Today saw around 200 mostly young people take to the streets of Glasgow against victim blaming and recent political discourse surrounding the issue of rape, as Slutwalk arrived in Scotland for the first time. The Slutwalk phenomenon began in April this year in Toronto, following remarks made by a senior police officer that women should ‘avoid dressing like sluts’ in order not to be sexually harassed or assaulted. The movement rapidly went global, as women across the world began organising marches both in solidarity with those in Canada, and against a culture of victim blaming which is far from a problem confined to one police officer or one city.

Organised largely via facebook, the march gathered in George Square and took a route to Glasgow Green. Unfortunately, the police had denied the organisers their planned route through the city centre, but given the short notice at which the march had been organised, it was felt necessary to go along with the police’s instructions.

Despite this minor hiccup, the march was a great success, attracting a huge amount of media attention and providing a vital reminder that – as the chant rang out – however we dress, wherever we go, yes means yes and no means no.

Slutwalk is the result of women fighting back against the idea that what you wear will determine whether or not you are raped.

It all started with Toronto Police’s lecture to women, saying that “…women should avoid dressing like sluts” to prevent being raped. Women of Toronto fought back by organising a protest which they named “Slutwalk” as a hit-back to say that it doesn’t matter what you wear – if a man is going to rape you, he will do it regardless of your attire.

The concept is multifaceted and has cause a disturbance with feminists and non-feminists alike with the idea that we are to reclaim the word “slut” in order to take it’s power away as a slur on women. I’m going to discuss fully why I think this is a good and feminist idea, and healthy debate is welcome in the comments. (Misogyny will just be deleted though. So no stupit folk, plx)

Toronto's Slutwalk

Okay. What’s the deal with the event? The even itself is a march. It’s purpose is to all say the same thing, which is to reject the idea that a woman can bring rape upon herself. Particularly through means of the way she dresses, which is one of the most common scapegoats for why rape happens.
Slutwalk aims to bring attention to the fact that men rape because they want power. Sexuality and attraction does not even come into it. A man will rape whomever he feels he needs to teach a lesson to or beat down. It is a tool of war and abuse and should be seen as nothing less.

To call a woman a slut is to imply that she should be ashamed of her sexual behaviour. Why is this an issue to anyone other than her? The simple fact of the matter is that it is not. A woman should be free to have sex with whomever she chooses and not be judged for it. It is a product of nation-wide misogyny that a woman should be “Slut-Shamed” for enjoying sex and having it when she likes. Sex is not a bad thing, and it’s just a way of keeping us miserable that it should ever be deemed a bad thing. But the freedom in it should be choice. Not doing it only a certain way, or with certain numbers or certain people. Slut, and all it’s variations (Whore, ho, cow, slapper, tart…) are words that have been put into play to beat women down. To put a woman lower than all the other woman. Everyone knows that the best way to oppress a group is to make lots of in-fighting happen. Women call other women these names because they have been told to, as a mechanism for creating levels of shamefulness and hatred.

We as women need to see that if you are called a slut, it is because you are a woman who is not living up to the male expectation of how you should live your life. Slutwalk aims to bring women together to say that if someone calls a woman a slut, they are calling all women sluts.

This brings me seamlessly onto the concept that’s got everyone talking – reclaiming the word ’slut’. History has shown success in oppressed groups taking words back off the privileged and robbing them of their power. Black people in America were branded with the word “Nigger” as a way to dehumanise people, and thus making it much easier in people’s minds to treat them less than human. The same goes for the word “slut”. If a woman is thought to be less than a human, someone who makes bad decisions and deliberately puts herself in harm’s way, it makes it easier for people to accept that someone has raped her and that she somehow brought it on herself and to treat her badly.
However, Black Americans took back the word “nigger” and began to use in in their own way, as a word to refer to a peer and thus disabling in in it’s use against them.
The same goes for examples such as the word “queer”, while it’s still early days and there’s a huge amount of work still to be put itno LGBT issues and gay rights, the word “queer” has it’s own meaning within the LGBT community. People use it to in a sense, non-describe their sexuality, to say that they do not conform to straight ideas of a “normal” gender binary.

