Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism Read Online Free Page A

working in Superdrug for the rest of your life, well, kind of, why not,’ he said, ‘if that’s the choice you want to make for yourself?’
    Both Hilton and Edgar-Jones are clearly right about one thing. As they say, this culture can no longer be seen as one purely created by men for men. Just as women are freely entering the live show that is the Nuts Babes on the Bed competition, and sending in pictures to be used for nothing in the magazines, so women who could work anywhere in the media are choosing to work at men’s magazines that sell themselves on the promise of Big Boobs Special or Blondes in the Buff, or to commissionreality television programmes that centre on watching women with big breasts in their bikinis. We cannot pretend that this is all about women as victims, when many women are deeply complicit in creating and selling this culture.
    These are the kind of women that the American writer Ariel Levy has called Female Chauvinist Pigs 7 – the women who are happy to work alongside men to promote this waxed and thonged image of female sexuality. I was intrigued when I met a woman who works in this world – Terri White, then the deputy editor of Maxim magazine, now editor of Shortlist . White is a bright, confident woman in her twenties who comes from a working-class Derbyshire background. She first went to work for Phil Hilton as his PA at a shortlived men’s magazine called Later , and laughed when she remembered the interview. ‘Phil was unsure about whether I was the right person for the job,’ she said. ‘Because I mentioned to him that I had done my dissertation on black feminist theory. He thought I might not be comfortable with what went into the magazine.’ Indeed, a young woman with a degree in English literature and feminist theory is not necessarily the person who seems most likely to take to a culture based on the values of soft pornography. Yet for White, men’s magazines turned out to be a very comfortable place to work. In order to succeed, she learned to look at women the way that the men who buy the magazine look at women: ‘I say, do you think that’s sexy, to the men I work with. But I think I’ve learnt what works for them and what doesn’t.’
    In many ways Terri White is what I would call a feminist; she wants to make a good career in an area that she enjoys and finds fulfilling, and she is keen to prove herself as good as the men around her. But rather than trying to discover what sexuality might mean in women’s terms, she has trained her eye to see women in the way that the readers of men’s magazines see them. When I asked White whether she thought that the women whostrip for these magazines are being exploited, she bridled. She insisted that the glamour-modelling world respects and celebrates women, and again returned to the theme of free choice. ‘We are never misogynistic about the women who model for us. They sell the magazine for us.’ And she added, ‘I find it really offensive when people say that. It’s their choice. A lot of them have huge ambitions, or they just want to be in a magazine. Who are we to judge them?’
    This idea that the growth of glamour modelling and its effect on women’s ambitions is all down to the operation of free choice seems to have silenced many potential critics. I can certainly understand why it is that many people would like to believe that the changes we have seen in our culture are a marker of women’s increased liberation. My first book, The New Feminism , argued that feminists should no longer be too anxious about the sexual objectification of women. I believed that we should concentrate on pragmatic advances in terms of economic and political equality and let people behave as they liked in their sexual and private lives. I honestly believed that as women became more equal, any sexism in the culture would easily wither away, that if such objectification remained characteristic of our culture it would apply to men as much as