feminist condemnation of F**** S**** O* G***, so I won't go on about it here. But I started thinking about the parallels when I went to a burlesque fair this weekend. There are a lot of conflicting feminist opinions about the modern revival of burlesque culture; some women consider it body-positive, sex-positive, empowering and female-focused, others consider it simply more sexist objectification in cuter clothes, and of course some view it as just a bit of fun. At the fair, though, what struck me was what a female-dominated culture this was. The stallholders were majority female, as were the attendees (I went with three other women). Interestingly, not all the performances were by women - I was pleasantly surprised to see a male pole dancer and a male aerial hoop performer in the pictures afterwards. But what the whole experience made me think was that anyone condemning this as women being objectified for male pleasure would be so off-base it would be laughable. This was very much a female-oriented event, run by, enjoyed by, and supported by women. 

Now, of course there are those who will claim that women have just been so brainwashed into objectifying other women that we don't even realise we're doing it - we are Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs made flesh, and are no better than the women who accompany their male friends to strip clubs in the spirit of "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em." But when I was watching a size 16 woman in her 30s gyrate onstage in a spangly costume, I didn't feel like I was treating her like a piece of meat. I was aware of her as a person with a mind as well as a body, and very much aware that her performance was artifice - because it was so clearly intended this way. I was also aware that her performance was intended to be fun and humorous, and that the smile on her face wasn't trying to emulate sexual ecstasy, but was simply a cheeky grin. It certainly beat the furrowed brows, pouts and icy seriousness of other supposedly "erotic" performances I've seen, and reminded me of why I always liked the pin-up pictures one can find in the Taschen books filled with magazine covers called 'Wink' 'Titter' and so on - because the girls look like they're having fun. As someone who proudly owns a sailor playsuit and has been compared to a pin-up myself when I've posted pictures of myself in it, I can attest that it's not just a look either. It is fun to feel cute, to dress up, to feel colourful and sexy in a way that one still feels like one owns that sexuality. Yet as a feminist, you sometimes wonder whether it's OK to feel that way, or whether you should be trying to condition yourself out of it.

Burlesque performances are generally pretty tame compared to what you'll see in a modern strip club - I've not seen a burlesque performer strip below knickers and nipple tassles, although I'm sure some do, but the point is generally that it's about the art of suggestion so there's still likely to be some giant feathers or balloons in the way. Therein lies the fun - everyone in the room knows they're not going to actually see any pubic hair, or labia, or probably even a nipple, but we're enjoying the fiction that we might, and enjoying the tension that the performer is building up by teasing us with what's behind the sequins. Women and men stood and watched the performers, whooped, clapped and encouraged. It didn't feel sleazy or objectifying. It's also often forgotten that the art of burlesque didn't just use to mean 'stripping' - it also included acrobatics, tumbling, cross-dressing, skits and all manner of entertainment. The immediate tendency to focus on the nekkid-lady part of burlesque is a sad sign of the modern insistence on reducing everything to sex. I once saw a female burlesque performer dress up in a tux and do a Bruce Forsyth impression to Rizzle Kicks' Mama Do The Hump - how often does that aspect of burlesque get mentioned?

Still, as I put my pin-up-lady-themed mirror up in my bedroom, and my lady-in-nipple-tassles-and-knickers toothbrush holder up in my bathroom, I experience a twinge of feminist concern. Am I no better than the man slavering over Page 3, or leering at the women in Zoo? Am I just fooling myself that I'm more enlightened because I didn't mind the fact that the women I watched onstage the other day had rolls of flesh on their bodies, and parts other than boobs that wobbled when they moved - whereas those raised on a diet of airbrushed female bodies and porn would probably consider them unattractive and inferior? Who can say. It bothers me that there exists, in a movement supposedly supportive of female freedom to look, act and spend our money in whichever ways we wish, a faction that makes me have this very argument with myself. I also think this faction is operating on the often-mistaken premise that cultures such as burlesque only exist because of a (automatically evil) male desire to objectify and sexualise women. Based on my experience on Saturday, my answer would be - BOLLOCKS DOES IT. Some feminists will tell us that we've internalised male objectification of our bodies so much that we're now convincing ourselves that we're buying corsets or jiggling our nipple tassles onstage for ourselves or for fun, but that is, of course, just self-deception. We must be doing it because men told us or made us. 