A lot of people have raised issues about the word “slut” being reclaimed, and this is not to be taken lightly or disregarded. Women have been harmed by this word, their lives destroyed and their reputations been stomped into the gutter by vindictiveness about their sexuality. That is an issue to be respected. However, the reclamation of the word does not mean that we’ll simply use it in the same way, to describe promiscuity or even immediately start using it. The de-powering process is long and will take a lot of work from people who care about women’s rights and want to stand up for those who are oppressed. The starting point for this reclamation can in fact be, the simple act of protesting in Slutwalk. Showing that women cannot be singled out as being shameful, if one of us is a slut, then we sick together and all take the insult.

Another point made by Slutwalk is that what the Toronto Police Force say and what the opinion of the sexist majority think about rape – it happens late at night in dark alleys. This is a huge misconception. These things do happen, but rape is overwhelmingly happening in people’s families and homes. The statistics show that around 80% of cases are by someone the victim knew well, such as a friend, family member or partner. It is important to highlight this fact and stop dwelling on the idea that rape is something that happens to someone, comitted by a bogey man and start looking up to the reality that men rape. These men are husbands, sons, brothers, uncles, friends, grandfathers etc. Rape is committed by men who want to over power women. The reason that the media portrays rape as a bogey-man is that people raped by men close to them will be less likely to report it for many complicated reasons, and this must be respected.

If you agree with what Slutwalk aims to do, then find out if there is one near you and step up to protest the continuing abuse and oppression of women everywhere. Slutwalk Glasgow will be happening on the 4th of June, from 1pm to 4pm hopefully starting at George Square. Bigger numbers mean louder voices, and we need all the noise we can get to uproot this deep seated hatred of women.

The following is an essay I wrote, and have recently submitted, for my Sexualities class. A bit long perhaps but the blog’s been kind of short of stuff recently and I thought it might interest some people. Have included the bibliography in case anyone wants to do some further reading.

In this essay I will discuss the issue of pornography which has divided feminists for decades and was, above all else, the defining issue of the so-called ‘feminist sex wars’ of the 1980s. For radical feminists, pornography is widely seen as a form of male violence against women and is believed to contribute to a patriarchal and heteronormative ideology in which women are reduced to objects existing purely for men’s sexual gratification. Many of those liberal or socialist feminists who support pornography on the other hand emphasise its supposed potential to bring about sexual liberation and openness and to allow women to more freely express their sexual needs and desires in a world where traditionally only men have been seen as enjoying a sexually active role. Such feminists claim also that any form of censorship would be inherently detrimental to the rights of women and other historically oppressed or marginalised groups. Although the definition of pornography among feminists and academics is widely disputed I will, for the purposes of this essay, accept the dictionary definition of pornography as being “printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate sexual excitement” (Oxford Dictionary, 2011).

While the above definition is largely neutral and would encompass a diverse range of erotic material I feel it is important to place most of my focus on those forms of pornography most prevalent within society and which, it can reasonably be assumed, have the greatest impact and influence within the sexual sphere. In this essay I will attempt to explore in more detail some of the feminist debates around pornography, making particular reference to recent developments and research which has been carried out on the issue. Fundamentally important to any understanding, from a feminist perspective, of pornography and how it operates is the issue of power relations and inequalities between the sexes. I will discuss, in detail, the capacity of pornography to either assist or hinder in the building of a more egalitarian and sexually liberated society. For an understanding of what such a society may look like I will, in particular, draw upon prominent radical feminist writers such as Millett and Dworkin who have been instrumental in having sexuality recognised as a sphere through which gender relations built upon male dominance and female submission can be recreated and reinforced.

Background to the debate

The emergence of the so-called ’second wave’ of feminism in the 1960s coincided which what is widely referred to as the sexual revolution. At this time many people began to rebel against the traditional religious and family-based notions of sexual morality which had regained support and prominence in the 1950s. Growing tolerance towards, for example, sex outside marriage, homosexual relationships and public expressions of sexuality went alongside the development of new methods of birth control, heralding a major shift away from the view of sex as existing ideally for procreation within marriage and in favour of an embracing of sex for recreation. During this period in many countries homosexuality was legalised and restrictions on abortion also began to be lifted. Pornography too was legalised in a number of countries, the first being Denmark in 1969. Read the rest of this entry »

Here are some lefty nonsense-ideas that have been getting my goat lately.

