Thoughts on Natasha Walter's 'Guardian' interview

Natasha Walter has a new book out called Living Dolls, and yesterday the Guardian ran an interview with her as part of the publicity for the new release. Walter's previous title, The New Feminism, was widely acclaimed, although according to the article the title alone offended some feminists (and, of course, the content offended others - hard not to offend at least someone on some feminist topics!)

Anyway, the new book is subtitled "The Return of Sexism", but as far as I can tell from the article what's really bothering Walters is the rise and rise of sexualisation.

Skipping gaily past the intro, in which interviewer Kira Cochrane gushes about how clever and calm Walters' writing is and they talk about what makes Walters angry (the F-Word Blog take on that part of it is pretty good), we get to the nitty-gritty of what the book's about.

It is organised in two distinct parts, and the first finds Walter ­taking a journey through the seedy underbelly of modern culture, an ­excursion that starts, in faintly ­surreal fashion, at a "Babes on the Bed" ­competition in a Southend nightclub, a contest to find a glamour model for Nuts magazine.

...

The journey continues through interviews with a former lap dancer called Ellie, who helps illustrate just how sexist the culture has ­become: "Now," says ­Ellie, "women get told they are prudes if they say they don't want their boyfriend to go to a club where he gets to stick his fingers in someone else's vagina." She interviews a woman she calls Angela, who, in ­describing her work as a prostitute, says that "basically you've consented to being raped sometimes for money". And then there's pornography addict Jim, who says that "porn is way more brutalising than it used to be. There is this unbelievable obsession with [extreme] anal sex . . . It's far more demeaning to women than in the past."

The second part is about the gendered roles in which children are being brought up:

When Walter first had her daughter, she says, "I was hit by this deluge of pink. Then, at friends' houses, you'd walk into a boy's bedroom, and it would just be blue and navy, and full of cars and Action Men. I found that when I raised this – even with really liberal parents – they would say, 'But boys and girls are just different. She just LOVES pink.' Or, 'It's such a pity that he doesn't play with dolls, but he just doesn't get it.' They would be ­saying this, sort of bemoaning it, but ­endlessly reinforcing [gender] ­stereotypes in an almost unconscious way . . . I'd hear things like, 'Well, he wanted to do ballet, but he'd be the only boy in the class, so obviously he couldn't do it,' and you'd think, 'Why obviously?'."

Now, it's a fair guess that I'm unlikely to read Living Dolls any time soon, just because I have a lot of reading on the go at the moment, so I'll have to settle for what I can see in the Guardian interview alone to talk about (that's why the post is called "thoughts on the interview" instead of "thoughts on the book", neat that, eh?)

I'll start by saying straight up that I loathe and despise the Nuts magazine culture. In my analysis of the messages sent out by different kinds of sexual media, the "Lads' Mags" of which Nuts is the most well-known example comes out as easily the most sexist and despicable, commodifying women's bodies; the passage that I clipped above demonstrates this aptly:

...at a "Babes on the Bed" ­competition in a Southend nightclub, a contest to find a glamour model for Nuts magazine. It's difficult to ­imagine anyone more ­incongruous here than the intellectual, refined Walter; ­especially when the DJ starts ­shouting, "This is Cara Brett! She's on the cover of Nuts this week! So buy her, take her home and have a wank."

The point where I start to get wary of the analysis is when we're presented with anecdotal evidence: Ellie the lap dancer suddenly stands in for ALL lap dancers; Angela the prostitute suddenly stands in for ALL prostitutes. I am not saying that Angela's story is false, and I'm not saying either that such experiences are few and far between. The recent Men Who Buy Sex survey (for all its faults) did reveal that a lot of men effectively think the same way about prostitution as Angela does (although they don't cast it as "rape" in their own minds). The point of disagreement is whether it represents something essential about sex work [NB - I don't know for certain without reading the book whether that really is a disagreement, I'm interpolating from the rest of the article a little here].

A similar criticism can be made of the anecdotal evidence of "pornography addict" Jim, quoted as saying, "porn is way more brutalising than it used to be. There is this unbelievable obsession with [extreme] anal sex . . . It's far more demeaning to women than in the past."

Firstly, while I agree there is a lot of brutal anal sex porn available if you look for it (I'm a sadist with a love of all anal play - so naturally, I look for it!) I totally disagree that it constitutes an "obsession" in all porn: you get what you look for, generally. That said, anal does seem to have become a part of the standard sequence of porn sex scenes (it usually seems to go like this: fellatio - cunnilingus - PIV - anal - facial/tit cumshot) - on th eother hand, there isn't any particular focus on it.