Well, I don't know where those evil men were hiding on Saturday but they sure must have been well-concealed. Was one of them the very camp guy wearing make-up and dressed as a sailor: was he forcing my friend to alter her body when he laced her into one of the corsets he was selling, and is it worth mentioning he was also wearing a corset, as were several other men that day? Was another of them the petite, topless guy with a locked collar around his neck who was helping his much taller female partner run her stall? Were the dutiful partners following their girlfriends around as they excitedly scanned the stalls really calculating sexists waiting to reap the rewards of all this underwear their unsuspecting female partners had been duped into buying...and were they going to be disappointed if their girlfriends instead only chose to buy a necklace that said "FUCK YOU" (one of my friends' purchases from the day) or a cruet set that said "METH" and "COKE" (another friend's purchase that day)? Were the male performers onstage also victims of the patriarchy in some roundabout way, or interlopers here only to spy on all that exposed female flesh...even if it meant exposing most of their flesh too? 

I just didn't see anything to get one's spangly knickers in a twist about. I saw women running businesses, and other women supporting those businesses. I saw female friendships being formed and strengthened. I saw bodies being presented in a sexual yet fun way, and real bodies, bodies that made me feel good and less self-conscious about my own pale skin, my wobbly bits, my average-sized boobs, the rolls on my stomach. I saw a lack of fake tan, a lack of perfectly round breasts that stick straight out instead of being shaped more like half-moons and actually responding to gravity, a lack of underwear so groin-slicingly skimpy that retaining any of one's pubes would be an impossibility, and as a result of this, I felt at home. I felt comfortable. I felt like I saw my body and my sexuality more accurately represented here than I ever would see in the world of mainstream porn.

And next time I go, I'm wearing that sailor suit. ;)

Control and The Cool Girl

A lot of my life is about control. As a formerly overweight person, I have to be extremely vigilant about diet and exercise, lest I gain the weight back. As a person with mental health problems, I have to remember to take my medication, and be constantly monitoring my mental state for signs of an imminent bout of self-destructive despair. As a freelancer, I am the only person responsible for when I work, how much I work, and how successful my career is - no one else is going to remind me, nag me or pick up the slack if I don't keep a grip on my work.

Being female, or should I say, successfully fitting the dominant stereotype of what a female should be, also requires a great deal of control. You're expected to control your body - how slim it is, how toned it is, keep it free of hair, marks, wrinkles, sags and yet still have flesh in all the right places. You're expected to control your face - keep it constantly fresh-looking, dewy, unmarked, unlined and of course always smiling, pleasing to others and preferably fully made-up. You're expected to control your hair - even if it's meant to look 'tousled' or 'just-got-out-of-bed', you should still have preferably spent hours colouring, conditioning, applying products, blow-drying, tonging and spraying in order to achieve that wild, devil-may-care look. You're expected to control your body's excretions - cover the smell of your sweat, mask any smells your suspicious lady-parts may emit, and hide the fact you ever menstruate from anyone, even those most intimately acquainted with your body. You're expected to control your emotions, lest anyone assume you are 'hormonal', 'hysterical', or behaving like a 'typical woman' and decides to use this to attempt to discredit the whole female race. You're expected to control your fertility, even if that means increasing your risk of certain cancers, or causing weight gain, horrific depression, migraines, nausea or an array of other side effects - you're simply expected to be grateful that you have any control over whether you have children or not, because your unfortunate foremothers did not enjoy such a luxury, and why should it be down to men anyway when they're not the ones who get pregnant? And, of course, you're expected to control your sexuality - it should be constantly bubbling under the surface and suggestible to everyone while not being 'blatant' or 'desperate' and not intimidating to the opposite sex, it should be apparent from the way you dress and act without, of course, making you come across as a 'slag', it should 'ask for it' without 'asking for it', and of course if you put a foot wrong in how you express it, you should resign yourself to the fact that you'll be labelled either a prude or whore, and if you're a victim of sexual aggression, the way you presented yourself will be the first thing people will focus on, rather than the person who attacked you. Because men's control of themselves and their actions is rarely, if ever, under the microscope the way women's apparent failure to control their wild and tempting sexuality is.

