How the 'new feminism' went wrong

How the 'new feminism' went wrong | Books | The Guardian Saturday 6 March 2010

From pole-dancing lessons to baking cupcakes, modern woman thinks she can do it all. Germaine Greer's free-thinking female eunuch has been replaced by the desperately self-inventing 'Madonna', argues Charlotte Raven, who looks back in shame at the moment in the 1990s when her generation turned its back on feminism

Madonna on tour in 1990 Photograph: SANDY HILL/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Thanks to a string of celebrity sex stories, the world according to the tabloids has recently been – even more than usual – a sorry place for feminism. But among the countless snaps – of bikini-clad betrayed wives, distressed mistresses and pneumatic "hostesses" – perhaps the most disturbing was that of Katie Price's two-year-old daughter, Princess, in heavy makeup, complete with false eyelashes. Millions have seen it. The "debate" about it has been staged on all media platforms: on one TV talk show, a woman said she couldn't see what all the fuss was about. Her daughter was a "girly girl", like Princess. She "adored" dressing up and posing in front of cameras. It would be wrong to stop her, wouldn't it?

Katie Price's currency is as high today as when she published her million-selling autobiography in 2004. She has generated much outrage in the last few years, but it is nothing compared with her influence. Her narcissism no longer seems so aberrant. Women's belief in specialness and a concomitant sense of entitlement has inflated in line with Price's most famous assets.

How has it come to this? Feminists blame the sexists, Martin Amis et al, which is easy but unfair. In reality, we can't blame anyone but ourselves. While Price has been working tirelessly at getting her message across, the thinking women – the writers and journalists – who should have been putting the counter case have been indulging in a variety of "guilty pleasures" – from ogling young men (Germaine Greer in The Boy) to drooling over frocks (Linda Grant in The Thoughtful Dresser). Feminists have become increasingly frivolous, and as such are no match for Price, who is serious about her mission to win over all women to "Team Narcissist".

Two new exposés of the dehumanising effect of the Price worldview feel like too little too late. The fantasy world described in Natasha Walter's Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, where appearances are everything, has already come to pass. Today's young women are right to think they will be judged on how they seem, rather than who they are. In this context, Kat Banyard's promise to tell "the truth about women and men" in her new book The Equality Illusion is the promise of a horse-drawn plough in the machine age. The truth is no longer enough; she needs a promotional gimmick.

In a recent study of 1,000 British girls (admittedly by a mobile entertainment company), quoted in Walter's book, 60% said glamour modelling was their preferred career. A quarter said they would consider becoming lap dancers. By all measures, the value map has shifted in Price's favour.

I'm sorry to say that we are culpable. Thinking women have turned their backs on feminism. This might not have been a disaster if we had remained neutral. But we, too, have found the governing philosophy of Priceworld compelling. The fact that our daughters join in shouldn't come as any surprise. Their insouciance about the business of striking poses for money has been learned from us. For too long we've been channelling rather than challenging Price.

There was a moment in the 90s – I wince to recall it – when women themselves fell in with the view that feminism was unglamorous and inhibiting. It was cramping our style and even worse, stopping us from shopping! Middle-class commentators encouraged their readers to embrace their "inner bimbos". Their paeans to hair products and sexy knickers read like new lad-mag paeans to tarty women. Comic exaggeration made it clear that the writers were self-aware – women who "should know better".

[...]

The girlpower we were all getting "into" was in fact a bit of marketing aimed at getting tweens to buy records. Walter, however, thought it was a real phenomenon. Her first book The New Feminism, which came out in 1998, suggested that the sex war had been won. "As women break down every corridor of power in Britain, we can see that we are in the final stretch of a long feminist revolution that is taking women from the outside of society to the inside, from silence to speech, from impotence to strength."

[...]

If Walter was right, now was the moment to sit back complacently, filing our nails. The last bit of the feminist revolution was simply a matter of signing on the dotted line. "This generation of women is much less likely to experience the feminist's erstwhile ambivalence about taking on power."

In this model, power could be taken on, like a mortgage, after due consideration. Everyone could sign up for it. Those who chose not to may have had some perverse attachment to their "downtrodden", "sorry victim" status. The rest would opt for life as a "laughing, independent, ambitious optimist", in the manner of Cherie Lunghi (worryingly, one of Walter's positive role models) from the Kenco coffee ads.

In her 1994 book Fire With Fire, Naomi Wolf argued that the impediments to my becoming the Kenco CEO were psychological rather than political. An old-fashioned feminine reticence about boasting and bullshitting was holding me back. To combat this, Wolf suggested convening a "power group" in a gorgeous setting with gourmet coffee on tap. Between sips, my Prada-clad sisters and I would affirm our achievements and discuss ways of making feminism "fun, easy and lucrative" instead of angry and bitter.