Secondly, did Jim mean "brutalising", or did he mean "brutal"? "Brutalising" means "turns into brutes/makes brutal", so if that's what he meant then he is saying that porn today makes people more brutal than porn used to. There is no evidence to support this claim, and it's an assumption he's making based on I don't know what. Alternatively, if he means "porn is more brutal than it used to be" then I would repeat my previous observation that porn gives you what you look for: if you look for brutal porn, you'll find it; if you like it gentler, you can find that too. The top-grossing porn films are almost all towards the softer end of that spectrum.

Thirdly, what is it with these assumptions about "demeaning to women"? There seems to be a tendency to apply essentialist assumptions about certain sex acts that is deeply rooted in society (always about what it does to women, never about men being degraded by sex!) but it seems incongruous for a feminist to allow a man to think in a woman's place and determine for women what is or is not demeaning to the women involved. Judging from some of Walters' other remarks in the article, it seems as though the idea is that somehow what one woman does in a porn shoot is somehow demeaning to every other woman in the world (a link that I really don't consider to have been proven yet - who knows, maybe there is groundbreaking analysis in the book, but I doubt it).

Having said that, there is an important analysis mentioned in the interview - it's not a new idea to sex-positive feminists, but it's good to have it out there in published literature (as opposed to internet discussion), and it may form a point of commonality for action between different branches of feminism.

That point is given here:

One email in particular stuck out, a message from a 17-year-old girl called Carly Whiteley. She said that she was "starting to think it was time to give up and sit in silence while my friends put on a porno and grunted about ­whatever blonde, airbrushed piece of plastic was in Nuts this week. What you said gave me back the will not to give in . . . It's nice to see someone else saying it, makes me feel like less of a prude-type oddball."

The "prude" reference was key. In Living Dolls, Walter takes on the ­notion that, for example, stripping and pole dancing are ­empowering, ­liberating choices; instead, she ­suggests, it has become increasingly difficult for young women to opt out of this culture, to take any path other than that which leads inexorably to fake nails, fake tan and, finally, fake breasts. And, if they do, there are ­serious social penalties.

While I don't like the slut-shaming language used by Ms Whiteley in her email, I think that there is an important point to be made about the ways in which sexualised culture is imposing certain choices and making it harder to say "no". I think that our sex education system has to do a much better job of empowering young people (men as well as women) to say "no" to the sexualised versions of ourselves that we are sold every day (men are sold a role as desirers, women as desired).

The whole "stripping and pole dancing are ­empowering, ­liberating choices" thing is a strawperson argument when debating sex-positive feminism; but in the wider "raunch culture" it's a valid criticism that needs to be addressed. As Walters describes, it's only a liberated choice if it's a free choice, and genuinely a personal expression. It's sold to women as such by raunch culture, but that isn't always the way it really is: as Walters explains, "I was surprised by the attitudes of the girls I interviewed, who seemed to feel that they would be mocked if they protested within their peer groups... Of course, a lot them would say, 'It's fine, we can choose whether to [interact with the sexist culture] or not,' and then you dig a little deeper, and you realise that it is more ­problematic than that."

I am reminded of the evidence presented in Channel 4's The Sex Education Show vs Pornography about the ways in which teenagers are coming to terms with their sexuality. Some of it is very pernicious, and it's an issue that needs to be addressed. My mantra is always the same: fully comprehensive sex education, covering emotional as well as physical aspects of sexuality. Give young women and men the power to say "no" to these things, as well as the ability to say "yes".

If there is no "no", there can be no meaningful "yes" either.

The concern I have with the tenor of the interview is that it comes across that for Walter, "no" is the only valid answer to sexual media, to sex work, to displayed sexuality. Her answer to the problems discussed above seems to be "therefore we must have NONE of these things ever - no, none at all, all gone!" But that only leads back into the old forms of sexism and slut-shaming. Maybe I'm misjudging Walter here - maybe it is Cochrane's agenda that is coming through from the interview instead, or maybe the information presented doesn't accurately reflect the thrust of the book's argument, I don't know.

Knowledge is power. Education is empowering. There is a syllabus, a curriculum, that needs to be developed here to put the power into young people's hands so that they are in control of themselves and their relationship to sexuality.