(Think about it. A man who attacks a woman is excused as 'not being able to help himself'; the woman is accused of 'leading him on'. Men are portrayed as passive victims of their own unstoppable, unquestionable sexuality, and the question of them exercising control over their desire to sexually violate someone is never up for debate. It's the woman who apparently should have exercised control - over how she dressed, how she looked, how she spoke to him. Funny how the only times we attribute power to women are the times when they are utterly powerless - just a way to add insult to injury, really. But I digress.)

I got to thinking about control while pondering the concept of 'The Cool Girl', as made famous in Gillian Flynn's psychological thriller Gone Girl (described by some as feminist, others as misogynist - I generally just view it as sociopathic with the odd pseudo-feminist rant thrown in to justify utterly self-serving behaviour, myself). Just a quick reminder of how Flynn describes the mythical 'Cool Girl':

"Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want."

I think a lot of women smiled wryly and sighed with relief when they read this passage. Finally, someone had identified this utterly false phenomenon and called it by its true name, and pointed out that no such person actually exists. Women who were tired of explaining to people precisely why you cannot throw caution to the wind and behave exactly how you want and still expect anyone to find it attractive now had a neat explanation, nestled within the pages of a best-selling novel. Everyone's seen the advert where the woman with jutting collarbones and visible hipbones pretends to get orgasmic over creamy yoghurt or full-fat chocolate and thinks "Yeah, like SHE actually eats any of that - bet she spat it out as soon as the director called 'cut.'" Everyone's seen yet another female character supposedly waking up au naturel when she's clearly in full make-up. And plenty of us have watched One Day and wondered why the makers were happily willing to age the fuck out of Jim Sturgess' character Dexter but could not bring themselves to put even a smidge of ageing make-up on Anne Hathaway who played Emma, even though we are supposed to be watching the character across the timespan of 20 years.

Still, it can hard to remember that no one possesses the Cool Girl Secret. We all will have some facets - some girls can eat what they want without gaining a pound. Some girls do genuinely enjoy football, video games, sci-fi and rugby. Some girls have a very high sex drive and are very adventurous in the bedroom, and some of us would rather eat broken glass than spend a Saturday trailing dreamy-eyed around Ikea or a wedding fair (yo!). But we'll all have an Achilles' heel that means we don't quite make the grade. Sometimes I become more conscious of mine when I feel like other girls are more 'fun' than me. I can't eat or drink what I want, because my shitty genes mean that it would not be difficult for me to gain back the 3 stone I worked hard to lose in order to be a healthy weight for my height. It would also not be difficult for me to be even heavier, and therefore even less healthy. If I never had to see another human being again as long as I lived, I imagine I would get obese pretty quickly, because we all have a catastrophic trapdoor that we could fall through if we truly 'lost control', and eating is pretty sure to be mine. But in this life, I would like to be reasonably healthy. I would also like to be attractive. I know I should be musing on higher things and telling myself that it's what inside that counts, but I'm honest. I want a life that includes feeling sexy, and I certainly want a life that includes having sex with people who find me sexy. If I were happy to be celibate and hermetic for the rest of my days, then great - bring on the red velvet cupcakes and deep-fried mac n' cheese balls. But I know where that would lead - so I have to keep exercising control.

There are other trapdoors that I know await me, and they also make me feel like the opposite of the cool girl some days. I can't stay out as late as I want, because sleep is massively important to my mental and physical wellbeing. I also have to take medication to help me sleep, and if I don't take it at a certain time at night, I won't be able to wake up the next morning. Which will in turn impinge on my ability to work, socialise and do the things that keep me sane, such as roller derby. So any night out involves a constant eye on the clock, and the luxury of full relaxation in the knowledge that it doesn't matter what time I get to bed is one I cannot enjoy. Drinking excessively is not open to me for this reason, and is also connected to the weight issue (when I was heavier, a lot of my body was composed entirely of Strongbow). I'm also an introvert at heart, and can only take so much group activity before I long for the satisfying intimacy of a one-to-one with a good friend, or an intense exchange with a small group of trusted people. Those who know me well enough understand this, and won't assume I'm rude or snobby or 'high maintenance' just because I sometimes need to be alone and haven't got the energy to assume a persona that's not true to me. But when I look at other girls drinking and joking and larking as I slope off to take my Quetiapine and read in bed, I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a twinge of "Guh, why am I so dull, and how do they manage it?"

