New feminism for new generation
Vicky Allan
through a porn-influenced culture, and suddenly realised that all the assumptions she had made back in the nineties were wrong.
In Living Dolls, she wrote that she had once thought women should put aside the feminist arguments that “centred on private lives … I believed that we only had to put in place the conditions for equality for the remnants of the old-fashioned sexism in our culture to wither away. I am ready to admit that I was entirely wrong”. She woke up, just as a whole generation of young women did, to the fact that, in some ways, girls were as trapped as ever.
Myself, I’m less bothered by lads’ mags than I am by women’s mags with their relentless diet of beautification tips, relationships advice and fashion. But I do get why titles such as Nuts are a good target, and why a Tesco AGM represents an opportunity to get a wider message across. Lads’ mags, with their dwindling circulations, may seem like small fry in a world where humiliating and violent porn is easily accessible on the web, but they are a very visible, legitimised physical presence in the mainstream. Tesco sells them. So does WH Smith. And for a generation who have learned their tricks from the anti-capitalist movement, this makes them prime prey.
Lucas described Page 3 as a “sexist anachronism”. That, she said, is why it should go. But actually the problem with Page 3 is not that it is an anachronism. Unfortunately, today, it is just the tip of a vast cultural iceberg in which women, in various states of dress, are used as the decorative, sexually alluring, element for selling things.
The reason The Sun never drops Page 3 is not that the editors have justified its existence, but that it sells papers. David Dinsmore, the new editor of the paper, has already said as much. Discussing news coverage of a new British Museum project and exhibition, he said: “This is Japanese art … It’s given the editor of The Times the opportunity to put a naked Japanese lady on page three, which as we know is a good way of selling newspapers.”
This is more than a tired old story of a battle not yet won; another Groundhog Day in which the same anger is voiced. The new feminists of today are not so much carrying on the war that their mothers and grandmothers began as becoming involved in their own very particular offensive.
Around a decade ago, before I had children, I was rather fond of a quote (one, sadly, I can no longer attribute), which said that women under 30 without children needed feminism like they needed a hole in the head. But this generation is making it clear that is not true.
Theirs is a campaign with potency and urgency; one which is less about burning bras and more about eliminating the conditions that produce hate and sexual violence. Each day these women wake up to their own new morning – and they, at least, are trying to reshape the day.
THERE was a sense, perhaps, that it was Groundhog Day in the world of feminism over the past few weeks, with the female sex, like Bill Murray in the Hollywood movie, forced to relive the same experience again and again. First there was Caroline Lucas, following in the footsteps of Clare Short, attending a parliamentary debate wearing a T-shirt saying No More Page 3. Lucas was trying to push for an end to free copies of The Sun being made available in the Houses of Parliament, but David Cameron was having none of it. Then there was a gang of young feminists who turned up at the Tesco AGM on Friday, demanding that they stop stocking lads’ mags such as Nuts and Zoo on their shelves. And, around midweek, we seemed to have rewound to the sixties and Made in Dagenham when female staff finally won an equal pay case against Dumfries and Galloway Council. Britain, it seems, is stuck in a time warp. Or is it? Are the young women of today waking up to the same morning alarm they have for decades? Or is there a new tone to that awakening ring?
A couple of weeks ago, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown threw a small wobbly in her column in The Independent over the way feminism had been let down by younger women, specifically those aged 20 to 40. This seemed a bizarre misrepresentation. Watching the Slutwalk movement, the ever-expanding UK Feminista organisation and ubiquitous anti-pornography campaigns, it is clear that the younger generation, those from around 15 to 35, are the driving force in a vibrant new wave of feminism. Woman’s Hour this week even devoted most of its programme to it.
Lucas might be the one wearing the T-shirt in the House of Commons, but it was a young woman who created the No More Page Three campaign: Lucy- Anne Holmes, who, during the Olympics last year, looking for coverage of Jessica Ennis, picked up a copy of The Sun and was pleased to find no topless model on Page 3. At first she thought it had been dropped – only to find “Emily” posing on page 13, where the slot had temporarily moved. Holmes “felt sad to my core”. Yes, the athlete Ennis was featured in the paper too. “But her picture was much smaller than Emily’s,” wrote Holmes in her blog. “In fact, the largest image of a woman in that issue of The Sun was Emily with her clothes off.”
THIS new feminist movement didn’t come into being because of some revolutionary new idea. It was born as a reaction to the society young women are currently growing up in: an aggressive, highly sexualised, often pornographic culture which hits them smack in the face as teens and twentysomethings. It is a backlash against a world of Nuts magazine, poledancing classes, ubiquitous online pornography, designer vaginas and so-called “rape culture”.
The message for these women in their early years might be that girls can have it all, including empowerment through sex. But reality has thrown them a much more bitter pill. Again and again you find in the stories of “how I became a feminist” a personal tale that involves the sudden realisation, mostly in her teens or early twenties, that there is a world out there of hatred and aggression. Teenager Jinan Younis, for instance, who set up a feminist society at her school in Altrincham, recalls that moment on a trip to Cambridge when she and her friends were harassed by some young men in a car, and she had a cup of hot coffee thrown over her bare arm.
Many people cite Caitlin Moran as the mother of this movement. But actually, I think Moran is just its funny and fabulous big sister. It is not her How To Be A Woman you should look at, but Natasha Walter’s Living Dolls: The Return Of Sexism. Walter, after all, was the intermediate generation feminist who did a turn-around; who looked at the world that young women were growing up in, of so-called empowerment