Bring back all that vajazzle
REMEMBER a few years ago, when feminism was in the doldrums? Back when it was all about whether pole dancing or showing off your vajazzle on reality TV was empowering or degrading? I do, and I was terribly impatient with it all. I didn’t think pole dancing was empowering in the slightest, and frankly I wished women would find something else to worry about.
How I yearn for those days now. They seem so fresh and lively, belonging to an era before the Twitter militias who patrol and prowl political correctness took over the internet and made everything angry, grim and grey. How I want to grab all those “pole dancing is empowering” women I used to disparage and give them all a hug. “Yes!” I want to shout. “Take your kit off and enjoy it if you want to!”
For Britain has become a different place since then: punitively anti-sex; harassment-obsessed and – to judge by Google’s anguished new clampdown on workplace romances – on track for a cascade of sex-related lawsuits.
Last week saw the latest patronising, puritanical and sharply antiliberal kerfuffle over women’s bodies.
Keen to jump on the moral bandwagon and demonstrate its own stringent anti-harassment morality, the UK’s gambling regulator primly called on the industry to “stamp out sexism” or face a boycott of the flagship ICE Totally Gaming event at London’s Excel centre.
The regulator said that the women hired to entice people to the exhibition stands were “expected to wear nothing more than swimsuits”. Gracious me. Nothing more than swimsuits, you say? Clearly, the poor dears needed saving from lecherous men, themselves and, one can only infer, their paychecks as well.
Thankfully, in a reassuring bid for freedom and the market, the organisers ignored the regulator’s threat and went ahead with employing hundreds of hostesses to flaunt their bodies in miniskirts and crop-tops. One can only imagine the enraged blushes at the Gambling Commission as the conference kicked off with a Playboy-themed dance show, or when another exhibitor offered a poledancing display with women wearing – gasps all round – “high heels, fishnet stockings and lingerie”.
Did the men behave themselves? Not quite. One dancer reported a request for her “going rate” – others said they experienced uninvited physical contact from male attendees. The photos from the event, however, show a bunch of healthy, strong and cheerful women, holding pompoms at jaunty angles.
A few years ago, they’d have been called liberated. Now everyone wants to take their jobs away. It seems to have been decided that it’s better for women to work at Pret a Manger – less money, but at least out of harm’s way. The gambling industry fuss, of course, follows the precedent set by the Presidents Club – the all-male fundraising dinner shut down last month after it was engulfed in a harassment scandal.
When those 150 women took jobs as hostesses at the event, which raised funds for the Great Ormond Street Hospital (money that was disdainfully returned), they donned stilettos and miniskirts. When some of the men behaved inappropriately, the sky fell in. I couldn’t help but agree with Jilly Cooper (an author who knows a thing or two about sex) when she observed, bewildered at the fuss: “I’m old, darling. When I was young, I loved men saying I was pretty and had a nice bottom.”
Of course, I do not condone harassment, and the attendees of the now-defunct Presidents Club, the gambling conference, and all other such events, should keep their hands to themselves. Indeed, in an ideal world, men wouldn’t need the sight of pornographically arrayed female body parts to take an interest in new gambling technology – and perhaps they could also ditch the gambling altogether.
But we’re not in an ideal world, and the real problem is nothing to do with lechery, gambling or skimpy dresses. It’s the authoritarian bullying and rank hypocrisy of those who claim to have women’s interests at heart.
It seems lost on those loudly piping a righteous tune of anti-sexism that they are also now deciding what women are and are not allowed to do with their bodies for money. In other words, while claiming to be pro-women, it looks awfully like they’re actually just pro-controlling women.
The drive to “stamp out sexism” by making it unacceptable to pay women to appear in skimpy clothes, looks very like the desire to protect female virtue. And in this, we’ve suddenly got rather too much in common with the repressive regimes of the likes of Iran or Saudi Arabia.
Where once we celebrated women’s right to be (and, crucially, to profit from being) scantily clad, now we decree that it’s too objectifying to be tolerated. Where once it was a woman’s right to choose to flaunt her body for cash, now the screws are being turned on those who pay them to do so.
In thrall to political correctness and falling over themselves to virtue signal, the great and the good have decided to save these women not only from men but also from themselves. If this is what feminism means now, take me back to the days of pole dancing and vajazzles, please! —