I've managed to hang on to enough self esteem over the years to be proud of carving my own path, to know that what I need and what I aspire to are very different from what the majority of women my age seem to pursue. I don't want: marriage, children, monogamy, a career that's 'stable' at the expense of being fulfilling, or pots of money at the expense of having a life. I do want: great friends, fun lovers, travel, adventure, a career that is nothing other than what I want and makes enough money to keep body and soul together, and a neverending supply of good books. Like most of us, I also want to enjoy physical and mental health. I'll probably never manage to balance these demands with the expectation that I be slim, smiley, fragrant, hairless, uncomplaining and 'fun', and in general I couldn't care less, since those in my life like me just the way I am and most of the time, so do I. It's just sometimes hard to remember that those other women, who in my shameful, petty and insecure moments seem to me like shining examples of all the things I can't be because I have to spend so much of my life exercising so much damn control, will also be nursing insecurities and fatal trapdoors of their own.

But that's feminism, innit. Being kind to yourself, and being kind to other women too, however much mental work it takes. Because the most feminist thing you can realise is that none of us are The Cool Girl, nor should we want to be, because she's ultimately just a patriarchal fantasy. What we all are is simply cool girls, every one. 

Why there is no 'ironic' objectification

About a year ago, a screenwriter friend of mine asked me if I would take a look at a script he had written. I asked him if it was likely to inflame my feminist rage, which is often aggravated by Hollywood, the films it produces and its generally shitty treatment of women. He said he had chosen me deliberately as he wanted a feminist viewpoint, so I took a look. It only took a few scenes before I started to lose patience. Obligatory sex scene with focus on body of nubile young woman - check. Totally unnecessary scene showing faux-lesbian pornographic frolics - check. At this point, I told him that my mellow was getting thoroughly harshed and I didn't really fancy reading on, so I handed it back to him for possible re-writes.

 

My friend tried to mitigate my rage by explaining that the script was about a superficial, amoral man living a worthless life full of shallow pleasure-seeking, and that he would get his comeuppance later in the film. OK, fine. Job done, scene set. But how many female bodies had to be thrown under the bus before the audience understood that this man was going down the wrong path, and would shortly be shown the error of his ways? My point was, even if we as the audience were meant to see the objectified female bodies in the film as evidence of the protagonist's shitty, vacuous life, we still saw them. Trying to make the point that this man objectified women by objectifying them further is a pretty lame tactic. I made some suggestions - when showing how the media frequently uses faux-lesbianism to appeal to straight men, why do exactly what the media does and show the women in their full scantily-clad glory (feeding each other ice cream, as it happened)? Why not have some class and just show two pairs of feet interlinking, or block the audience's view with something totally boring and just intrigue us with the sounds of giggling and slurping? Point made, objectification dodged. It seems so easy, yet is so rarely practised.

 

I got to thinking more about this when I went to see Kick-Ass 2 last night. I wasn't expecting feminist miracles from the film, although the fact that the first Kick-Ass was surprisingly pro-woman was what made me a) actually watch it with some interest on a plane when I'd usually be unable to take in any forms of media after 36 hours without sleep and b) give the second film a try. However, aside from the uncomfortable regularity of homophobic insults being flung around (waaaay too many unconvincing uses of 'cocksucker' and similar epithets from Hit Girl), the cringeworthy effort to wring comedy out of an attempted rape scene, and the fact that of the four female superheroes in the film, two were scantily clad, what got my goat the most were two scenes of totally unnecessary objectification of women. 

 

Now, much like in the example I gave above, the random peppering of 'exotic' dancers and topless prostitutes in two scenes with baddie Motherfucker/Chris D'Amico were designed to show that the character in question was a Bad Guy. Trashy, evil, immoral. Look, his layer is decorated with table dancers and women gyrating in cages, what a douchebag! And yet...we're complicit in his douchebaggery, because those women are exposed for our delectation as much as they are for his fictional leching. We can see their teeny bikinis, wiggling backsides and taut thighs too. And our options are either to join in the perving, or judge the girls for being slutty pawns in a baddie's masterplan. Same goes for the eye-poppingly random scene whose function appeared solely to be 'Get some tits into this film', where we see Motherfucker cavorting in a swimming pool with two topless women who...let's just say they look very much like they work in the adult entertainment industry, with the surgical alterations you might expect to accompany such a career. Apart from ticking the 'LOOK, BOOBS!' box that is apparently so essential to a film's box office success that you might as well scrap your film if you don't have one topless female in it, the point of this scene seemed to be to further illustrate Motherfucker's role as a decadent and pretty idiotic villain.