The real 9/11 conspiracy was perpetuated by the people who produce sparkly crying eagle gifs

1. The idea that people abused through prostitution are “sex workers” who should be unionised.

Being abused is not a job. People being abused through prostitution should be given all of the help, access to help for addiction, safe affordable housing, and therapy for the multitude of abuses they have suffered before and during prostitution that they need. People who buy consent through paying for sex should be criminalised. The men who buy women and other men through prostitution are disgusting and oppressive and should be blasted off the face of the earth, or at least prosecuted to fuck. “Unionisation” = normalisation of abuse.

2. 9/11 “truthers”.

Do you want to know the truth about 9/11? Okay, the truth is that there’s this terrorist group called Al-Qaeda which used to be funded by the US so that they would do their bidding in the Middle East, but then they thought fuck that let’s put all this training to use and bomb our real ideological enemies, America! So they flew some planes into the World Trade Centre, killed a lot of people, and the US used it to its propaganda advantage by fooling a lot of stupid people into thinking that Afghanistan and Iraq had anything to do it, and started the War on Terror. TA DA! THERE’S YOUR TRUTH! No lizards, holograms, Jews, nanothermites or satanist symbols in banknotes required. So you can stop selling well meaning lefties your anti-semitic, anti-working class shit and go shave your back now.

3. Polyamory.

Really, this is just a heap of manipulative shit wrapped up in ‘alternative thinking’ and ‘free love’ terminology. Like, if we lived in the abstract, in theory there shouldn’t be a problem with several consenting adults freely choosing to take part in multiple relationships concurrently and totes not get jealous or emotional about it, if that’s what they’re into. The problem is that we don’t live in the abstract, we live in patriarchy. The fact that this is an actual concept that is encouraged in left wing political circles is what’s offensive, rather than the individual fact of specific couples agreeing to cheat on each other and not care. You shouldn’t be judged specifically if you really truly feel you have made the free choice to live that way. You should, however, be judged if you promote it to your partners who weren’t into it before you encouraged them to be, or to other lefties as some sort of alternative way to live your life, because it just encourages a culture in which it’s okay for charismatic lefty men to subtly manipulate their girlfriends into accepting bad behaviour as ‘polyamory’. Too many women have been manipulated into an ‘open relationship’ (i.e. her boyfriend wanting an excuse to shag around and mistreat her and get away with it) because they loved their boyfriend so much they didn’t want to lose him, and the truth is that he simply didn’t care as much as he said he did and wanted an easy way to get what he wanted all the time. That’s especially true of the all too prevalent charismatic sexy left wing man who later is revealed to be an arch abuser. Also, it promotes a total false consciousness of empowerment. Also, there’s nothing wrong with not wanting the person you’re in love with, who says they’re in love with you, to not be sticking it in other people. That is an okay way to think and feel, and it’s wrong that polyamory is promoted as a ‘left wing’ way of thinking when it’s not political at all, and as something that young women in left wing circles should get into. There’s nothing left wing about it, it’s left too many abused, manipulated and used women in its wake for that to be the case.

LET THE COMMENT RIOTS COMMENCE!

Frida Kahlo: Mad Trot!

Hey! It’s International Women’s Day! So let’s talk about artist Frida Kahlo, and why feminists like her.

Frida Kahlo was a Mexican artist, notable mostly for her graphic depictions of the painful aspects of her life, and for surrealist and colourful self-portraits. Throughout her life she experienced numerous physical and psychological traumas which she documented in her work. She was considerably ahead of her time in a number of aspects of the way she lived her life. Through her skill, she brought women’s issues to the forefront of a male-dominated art world, paving the way for many future female artists. She was also a mad Trotsky-shagging Trot and had an unashamedly revolutionary spirit. Though her physical traumas set her back and haunted her, she still managed to create some incredible art, cope and learn to give as good as she got with an abusive and badly behaved husband (despite her obvious love for him), and leave a lasting legacy in Mexican, female and art history. And that’s what makes her a feminist icon.

She was born in Mexico in 1907, but later in life she went around telling people that she was born in 1910, the year of the start of the Mexican Revolution. Clearly, Frida saw her life as defined by her revolutionary consciousness, and that’s pretty cool. She was of German, Spanish and Amerindian descent.

