Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism Read Online Free

how things have changed. This raucous fun-loving working-class culture, this take-me-or-leave-me attitude, it’s really taken off. It’s the women who are driving this. It’s all changed. Once glamour modelling might have been about some fat sinister guy with a cigar tricking young girls into taking their clothes off, but now women are queueing up to do it – they’re as drunk and lairy as the guys. Honestly, I think that to people of my age, it’s bizarre to see young women being so confident sexually at suchan early age – the amount they drink and the sexual confidence they seem to have. This incredible hedonism. Basically these girls see that before marriage and children, these are their golden years – they want to have a whole bunch of adventures. That’s their choice.’
    This emphasis on choice allows people such as Hilton to sidestep any sense of responsibility for the culture they have helped to create. So although Hilton was the editor of Nuts as it moved decisively into this semi-pornographic incarnation, he says the move was decided by readers, not by himself. At first the magazine sold a less sexualised culture – it didn’t show nipples and it kept the sex talk less explicit. But gradually the editors found they could increase sales by pushing at boundaries, and since this is a world in which value is determined by sales, they went with the tide. ‘It’s not that I am abdicating responsibility,’ he said, ‘but it’s not for me to judge. I earn my living by trying to understand what people want, and giving that to them. I’ve given up on judging people.’
    It’s intriguing that the men who have powerful roles in this culture are so eager to explain that it has in fact been shaped by the choices of others. When I went to talk to the creative director of Big Brother , Phil Edgar-Jones, I thought I would hear some recognition about what they did in selling a new kind of ideal to women during their heyday. Big Brother was accustomed to choosing a handful of young women from the thousands who auditioned, and made a habit of picking those who were prepared to continue their careers by posing in a particular way for newspapers and magazines. Of the eleven women in Big Brother 2006 four posed for lads’ magazines after leaving the house: Aisleyne Horgan-Wallace, a model who posed topless for Zoo, Nuts and the Star; Grace Adams-Short, a dance teacher who posed topless for Nuts; Imogen Thomas, a bar hostess and former beauty queen who posed topless for Zoo , and Jennie Corner, a student who posed topless for Zoo . There were alsoLea Walker, a pornography model who was said to have the biggest breast implants in the UK, and Nikki Grahame, a woman with smaller breast implants who had been a glamour model and who entered the house dressed as a bunny girl. More than half of them, in other words, made money from having their breasts photographed, while Celebrity Big Brother eagerly promoted glamour models as celebrities.
    Phil Edgar-Jones, like Phil Hilton, is a man with an unassuming, blokish manner who engaged politely with questioning when I met him. ‘Are we reinforcing this trend?’ He pondered for a moment. ‘I’d prefer to think we are reflecting it. We have open auditions and it’s very interesting – most of the women choose Jordan’s autobiography as their favourite book.’ He professed to be surprised that so many of the women who went into Big Brother seemed to end up following the same path. ‘The oddest people end up in newspapers in their bikinis. Kitten – who was in Big Brother 5 – was a complete feminist, or that’s how she presented herself – and then came out and was offered money by a newspaper and appeared in a PVC kitten outfit. I didn’t see that one coming.’ Just like Hilton, Edgar-Jones was reluctant to sound judgemental; choice was once again the operative word. ‘If it is a choice between that, and the glamour of that, and the financial rewards of that, and