 

But all that's really been achieved is that those women have been used as window dressing, the audience have been made complicit in treating them thus, and nothing whatsoever has been added to characters or plot. The audience KNOWS Motherfucker is a baddie, for fuck's sake. What gave it away - the name, the fact he's dressed all in black (even KIDS know the guy in black is always the baddie, jeez!), the fact he maims, kills and attempts to rape the good guys? Why do we need totally superfluous scenes of him surrounded by "sluts" to illustrate his badness?

 

I know it's pretty pointless to hope for nuanced understandings of gender issues in a film that treats prostitutes as either amoral whores or innocent victims, that at times seems to be playing racial stereotype bingo (Russian women are steroid-pumped no-shit-taking communists! Oriental men are ex-Triads and child molesters, and it's fine to call them 'spring roll' as long as it's a baddie saying it!), and that will only let its female protagonist be fully clothed because she's technically underage. However, is it really still beyond film-makers, in 20-fucking-13, to realise that this imagined need to inject every film with a dose of sleaze and sex, ALWAYS in the form of a scantily clad, slim, white, young, pneumatically-breasted woman, is just that - imaginary? I watched the film last night with five other people, three of whom were female. Did any of us four women rush to the cinema because we wanted a dose of tits? Amazingly, no. Would the two men who came with us have said 'Fuck no, I'm not bothering' if they'd've been told before viewing that the film contained zero objectified female bodies? I think not. So who exactly are Hollywood catering to when they continue to pump out this tired bullshit, except themselves?

 

It's hard not to get paranoid that there is a misogynist agenda at work in so many things that permeate our culture, because for all the people willing to stand up and say 'I reject this shit', that 'shit' keeps being produced. Sometimes it goes unquestioned, but increasingly people are objecting to it - and yet it keeps coming, apparently in service of a mysterious, unnamed audience who still want to see nothing but big guns and bouncing boobs. But as my experience with my screenwriter friend showed, the machine is still powerful enough that it can anaesthetise intelligent, sensitive people to a point where they don't even realise how their art is throwing women under the bus until someone points it out to them. And it was powerful enough to get me to watch a movie that regularly pissed me off with its retrograde politics. I can protest now, but I've already paid my money and added to the film's box office statistics, so what use is pointing out its sexism when the makers are deaf to the sound of anything but chinging cash registers? I guess it's to remind myself to never stop noticing this shit, in the hope that one day enough of us will notice it to effect change, and then we can go watch a film where the only thing that denotes a baddie is the fact he's stroking a cat. (And maybe has a British accent - j/k).

Sex, Scaremongering and Teen Girls

It's been a while since I was a teenage girl. Nearly ten years, and I'm quite content with the growing distance between myself and the era of insecurity, depression and terror - not that any of those things disappear with the onset of adulthood, but anyway. I do read a lot about how intensely awful it is to be a teenage girl today, and I imagine an existence something like my own teen experience of body-hatred, paranoia and unrealistic attitudes toward the opposite sex, but with slim sleek smartphones and buttock-skimming hotpants instead of chunky Nokias and those baggy jeans us nu-metal-listening, 2001-era teens loved so much. So are we really so different? A quick skim over The Daily Mail would have you believe that yes, it is so much more terrible to be a teenage girl today, because you are going to be pressured and sexualised like never before, treated like a disposable object by boys raised on violent pornography, and generally set upon from all sides by consumerism, the diet industry, the music industry etc etc etc, to turn you into a pornified, pouting, passive sex doll.

 

So it's something of a relief to finally hear a dissenting voice in this Guardian article. Showing how the statistics on teen pregnancy and first time sex don't tally with the notion that all girls are now being pressured to be sexually active earlier than ever, Stuart Jeffries also quotes American sociologist, Danielle Egan, who says "Sexual violence is real. But to portray girls as only victims suffering from false consciousness and therefore as trapped in a sexualised culture that they can't change is a mistake". In an article which questions paranoid columnists' automatic assumptions that all 14 year-old girls are being forced to perform oral sex (and shows that legendary teen 'rainbow parties' were just that - a legend, which never actually took place, but which the media seized upon anyway as a sign of teen debauchery), Jeffries identifies how this 'moral panic' renders girls passive objects in the same way that pornography is alleged to do: "Better panic than find out, better to disempower girls rhetorically than suggest they might be forces for change in their own lives."