She grew up surrounded by women, and was one of only 35 women admitted to her fancy school. She wore long, colourful skirts all the time to cover up a leg that hadn’t formed properly as the result of polio, and always walked with a limp. Despite this she excelled at school and wanted to be a doctor. When she was 18 however, her bus crashed, breaking her spinal column, her collarbone, her ribs, her pelvis, her leg, her foot, and an iron rail pierced her abdomen and uterus. This left her permanently unable to have children, resulting in several traumatic miscarriages which she dealt with through her art in later life. She had to spend months in bed in a full body cast, during which time she had an easel fixed to the bed and began to paint. She experienced a lot of pain and constant operations throughout her life, the pain of which is best expressed through her self-portraits:

'The Little Deer'

'The Broken Column'

It is clear from Frida’s paintings that she believed that she was weak and not entirely beautiful, although she was – she exaggerates her facial hair in nearly all of her self portraits, and in portrays herself as incredibly tiny and dainty next to her admittedly large husband, Diego Rivera. She exaggerated what she perceived as her flaws, and at the same time she took ownership over her appearance, her body disfigurements, and her pain, and reclaimed them as something quite beautiful in her art. She did what I’m sure a lot of us would like to do and say ‘fuck you, I don’t care if I have hair where you think I shouldn’t, this is what I look like, I’m a strong Mexican woman, look at what I can create and do’.

Part of that reclaiming was a healing process for herself, in coming to terms with the miscarriages that her bus accident caused her to have. The paintings depicting this might be upsetting for those who have suffered miscarriages or are sensitive to graphic images, so I’ll just link to them here. Frida wanted more than anything to have a family with her husband, so the pain of her injuries served as a constant reminder of the happiness she was denied.

During her lifetime, Frida Kahlo was mostly famous as the wife of Diego Rivera, who was a very successful artist at the time, and the two were well known for their communist activism and turbulent/abusive relationship. Posthumously however, Frida Kahlo’s success has far eclipsed that of her husband, and she is now perhaps the most well known female artist ever. Frida loved Diego very deeply (as her art and writings show), but their relationship was marked with constant arguments, constant adultery on both parts, and some very bad and abusive behaviour from Diego when it came to his intense jealousy over her relationships with other men, and his affair with one of her sisters, which caused Frida to divorce (then remarry) him. What makes Frida very ahead of her time (remember she lived from 1907-1954) was her open bisexuality and affairs with women, including African-American singer and civil rights campaigner Josephine Baker.

Another of Frida’s famous affairs was with none other than the exiled Leon Trotsky, shortly before Stalin’s henchmen set aboot him wi an icepick. Frida had long been a commie, being a member of the Young Communist League and the Mexican Communist Party. Their affair resulted in Diego Rivera falling out with Trotsky, made Trotsky’s wife very upset, and caused Trotsky & wife to move out of Frida & Diego’s house and into another ’safehouse’ where he promptly met his bloody end.

Frida herself died at 47, after yet more pain and further operations, including a leg amputation due to gangrene. She left behind a vast legacy of beautiful paintings, revolutionary spirit, and her former childhood home which she later shared with Diego and Trotsky, the Blue House, is now a museum of her life and art.

There’s a pretty decent film about her life starring Salma Hayek as Frida, which you can download here.

A parting message for International Women's Day

Justin Bieber says a big FUCK YOU to women's rights

Today, in what can only be described as an ABORTION EXTRAVAGANZA, we bring to you not one, not two, but THREE news stories that should cause sighs of woe from all sensible (i.e. pro-choice) people.

First and most stupidly of all, is the worrying news that pre-teen hearthrob and Leftfield laughing stock Justin Bieber is ignorantly and vocally anti-choice. Not only is he against a woman’s right to choose what she does with her body & mental health because “it’s like, killing a baby yeah?”, he also has some very worrying views on rape too.

Speaking to Rolling Stone Magazine, J.Biebs said he didn’t agree with abortion, and was asked by the interviewer one of the obvious questions – “but what about in cases of rape?”

Instead of sticking to his bollocks “babykilling” line, The Biebs went further, saying “Um, well, I think that’s really sad, but everything happens for a reason. I don’t know how that would be a reason [to have an abortion].”