As a young journalist in the 1990s – when journalism was having its own moment of hubris – following Wolf's advice, I tapped into my own reservoir of "unclaimed power". No longer whinging about constraints, I seized opportunities and relished the feeling of being mistress of my own destiny. Earning proper money for the first time, I gave myself permission to spend it on designer outfits and crates of bottled Coke "Classic". I never had a bottle opener, so developed the knack of pulling off the cap with my teeth. As I did so, an Oprahesque voice in my head intoned "You go girl!"

Wolf said we needed new role models to replace uninspiring "downtrodden" feminists. Walter plumped for Thatcher on the grounds that she "allowed British women to celebrate their ability not just to be nurturing or caring and life affirming, but also to be deeply unpleasant, to be cruel, to be death dealing, to be egoistic. It was cathartic for us to acknowledge these possibilities. Thatcher normalised success."

I opted for Julie Burchill, a narcissist before narcissism was fashionable. Our brief relationship was a six-month-long powergroup (without the gourmet coffee), and I emerged from it unchivalrously convinced that I would be the next Graham Greene, rather than the next Julie Burchill. "You're the proper writer. Not a performing seal like moi!" It was strange to see other women modelling themselves on Susan Street, the heroine of Burchill's 1989 novel Ambition. The book begins at a crime scene. Street has dispatched her rival "to the big boardroom in the sky with a sexual performance of such singular virtuosity that his heart couldn't stand it". Street doesn't do reticence. The only thing standing between her and her ambition to become the first woman editor of the Sunday Best is its owner, Tobias Pope. She agrees to become his sex slave, knowing that she will remain in control and unmoved, even as she's hanging upside down from the ceiling in a lesbian club in New York. In these moments of degradation, she's still experiencing the "ecstasy of success". In spite of appearances, she is leading him on. Her motto is: "When you win, nothing hurts."

We all started to evince "attitude". Like Katie Price doing sexy, we adopted the pose selfconsciously, knowing that it made commercial sense. Women with balls were de rig. The launch of the late-night magazine-format Girlie Show on Channel 4 in 1994 convinced us that being "Amazonian" and "in yer face" would pay social and professional dividends. "Attitude" was sold as a more authentic way of being. The idea was that women had repressed their sex-loving, gobshite side in the name of feminine propriety. According to the producer: "Women have always behaved like this – they've just never done it on the TV before."

[...]

If it didn't I could always pretend it had. The bars and clubs were full of women lying like men about the size of their promotions. Everyone was "glinting", Peter York's phrase for believing one's own publicity. Sad to report, feminism had reneged on its responsibility to present uncomfortable truths. It had become a mirror of the moment.

Ten years of ego inflation has had a predicable impact. We are hyperconfident, hypersexual and hypercandid about our readiness to do whatever it takes to secure top billing. We're still longing to experience the ecstasy of success. This feels elusive, even to those at the top of the professional ladder. Wolf would be disappointed to see female CEOs fantasising about the moment when they will be elevated to the next level. "What women want" is no longer a mystery. In our age, it isn't a fulfilling job or happy home life, but promotion in the broadest sense.

The heroine of India Knight's novel My Life on a Plate, published in 2000, models herself on Madonna. In times of personal crisis, she asks: "What would Madonna do?", confident that this will give her the right answer. The novel's popularity suggests women identified with the heroine's belief that "all we need is to feel like Queens on Thrones all the time". The queenly aspect of modern woman – the sense that she is meant for better things – could be described as Madonnaesque. The pop star's lifelong commitment to getting to the next level reinforces her fans' belief that it's possible and desirable to "reinvent" your world, as well as yourself, to match your inflated self-image. Her failure to smile once during the whole 40-year process suggests that this form of self-advancement is as enjoyable as suffragism was for Emily Wilding Davison.

Instrumentalism has taken over from romanticism as the governing female philosophy. Madonna-ised woman sees everything, and everyone, as a means to her end. She views her body instrumentally: the "hypersexualisation" of women noted by Walter in Living Dolls has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with self-marketing. Everyone is constantly orgasming, yet they've never seemed less convincing. They aren't fake, but phoney, a form of spin. They are meant to be overheard, conveying empowerment.

A recent interview with sex blogger Zoe Margolis portrayed her as an icon of liberation. But Walter doesn't fall for this: in the 90s she was happy to take women at their own account, believing their assessment of themselves as empowered-women-of-the-90s, but not today. Living Dolls is more sceptical than The New Feminism. Interviewees' claims to be happily promiscuous, porn-loving, sex-texting women-of the-noughties are properly scrutinised this time, and her accounts of the emotional and psychological costs of this way of life are plausible and compelling. But she's less convincing about the causes of the phenomena of "hypersexualisation" and "exaggerated femininity", so named, I imagine, because she couldn't use "hyper" twice.