 

That's the part that always gets my goat the most. Teenage girls may often be silly, shallow, self-obsessed and lack self awareness and judgement (and my God, don't even get me started on adjectives describing teen boys and all their deficiences). But they're still people with brains, desires and agendas of their own. I know, because I was one. And I spent a lot of my late teens feeling that I'd been sold a complete pack of lies when it came to boys and sex. No one ever pressured me to do anything I didn't want, or made inappropriate advances to me. I'm sure this was partly luck, partly going to an all-girls' school. This didn't, however, stop my own sexuality from forming. I spent most of my teen years masturbating like mad and fantasising about the sex life that I was convinced my horrendous ugliness would prevent me from ever enjoying. I wanted to get laid. Does anyone ever acknowledge this about teen girls, that they might want sex?

 

The way our conservative media frames things, you'd think teen boys were the only ones with a sex drive and that sex only ever takes place when girls reluctantly give in to the unstoppable male desire. And again, in my own life, that turned out to be another lie. When I finally did find someone I was powerfully attracted to - and again, the force of my own desire came as quite a shock to me, because I was always taught it was my job to be desired, to be the cause of randiness, not the one experiencing the pangs of 'I must have this person NOW, or I will explode' - I was very much the aggressor, the one doing the persuading. If anyone was 'the girl' in that particular exchange, it was my male partner, who wanted us to stop and think about what were doing and be sure that it was right. And if anyone was the sly horndog who would've said anything just to make sure that sex happened, it was me.

 

So where is the media coverage that acknowledges girls like me, because surely I can't have been the first and last teenage girl to actually be in control of her sexuality and use it for her own, not others', pleasure? Am I to believe that I was the only 18 year old female who ever had sex just because she was horny and wanted to? Much as I'm troubled by the tales of abuse and coercion I hear occurring in teen relationships, I'm also sick of getting such a one-sided story. Not every teen relationship is a battleground in which the evil forces of internet porn and sexism are unleashed upon some poor unsuspecting young woman. As Heather Corinna writes in her brilliant essay 'An Immodest Proposal', we are guilty of sending out horribly mixed messages to young women, and the continuing focus on teen girls as 'victims' of evil sexuality is partly responsible. The 'black hole' that is so often missing in portrayals of teen sex, and indeed so much sex in general, is the woman's desire. Where is the story of teen sex that shows the girl"feeling that if she didn't do it soon, she was going to pounce on him like a hungry dog?". When I read Corinna's words, I was transported back to the sweaty dark of an October night in 2002 when I was exactly that hungry dog, and I felt like I was playing out a script no one had prepared me for. As Corinna asks, why are we still failing to reinforce the message "that women experience, initiate and pursue desire, and that it is completely acceptable to do so with great enthusiasm"?

 

And yes, the problem does lie in our sexualised society, but not in the way that right-wing commentators think it does. Rihanna can writhe around showing off the outline of her vulva all she wants and Beyonce can thrust her oiled butt-cheeks at the screen til the cows come home - women behaving in an overtly sexual way is not the problem. The problem is that girls are never taught to be sexual for themselves, only for someone else. If I believed for a second that Rihanna actually got off to S&M, rather than just decided to make a song about it for cynical marketing purposes, I'd be her biggest cheerleader. But I don't. I think she's making the best of her talents in an industry that isn't going to let her exist outside extremely narrow parameters, and that industry demands that she sexualise herself at every turn. Ditto 'B', ditto Nicki Minaj, ditto Nicole Scherzinger et al. You can tell me these women are 'smart', 'feminists', 'businesswomen' all you want. But until I see them say 'Y'know what? I've had enough of this shit, I'm wearing jeans and baggy t-shirt onstage tonight, and tell my marketing team to go fuck themselves', I'm not going to believe that they're not victims of a culture that tells women to constantly serve their bodies up as passive objects for consumption. Because yup, we all feel like dressing and acting sexy from time to time, but I fail to believe there's any woman who really feels like doing it 24/7. Yet we're supposed to be convinced that all that oiled-up heavy breathing and writhing from our pop stars is genuine? Please.

