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

women. But for the last few years, I have been watching this hypersexual culture getting fiercer and stronger, and co-opting the language of choice and liberation, and I realise that I was wrong to be so nonchalant about it ten years ago.
    It is time to look again at how free these choices really are. After all, real, material equality still eludes us. Women still do not have the political power, the economic equality or the freedom from violence that they have sought for generations. This means that women and men are still not meeting on equal terms in public life. And the mainstreaming of the sex industry reflects that inequality. It is still women who are dieting or undergoing surgery on their bodies; still women stripping in the clubs whilethe men chant and cheer; still women, not men, who believe that their ability to reach for fame and success will be defined by how closely they conform to one narrow image of sexuality. If this is the new sexual liberation, it looks too uncannily like the old sexism to convince many of us that this is the freedom we have sought.
    Even many of the people who at first seemed so keen to shrug off criticism of the glamour-modelling industry gradually began to talk to me about the ways in which the so-called choices made by women to join this industry were not always very free or very informed. Cara Brett herself, who on that night in Southend strutted the stage looking as happy as anyone with the feast of flesh that she was serving up, could not be sure that everything was rosy in her world. ‘Once a girl who was entering a competition said to me, do you think this is a dodgy way to get into the industry, and I said, yes, it is,’ she told me. ‘Once they are up there in their skimpy vest top and the thong, I’m there with the microphone saying to the guys, give us some encouragement, and they’re all yelling, and the girls on the bed basically get naked, they are so desperate.’
    This desperation, she thought, too often led to exploitation. ‘So many girls do it for nothing,’ she said. ‘A magazine says, do a shoot for us, and we won’t pay you, but you’ll get the publicity. They just do it. If you sell yourself at a low price, then you’re stuck. There are so many, to be honest. If you go into any club, I guarantee ninety per cent of the girls in there would go, I’m a glamour model. You get down to the bottom of it and they’ve appeared in the Sport once.’ She curls her lip. ‘That paper, it’s filth, get it away from me. The Sport is degrading to women. I wouldn’t touch it, I’d run a mile from it. It makes girls look like cheap sluts.’
    And although Cara Brett was so scathing about the feminist protests in front of the clubs, at one point, suddenly becoming thoughtful, she unexpectedly echoed their views. Do you thinkthis is just what women choose to do, I asked. ‘No, not really,’ she said. ‘A lot of girls don’t know how to make choices. They think that because one girl’s doing it, and everyone’s going wild, they should do it. Maybe that will change one day.’
    Dave Read, the head of Neon Management, Cara’s agency, is an upbeat man, used to selling his business – but he too could not prevent a tone of realism, which even turned to disgust at times, when he talked about what he’s seen in his business over the last fifteen years. For him, too, it is clear that these so-called choices are often fuelled more by desperation than liberation. ‘There’s this desperation, there are so many girls coming through,’ he said honestly. ‘They churn them through. They don’t have to look like a Pirelli calendar, it’s this girl-next-door thing – just a sexy girl who puts pictures of herself in her knickers online or in a magazine. You don’t even have to pay those girls. You go to Chinawhites any night of the week and you see all these girls milling around, all desperate to bag a footballer and be a glamour model. They come down to London on the