Walter puts "hypersexualisation" down to a rise in sexism– not the old-fashioned sort but something more sinister that never quite comes into view. The second half of her book explains the return of traditional femininity as a result of a greater belief in determinism. She is right to point out that we no longer believe in conditioning, but surely wrong to say this belief has been supplanted by essentialism – a belief in innate differences between the sexes. The Madonna-ised woman views femininity as a tool for getting what she wants, whatever that may be. In this moment, it is more or less compulsory for intelligent women to reveal a passion for baking cupcakes. The domestic goddess is a pose, not a reversion to old-style femininity. Now that "attitude" is out and old-fashioned feminine virtues are "in", so Madonna-ised woman is ready to reveal that cake-making is her number one "guilty pleasure".

The young girl's penchant for pinky "girliness" reflects not a belief in essential femininity but an early brand awareness. Her belief that the pickers on the next level favour "girliness" is reinforced by everything she sees. Today's girly isn't passive, but sassy and self-defining.

Completely sold on the myth of "self-invention", today's woman believes herself in control of her life, from birth to the present day. There's no governing philosophy, just an urge to assert her will. She doesn't know what she's doing, but she's damn well doing it.

Anyone who challenges or questions her will get short shrift, even our own children. A slew of motherhood memoirs portray the baby as a "rival consciousness". This memorable phrase was coined in Rachel Cusk's A Life's Work. Cusk's nuanced portrayal of maternal ambivalence was read one way by those seeking support for their perception of motherhood as an endless bad hair day.

Mothers are now more able to portray themselves as victims of their children. Brett Paesel says she was prompted to write her memoir Mommies Who Drink by the silence around motherhood and women's unwillingness to bear witness to their subjugation, "which feels like complaining". No one dares convey the rage evoked by the maternal requirement to put someone else's needs above their own? None except Stephanie Calman, author of Confessions of a Bad Mother; Kate Long, author of The Bad Mother's Handbook; Mel Giedroyc, author of Going Ga Ga – Is There Life After Birth? and so on and on. These controlling mothers seem to feel wronged by the autonomy of the people in their orbit. The fact that their children are separate beings with their own beliefs and habits seems like a dreadful affront. Female confessional writers seldom pay much mind to how it feels to be them. Far from being a golden age of female self-expression, this is the opposite. Real self-expression requires dialogue. With the other point of view excluded, candid authors are communicating nothing.

Madonna-ised woman believes she should have everything, like the women from Sex and the City, with everything defined as every possible dress and sexual permutation. The teenagers interviewed in Living Dolls say things like: "We were saying that one week we should go out and try to notch up as many lovers as we can, with the most variety possible – age, gender, jobs." They might be mortified to find these very omnipotent fantasies enacted, page by lurid page, in Madonna's book Sex, 18 years ago. Many of them maintain a Price-like carapace of invulnerability. They are winning, they believe, so nothing hurts. Unable to evaluate risk, they see no reason not to go out to a drinking barn in their underwear, or appear in a college-run porn mag or have sex with everyone they can.

[...]

Happily, Kat Banyard is on hand to remind them of the bad things that do happen. The Equality Illusion is a dose of feminist commonsense. Banyard doesn't think we need new words for things, or a "new feminism". She reminds me of the feminists I knew at university: angry in just the right measure. I've a hunch she didn't serve cupcakes at her book launch.

Refreshingly, she doesn't flinch from portraying as victims the people bad things happen to. The Equality Illusion provides a useful corrective to the Belle-sponsored myth of free will. "Between 50 and 75% of women in prostitution in the UK begin selling sex acts before they are 18 years old." Many prostitutes were abused as children or "fucked up" by other means.

"I was basically too fucked up for work," one woman tells Banyard. "And I knew it, so when I saw an ad in the paper for escorts, there seemed little choice. I figured I was really fucked up about men and had been truly fucked over by them, and didn't trust them an inch so might as well make some money from it. This was not a free 'choice'. It was the opposite. I needed money, but was a mess. Where else do they greet you with such open arms in such a state as the sex industry?"

During the 90s, according to a Home Office report, the number of men paying for sex in the UK doubled; there are now an estimated 80,000 women involved in prostitution and 921 brothels in London. The industry's efforts to make it seem like a normal leisure pursuit, rather than a form of abuse, appear to be paying off. It isn't. Banyard's interviewee had recently been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder – a common psychological "side effect" of prostitution. One symptom of this was disassociation, protective in the first instance, then destructive if you can't stop doing it. The teenage interviewees in Living Dolls are already adepts at this and rather pleased with themselves to have found a way of avoiding the emotional costs of promiscuity.

The Equality Illusion is full of grim statistics illustrating pay differentials and the point that poverty often has a "female face". As Banyard demonstrates, it isn't difficult proving that women are more oppressed than ever; the difficulty now is getting them to admit it.