 

The real heavy breathing and writhing happens in private, under duvets, on sofas, in student residences, in jeans and t shirts and dressing gowns and all other manner of unsexy accoutrement, and my god it's wonderful. And yes, I'm troubled that teens may be growing up not realising this, and thinking that the plasticised version of sexuality that they're increasingly being sold, is the way forward. But just as I was able to appreciate the superiority of Tori Amos to Atomic Kitten, there are teen girls who will be able to see through bullshit now just as I was able to 10 years ago, and there will be teen girls who are owning and controlling their sexuality the way I was, and hopefully still am to this day. And those are the teen girls our cultural commentators keep erasing from our social landscape, and in so doing they reinforce the image of teen female passivity just as harmfully as any sexual myths. Perhaps what society really fears is not the misuses of power against teen girls, but that teen girls might realise their own power, and start to 'misuse' it against a society that would rather they sat down, shut up and looked pretty.

The hair-brained scheme - an update

So, it's my grandmother's 90th birthday on Saturday. In preparation for the occasion, I've bought a new dress, given myself a pedicure, and booked a hair appointment. However there's one thing I have resolved not to do for the party, much as I want to - and that's remove the hair from my legs and armpits. After 2 months of not shaving, my body hair is about 3/4 of an inch long, and getting longer by the day. My armpits look decidedly European, or at least the way European armpits looked before the pressure to defuzz took over German and Spanish women's lives too. My legs look a little masculine, but mostly as I said before, they just look untidy. I'm not going to be mistaken for a yeti or even a man any time soon, seeing as I'm 5'2", unmuscly, and have a visible bustline and long hair. So far, so many fears allayed. I've been out in public wearing shorts and sleeveless tops, been to the gym in a vest and raised the weights high above my head without shame, gone swimming, socialised, had sex, and absolutely nothing different has happened. No comments, no looks, no partner hiding behind the bed with a rapidly deflating erection at the sight of my body in its natural state.

It all sounds so positive - and yet. And yet, the fact remains, I bloody hate the way my hairy legs and pits look, and am absolutely itching to wax them, to hear that ripping sound, to watch as the hairs are torn out by their bulbous black roots in one satisfying tear, and most importantly, to see my skin smooth again.

But, I'm resisting, because I'm trying to get to the bottom of why I think my legs and pits are only beautiful when hairless. If no one else cares (and even if they did, it certainly shouldn't be the controlling factor in my appearance), then why do I? Because, I suspect, the conditioning that women are only attractive when shaved, waxed and plucked, goes very deep. 2 months just isn't long enough to undo 27 years of smooth-legs propaganda, of watching my mum, aunts, cousins and female friends determinedly and ritualistically rid themselves of body hair, of having preceisely zero role models who have natural body hair, of daily encountering countless images, both in the media and the art world, of idealised, hairless women. Still, I wonder how long I'll be able to stick it before I crack and say I can't be bothered to use my body as the landscape for an experiment.

I think what stops me reaching for the razor though, is the act of asking myself the litmus test question for any action to see if it promotes inequality - Do men have to do it? The answer being that if not, then it's probably part of a set of shitty rules designed to keep women insecure. I can't say I apply this rule consistently - I do wear make-up on occasion, and enjoy it (although I certainly don't wear it every day and don't wear it for work- if you want me in a certain place at a certain time, you get my face the way it is), I wear dresses, the occasional pair of wedges (the only type of heels I'll generally deign to wear, for comfort reasons), and the toes that sit daintily below my hairy legs often sport nail varnish. I grew out my eyebrows til they were back to their natural shape, but found myself unable to leave them like that, so strong was the compulsion to pluck. So on many counts, I'm not winning the 'Do the boys have to bother with this shit?' war. Obviously, I'm taking my battles one at a time with the body hair experiment, and I guess that's sensible as there's so much conditioning to unknit just in this one area of the female beauty myth, that attempting to deal with any other parts would simply require too many resources. Just look at how many reasons I have for hating my hairy legs. Because they look untidy. Because I can't moisturise them properly and the skin underneath the hair is going dry and crusty. Because I've been taught to be proud of my shapely legs but now I can only focus on the hair, not the shape. Because it seems perverse to wear an outfit that shows off your legs when you've only got hairy ones to show off. Because I feel unfeminine.

