Patriarchal capitalism really does encourage young women to engage in a culture of monetised, deodorised sexual transaction in the name of ‘choice’ and ‘empowerment’, eliding the economic basis for all sexual work, paid or otherwise.
Resisting raunch culture, however, is not a complete answer to the marginalisation of female bodies in contemporary society. Skin mags and sexy dancing are symptoms of the problem, but they are not themselves the problem, and the strain of contemporary feminism that focuses its efforts on writing angry letters to the editors of magazines such as Nuts and Playboy is as flimsy as a stripper’s discarded thong. To understand the mechanisms of objectification and bodily marginalisation that perpetuate women’s struggle, we must cultivate a more ambitious vision of sexual dialectics.
The other side of sexualisation
The single story told about the sexuality of women today has them involved in a sort of abject whorishness. Adult society now acknowledges that having to grow up in a hailstorm of media messages encouraging female erotic availability might make life a little confusing for young women struggling with sexual feelings and anxious not to earn the shameful label of slut – but the same dialectic condemns young women as wanton strumpets, serial-shagging, binge-drinking and vomiting our worthless GCSEs into storm drains with our knickers around our knees. Apparently unable to glance at a glossy magazine without becoming pregnant, anorexic, or both, today’s young women are imagined as special objects of pity and contempt. This gleeful horror at female promiscuity is peddled by right and left-wing pundits alike, and has little to do with feminism.
“There has been a change in the sexual behaviour of young women, but it isn’t as dramatic as the media make out,” said Dr Petra Boynton, a sex educator and academic. “Most young people still don’t lose their virginity until they are over sixteen. If you take the generation who are now in their forties and fifties, many of them were having an awful lot of sex as young people, much of it unprotected sex. As adults we’re very quick to look at young people and say, ‘oh gosh, aren’t they awful’, but a lot of conversations that seem to care for young people actually end up being very moralistic about their behaviour, and start becoming discussions about what they should and should not wear, say and do.”
There is, of course, a class element to this understanding of sexual victimhood. Hand-wringing tabloid articles about teenage pregnancy are invariably accompanied by model-posed photos of furiously smoking young women pushing prams around sink estates and scowling; in respectable magazines and political rhetoric, this translates to backhanded references to ‘girls from deprived areas'. ‘Sexualisation’ is all well and good when middle-class parents order in crates of champagne for their teenagers’ ‘sweet sixteen’ parties, but utterly deplorable when hip-hop-listening working class kids attempt to Get Their Freak On. “The perception is that it’s only certain young girls who get pregnant,” explains Boynton. “It’s the bad teenage girls who get dressed up in short skirts and hit the town. Class is often associated with the worst aspects of negative sexual stereotyping.”
In 2010, a British tabloid photographer snapped a picture of 20-year-old teaching assistant Sarah Lyons cavorting in Cardiff centre with a pair of pants around her ankles, and she temporarily became the face of female reprobation across the world. Never mind that she wasn’t exposing any naughty bits; never mind that dancing with a pair of knickers around your ankles is perfectly legal behaviour; never mind that the pants in question weren’t the ones she’d been wearing, but a comedy pair of David Hasselhoff knickers a mate had picked up in a bar. Never mind that poor Ms Lyons was on a course of antibiotics and was, in
Resisting raunch culture, however, is not a complete answer to the marginalisation of female bodies in contemporary society. Skin mags and sexy dancing are symptoms of the problem, but they are not themselves the problem, and the strain of contemporary feminism that focuses its efforts on writing angry letters to the editors of magazines such as Nuts and Playboy is as flimsy as a stripper’s discarded thong. To understand the mechanisms of objectification and bodily marginalisation that perpetuate women’s struggle, we must cultivate a more ambitious vision of sexual dialectics.
The other side of sexualisation
The single story told about the sexuality of women today has them involved in a sort of abject whorishness. Adult society now acknowledges that having to grow up in a hailstorm of media messages encouraging female erotic availability might make life a little confusing for young women struggling with sexual feelings and anxious not to earn the shameful label of slut – but the same dialectic condemns young women as wanton strumpets, serial-shagging, binge-drinking and vomiting our worthless GCSEs into storm drains with our knickers around our knees. Apparently unable to glance at a glossy magazine without becoming pregnant, anorexic, or both, today’s young women are imagined as special objects of pity and contempt. This gleeful horror at female promiscuity is peddled by right and left-wing pundits alike, and has little to do with feminism.
“There has been a change in the sexual behaviour of young women, but it isn’t as dramatic as the media make out,” said Dr Petra Boynton, a sex educator and academic. “Most young people still don’t lose their virginity until they are over sixteen. If you take the generation who are now in their forties and fifties, many of them were having an awful lot of sex as young people, much of it unprotected sex. As adults we’re very quick to look at young people and say, ‘oh gosh, aren’t they awful’, but a lot of conversations that seem to care for young people actually end up being very moralistic about their behaviour, and start becoming discussions about what they should and should not wear, say and do.”
There is, of course, a class element to this understanding of sexual victimhood. Hand-wringing tabloid articles about teenage pregnancy are invariably accompanied by model-posed photos of furiously smoking young women pushing prams around sink estates and scowling; in respectable magazines and political rhetoric, this translates to backhanded references to ‘girls from deprived areas'. ‘Sexualisation’ is all well and good when middle-class parents order in crates of champagne for their teenagers’ ‘sweet sixteen’ parties, but utterly deplorable when hip-hop-listening working class kids attempt to Get Their Freak On. “The perception is that it’s only certain young girls who get pregnant,” explains Boynton. “It’s the bad teenage girls who get dressed up in short skirts and hit the town. Class is often associated with the worst aspects of negative sexual stereotyping.”
In 2010, a British tabloid photographer snapped a picture of 20-year-old teaching assistant Sarah Lyons cavorting in Cardiff centre with a pair of pants around her ankles, and she temporarily became the face of female reprobation across the world. Never mind that she wasn’t exposing any naughty bits; never mind that dancing with a pair of knickers around your ankles is perfectly legal behaviour; never mind that the pants in question weren’t the ones she’d been wearing, but a comedy pair of David Hasselhoff knickers a mate had picked up in a bar. Never mind that poor Ms Lyons was on a course of antibiotics and was, in
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