Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism Read Online Free PDF Page A

strength of one shoot, with stars in their eyes, and they end up up to their ears in debt, pulling pints, lap dancing, prostitution, you name it.’
    Other people in the glamour-modelling industry also admit that many of the women who set out into this industry may have few other routes in front of them which they feel will lead to any equivalent success. As Phil Hilton said to me at one point: ‘In reality, if you’re a young working-class woman from the provinces who sends your picture into these magazines, you’re not likely to become incredibly successful. It’s like the young working-class guys who all want to be professional footballers – these are unlikely ambitions. But what I’m very reluctant to do is to judge other people’s ambitions and choices very differently from how they would judge themselves.’ He recognised that he is often talking about choices that are already restricted, but he didn’t see that as the magazine’s problem. ‘Let’s be realistic, andtake an honest class perspective here – are you going to say to those girls, why do you want to be Jordan – why don’t you want to be a cabinet minister?’
    Although Hilton may have said this as a throwaway remark, I think it is telling. The mainstreaming of the sex industry has coincided with a point in history when there is much less social mobility than in previous generations. No wonder, then, if the ideal that the sex industry pushes – that status can be won by any woman if she is prepared to flaunt her body – is now finding fertile ground among many young women who, as Phil Hilton says, would never imagine a career in, say, politics.
    That’s not to say that everyone who has chosen to go into glamour modelling is being exploited or disappointed. On the contrary, this kind of sexual display clearly does deliver a true charge of excitement and energy to many women who participate. Some women in this industry make a point of emphasising that they have freely chosen the work. Jodie Marsh, for instance, a glamour model and star of reality-television programmes, has drawn attention to her good A-level results and that she could have been a lawyer if she hadn’t chosen to strip instead. And clearly many other women who have not had to clamber up through the glamour-modelling industry itself may enjoy taking on some of its attitudes and poses, whether that means singers such as Rachel Stevens or Alesha Dixon posing in underwear for men’s magazines, or actors such as Maggie Gyllenhaal modelling in handcuffs and black satin underwear for lingerie manufacturer Agent Provocateur, or women with many other options ahead of them, such as the Cambridge undergraduates, being photographed in glamour-model style for student magazines.
    Yet those young women who long for the club competition or the online glamour shot to bring them fame and fortune are likely to find that the huge, beckoning influence of the glamour-modelling industry promises much but, as people such as Phil Hilton, Dave Read and Cara Brett admitted, delivers little. Andalthough women may find themselves individually drawn to this work, the overall effect of the growth of glamour modelling is to de-individualise the women involved, whether they are university students or girls in an Essex nightclub. Nuts runs a section on its website called ‘Assess my breasts’, where people can upload pictures of their own breasts or others’ – with no faces – and viewers hit the button, assessing them with marks up to ten. Once the magazine produced a poster to go with the website. Even Terri White, who can see nothing wrong with her career in assessing women’s bodies through the lens of the boys who want to reduce women to the size of their breasts, was brought up short when she saw the poster. ‘It was …’ she struggled to put it into words, ‘all these rows of breasts without faces – it was so … depersonalising.’
    The effect of these choices, when we look across society,