All those reasons arise entirely from the narrow version of female beauty we are sold, and the threats of being single, unloved, unpopular, and most certainly unshagged that accompany the refusal to buy into it. I know I'm not any of those things, yet I still haven't managed to love my hairy legs, because the ideal of 'femininity' burned into my subconscious has a pernicious hold, even when I know logically that 'femininity' as it's sold, and actual, real femaleness, are about as alike as Britney Spears and Janis Joplin. So how do I 'unlearn' this unhelpful template? Germaine Greer once demanded that ladies learned to love their cunts - I wonder how her workshop on becoming enamoured with your body hair might go...

Related posts here and here.

I’ve been growing my body hair for about five weeks now. It’s part of an experiment to see if I truly can walk the feminist walk as well as I talk the talk. Those who dislike the idea of having to be all fuzzy before they can truly call themselves feminists will surely start arguing that focusing on a narrow definition of bodily freedom is not what it’s all about – what we fought for was choice, right? Well, I’m suspicious of the language of choice and how it’s been co-opted by those who have commodified feminism into the 'choice' to wear Jimmy Choos, carry handbags that cost enough to feed a family for 3 months, wax one’s genitals and turn one’s body into a performing, man-pleasing, one-woman circus. Whilst we may claim to now be ‘free’ and ‘have choice’, how many women truly feel comfortable choosing to withdraw their financial support for Gillette, Veet, Nair and a hundred thousand beauty salons, and letting their body hair grow as nature intended? A very confident, very small minority, I’ll bet you.

But yes, OK, if we’re arguing about rights and freedoms, technically we are ‘free’ and we do have the ‘right’ to unleash our hairy pits and furry legs on the world. We may have to put up with the odd disapproving or disgusted glance (often, interestingly, from other women, as if we’re somehow ‘letting the side down’) or even a derogatory comment, but it’s possible. However, what I want to achieve through my experiment is not the dismantling of other people’s conditioning – it’s the erosion of my own. I’ve done the easy part by letting my legs and armpits return to their natural state. Now comes the hard part – looking at them and seeing anything except mess, untidiness, and yes, ugliness. That is the battle – not walking through a crowded street in vest top and shorts with my legs and armpits on full display and inviting all and sundry to judge me, but looking at myself in the privacy of my own home, and not judging myself. Until I can look at my completely natural, just-the-way-mother-nature-made-me, body, and not find it wanting, I’m still a victim of anti-feminist, anti-woman conditioning.

And let’s face it, unless you’re a professional cyclist, there is no logical reason to remove bodily hair. It is an entirely manufactured ‘need’, one manufactured both by a capitalist society which realised that the more inadequate it made women feel about their appearances, the more money it could get them to spend, and by a patriarchal society, which realised that for every social or legal gain women made, it was still possible to oppress them with the threat of unattractiveness, and the accompanying unending work and expenditure involved in fending it off. Until women feel that their bodies are fine just as they are, without the intervention of a multi-billion-pound industry which feeds off the exact opposite sentiment, we can never truly claim that the battles of the women’s movement have been won.

All that said, I’m not finding it easy. Every time I look down and see my hairy legs – which, because of our conditioned belief that women should have no body hair, do look quite masculine to me – I still find myself longing for the clean, smooth appearance of a freshly shaven leg. It’s not even that they look manly, so much as they just look Messy – and I think that’s exactly what women are taught to fear the most. We’re allowed to look 'wild', 'dangerous', bed-head or stylishly unkempt in entirely prescribed ways, but we’re never allowed to indulge in the actual messiness that a real female body entails – i.e. body hair, menstrual blood, cellulite, stretch marks and all the wonderful bodily functions that keep us alive. When Germaine Greer talked about female eunuchs, this is what she was referring to – the pressure to rip off, pull out, mask and fade out all that actually makes us real women, and replace it with a grotesque, sexless parody of femininity.

So, if I can be conditioned, as women are every day all over the globe, to despise my body in its natural state, then presumably I can be conditioned to feel the opposite as well. Therefore I’m waiting for the day that my brain frees itself of the blinkers applied to it by beauty myths (which encourage you to ‘find your inner goddess’ by shaving your legs, cheers Gillette Venus & Jennifer Lopez) and I’m able to look at my legs and pits and find them as appealing covered in hair as without. Then and only then will I give myself permission to shave – but if my experiment has truly worked, I won’t feel the need to.

I’ll keep you all posted....