Natasha Walter can't quite. Living Dolls does an excellent job of exposing the brutal reality behind the sex industry's increasingly sophisticated façade. It reads much more convincingly than The New Feminism; she's describing something real. Yet, when it comes to it, she still can't say that any of these things are wrong: "There is, of course, nothing intrinsically degrading or miserable about women pole dancing, stripping, having sex with large numbers of partners or consuming pornography. All these behaviours are potentially enjoyable, sexy and fun."

Yet even in her own portrayal, there clearly is something intrinsically degrading and miserable about pole dancing. It's not about sex, says one of her interviewees, but the illusion of power. Each man wants to believe the no-touching rule has been breached for his exclusive benefit. If women were liberated, pole dancing wouldn't exist. Why not condemn it outright?

Walter seems frightened of sounding square – as if she's bought into the idea that a taste for porn is a badge of sophistication. She may also be scared of causing offence, possibly justifiably. Women have never been as touchy and as unwilling to accept criticism. Her reluctance to condemn may spring from an anxiety about being judgmental or from a fantasy about having everything. Like her interviewees, she doesn't want to rule anything out.

In the end, she doesn't want to be the person who's limiting women's choices. In the last decade, choice has become an ideology. Walter's solution to the conundrum of how to respond to the sex industry's successful rebranding as a chic lifestyle choice is to make more wholesome "choices" seem equally alluring. To rebrand them, in other words. As things stand, "we can see that certain choices are celebrated while others are marginalised". All that needs to happen is for these "marginal choices" to be "celebrated".

Will her strategy work? We've seen it in operation in repeated attempts to challenge the dominant ideal of beauty. Gok Wan's celebrations of cellulite always precede suggestions about how to conceal it effectively. Beth Ditto's body may look like a good example of a "marginal" choice made mainstream by a process of reclamation, but like every other cover girl she is styled in accordance with the current aesthetic orthodoxy. Her image on the cover of Pop magazine was manipulated, apparently, to make her bigger. Today the pickers on the next level like extreme looks, and Ditto is fortunate to conform to their hyperbolic tastes. The Pop cover is fashion. Like all fashion images, it makes normality seem risible.

It's a good moment to reread Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. Its reissue feels timely. In the 50s, as now, the early gains of feminism had been squandered by a generation who thought it unglamorous and inhibiting. Friedan was recording a postwar period of reaction when women sought refuge in a form of conventional femininity. With nostalgia she recalls the period during the early part of the century when women such as Amelia Earhart offered a glorious go-faster modernism in place of feminine passivity and female icons were complex-looking rather than merely beautiful.

I feel the same when looking back to the 1970s. The free-thinking, life-loving, desiring person described in Greer's The Female Eunuch now seems a historical figure. In her place, we have Madonna-ised woman grinding out routines in front of a mirror, with her eyes asking "am I hot?" Her whole being is directed at self-advancement, yet she is as incapable of real fulfilment. Her ambitions have been curtailed, just like Friedan's housewife. How very far this creature is from the feminist ideal. In spite of what is now claimed, feminism has never been about empowerment through choice. You can't simply opt for power – power isn't a fridge or an elliptical training machine. Any strategy in this consumerist register is doomed to fail.

Friedan didn't worry about offending her audience. She described the destruction wrecked by the "happy housewife" on her miserable husband and progeny. With no life of her own, she lives vicariously through them, stunting their emotional growth and preventing them from taking on the responsibilities of adulthood.

It's hard to imagine Madonna-ised woman having an "ah ha" moment reading something that anatomised her flaws. Any representation of the damage she is doing to her loved ones and herself will be angrily rebuffed, along with any accompanying advice about "getting other interests" or "putting baby first". Putting baby's needs ahead of our own, with no quid pro quo, seems as silly to us as Friedan's suggestion that the 50s housewife would benefit from putting herself first.

I remember that T-shirt we used to wear in the 70s which featured Thatcher and the slogan "We are all prostitutes", meaning exploitation was a universal fact. At that time it was thought clever to display some awareness of the social and psychological forces underpinning your actions. Now we think the opposite. Even prostitutes are insulted by the suggestion that they are not free agents, defining the terms of engagement.

If awareness returned – if modern woman were no longer disassociating from her pain and victimhood – all her decisions would be different. The things that hurt us would never seem "potentially enjoyable". We wouldn't wear silly shoes, blog about our sex life, worry that our babies are upstaging us. Most importantly, we'd resist the temptation to caricature ourselves. We'd lose the Nigella-esque pinny, the Price-esque lash extensions; the Belle-esque pose of erotic empowerment would seem inhibiting. We'd recover our desire for the missionary position with the person lying next to us. In every sphere of existence we'd be free to choose normality.

Natasha Walter's Living Dolls is published by Virago (£12.99), Kat Banyard's The Equality Illusion by Faber (£12.99) and Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique by Penguin (£12.99).