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In reply to the discussion: RadFeminists are making it difficult for the Democratic party to fight the GOP's attack on women [View all]seabeyond
(110,159 posts)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.
"I was surprised by the attitudes of the girls I interviewed," she says, "who seemed to feel that they would be mocked if they protested within their peer groups. You know, when I was at university [in the 80s] it was OK to be annoyed about sexism, to take it quite seriously if you argued about it, it didn't make you the subject of mockery. Even if you didn't particularly identify yourself as a feminist, you could choose where you wanted to be on a spectrum, and you could still say, 'I really don't want Page 3 in the common room,' or, 'I really hate the idea of porn' . . . I was surprised when I was interviewing young women that they felt uncomfortable engaging in that way. 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."
The focus on popular culture, on the pervasive web of sexist imagery and behaviour, is a big shift away from Walter's first book, The New Feminism, which came out in 1998. Then she argued that feminists should concentrate on specific political, social and financial aims; in Living Dolls she writes that she felt that, at that time, we could put aside the feminist arguments that "centred on private lives: how women made love, how they dressed, whom they desired . . . 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."