Bieber, listen up, or I’ll fucking abort you. Rape does not “happen for a reason”, other than the ‘reason’ that there are some disgusting men who make the choice to horrendously abuse women. Being raped is not a woman’s “fate”. The idea that “everything happens for a reason” is nonsense invented to try to force people in disadvantaged and oppressed positions to accept the abuse and discrimination that they face from privileged sections of society. Usually with some sort of religious undertone of “it’ll all work itself out when you get to heaven, so just accept your shit life and get on with it and don’t question authority”.

Women should be the only people allowed to judge whether they want to have a baby or get an abortion, and to make the vital decisions at this time regarding their physical and mental health. In an ideal world, that would be accepted as a matter of principle. However, it seems that Justin Bieber is so far behind in his social attitudes that he hasn’t yet even accepted the basic right of women who’ve been raped to not be forced to have a child that their rapist forced into their body without their consent, under violent and/or emotionally damaging circumstances. Even most right wing fuckwads generally make a wishy-washy type of exception for abortion in cases of rape, so it’s particularly disheartening to hear The Biebs hold that kind of backwards view. Get yourself a clue, Bieber.

I suppose some might say, Justin Bieber is only 17. It may sound excessive to judge the views of a stupit wee boy so harshly. However, two things are important to remember here – Justin Bieber is old enough to get a girl pregnant (and has many young girls flinging themselves at him daily, so it’s not unlikely), and therefore it’s time he grew up a bit and thought about the real issues at stake here before he opens his mouth to the media.

Secondly, Read the rest of this entry »

There’s an irony in the above title: I’m not a Muslim woman. I’m white, Western, and the lucky inheritor of an (ongoing) women’s movement. I’m also fully aware of the implications of claiming to speak ‘for’ this group, or any group of under-privileged individuals, from a such removed standpoint.

But that’s the point: no one in the press seems to be aware of the imperialist, colonizing implications of this ’speaking-for’ discourse. While the ‘multiculturalism’ debate rages around us, fueled today by David Cameron’s speech, women’s rights are cited as a foremost reason as to why we should abandon multiculturalism. The plight of Muslim women has been both absent and present throughout multiculturalist arguments. Despite the fact that it doesn’t seem to have occured to the government to take steps to protect Muslim women from the worst behaviours of Muslim men, it continually occurs to them to take steps to protect us indigenous Brits from the worst excesses of Islam. According to Cameron, it’s us, the white Westerners, that need protection much more than anyone else in the UK. Women don’t come into this though, since his cuts have resulted in the removal of funding to women’s charities and his party’s MPs have scrapped schemes to protect women from domestic abuse. And now he has the cheek to use Muslim women’s rights to backup his argument for the regulation and censorship of Muslim organisations in the UK: “Do they believe in universal human rights – including for women and people of other faiths? Do they believe in equality of all before the law?”

Where is the Muslim woman in this sort of discourse? She peers out from behind a veil of white, Western representation, where no space is granted her to determine her own role in the multiculturalist debate. She is merely a tool which Cameron is using to futher his own agenda, which is the perpetuation of the dominance of allegedly ‘British’ values. If David Cameron really wanted to regulate Muslim organisations in the UK in order that they might treat women better, he might have asked some Muslim women for their opinions (his token consultation with Baroness Warsi notwithstanding, since her status as a peer and Tory co-chairman means she’s not exactly impartial, nor is her situation in any way typical or representative of Muslim women in the UK). He might even have considered making a speech that was actually about them, rather than once-again tarring all Muslims with the Potential Extremist brush, aiming to limit the roles and identities available to Muslim men and women alike, further silencing an already-silenced group.

In this article from 2007, Johan Hari has actually bothered to do some reasearch that isn’t just from the point-of-view of card-carrying right-wingers, therefore anticipating some teasing-out some of the power-relations at work in multiculturalism. In this article he cites the case of Nishal, living in Germany, and her appeal to the courts for protection from her abusive husband. Informed by a judge that she has no right to such protection because, as a Muslim, she should of course expect such treatment, Nishal was sent back to her husband. And this German case isn’t as far from home as we’d like: German Chancellor Angela Merkel is not only a close ally of Cameron’s, but she anticipated his speech with her own public fascism last year.

