Natasha Walter’s latest book is, in many ways, an apology for getting it so wrong with The New Feminism in 1998 when she claimed the personal was no longer the political. From the outset she admits “I was wrong” to suggest that third wave feminism should focus on political equality and not be concerned with what has since been called the “raunch culture” of celebrities, pole dancing and an increasingly blatant sexualisation of women and girls. This new raunch culture is pushing girls into thinking that flaunting their sexuality is a form of empowerment.
The book is divided into two halves, the first being “The New Sexism” which covers pole dancing, pornography and prostitution. Walter interviews women working as prostitutes and pole dancers and they consistently describe the exploitation they feel when they are working for well dressed men in suits, probably doing very well for themselves, while they are poor and struggling financially.
It is a shame that none of her work looks into the deeper class politics behind all this. I felt that this reflected a British perspective on what Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs analysed in American culture. Walter interviews young women about their life’s ambitions, attitudes towards boyfriends and their own bodies and the results are unsurprisingly depressing. She writes: “Today, there are times when the dolls seem to have escaped from the toy shop and to be taking over women’s lives,” reflecting the sad statistics around women with eating disorders and the rise in cosmetic surgery.
The second half of the book, “The New Determinism”, covers the pop science theory of innate gender differences and a return to biological determinism. The bad science behind the studies of why girls really do have a preference for pink over blue! She convincingly dispels the myths of the men-are-from Mars ideas around gender binaries and then looks at the politics behind the popularity of these studies.
Her conclusions are, sadly, quite pessimistic and yet at the same time reassuring from a feminist point of view – that I am not going mad and sexism is still alive and well (sadly). She argues that sexism has renewed and reasserted itself as an oppressive force, for young women in particular. She points out that women still do more than double the domestic labour that men do; earn nearly 20 per cent less than men for doing the same job; and remain under-represented at the highest levels of politics, business and the justice system. What’s worse, though, according to Walter, is that the “rhetoric of liberation” that emerged from feminism has been co-opted to make women feel they have more choices than ever while, in reality, their options have become fewer and more proscribed.
Living Dolls does not make a call to arms and offers nothing as a manifesto for changing sexism. I finished the book feeling it was an interesting read, and the injustices are there yet the only way forward offered are some websites for single-issue women’s campaigns. The bigger picture about the way forward for 21st century feminism cannot be found in this book, but maybe we are a little closer to finding that.
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