What this means is that the German courts took it upon themselves to define Nishal’s religion on her behalf: based on a narrow reading of an out-of-context section of the Qur’an, they told this Muslim woman what her role as a Muslim woman should be. Nishal’s attempts to define herself and her own identity as a Muslim woman were thwarted. In a double-whammy, they granted Nishal’s husband the right to continue to determine her life for her. The only person who gets no say in Nishal’s life is Nishal herself. In order to achieve any degree of personal autonomy, Nishal must speak out from under her husband, from under the veil of ignorance through which Western state representatives view Islam, and from under a justice system which – as the verdict made patently obvious – was not made to protect such as her, but to contribute to her oppression. She must speak out from under piled-up layers of Western patriarchy, Eastern patriarchy, Western privilege, white privilege, and the discourse Cameron and Merkel subscribe to, which privileges what they perceive to be ‘native values’ over the rights of immigrants to determine their own lives. All these layers of power conspire to silence her; no one woman can have a voice loud enough to be heard over all that.

Which is why it’s time there was a prominent Muslim Women’s Movement in Western countries . The feminist movement in the West is far from over: it’s an ongoing struggle against the kind of discourse which uses women’s rights as a means to an end, but never sees them as an end in itself. Of course, white western feminism cannot purport to speak on behalf of immigrant women, any more than David Cameron – or indeed, Johan Hari – can. As Helene Cixous writes: ‘Woman must write her self [...] must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement.’ When Cameron uses what he sees as the rights of Muslim women to strengthen his position within the multiculturalist debate, he denies them this opportunity. Cixous advocates a fightback against this kind of marginalisation and the act of ’speaking-for’ (which is really silencing): ‘Women should break out of the snare of silence. They shouldn’t be conned into accepting a domain which is the margin or the harem’ (All Cixous quotes are from her seminal essay ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’).

Arguably it is suspect even for this kind of feminism – written by a female immigrant in 1975 – to determine the path that should be taken by immigrant women in Britain today. Nonetheless, what the work of established feminists does show is that, whenever immigrant women seek to determine their own lives, and subsequently to remake their religions, their communities, their culture, they should find millions of willing allies in their Western sisters. Whenever Nishal or someone like her goes to court, she should have available to her the support of millions of women’s rights activists willing to fight for her rights, because women’s rights don’t cease to be relevant when the woman in question chooses to wear a veil and/or go to mosque. However, these activists ought to be willing to listen, rather than to talk over Muslim women or to use their sufferings as a means to an end that wont benefit them.  David Cameron would deny these women the chance to speak for themselves. Allah forbid we should do the same.

Giles Coren: just fuck off

Giles Coren – star of food history programme The Supersizers, posh food critic, winner of an award for writing the shittest sex scene of any novel in 2005, “Fuck the Poles” racist and general snobby bastard (see his twitter at any one given time for evidence) – has authored an article for the Daily Mail today. About the sexist comments made by Sky sports presenters Richard Keys and Andy Gray (and his caught-on-camera sexual harassment), two old misogynists unable to accept that women are real people with the ability to work competently, and their subsequent sacking/resignation. Coren starts from the ever-promising position of ‘I’m not sexist, but…’ and from there on blunders into a horrifying public display of loathing for women that would shock even Tommy Sheridan.

The article is actually so offensive it makes the rest of the Mail’s content look like it’s been written by the Teletubbies loved up out their bins on MDMA. I can practically see the eternally offensive Jan Moir, Bel Mooney and Richard Littlejohn hugging each other and intently discussing how they totally now really get why hate and fear is just a media ploy to keep us from joining together in happiness and song. Coren’s article is THAT bad. Yes, I know it’s in the Daily Mail, so I shouldn’t expect better. That doesn’t make it okay for something this sexist to be published, especially as Giles Coren often presents himself as some kind of average liberal middle class guy whose opinions educated people should listen to. It’s like he’s tried to pack every offensive trope out there into the one piece. How bad the article is really can’t be explained adequately second hand, so we’ll just have to show you exactly what he said. And demolish his pish line by line.

Read the rest of this entry »

We live in a world where at every turn we are constantly bombarded with images of ‘perfection’. Whether we choose to believe this affects us or not is solely the opinion of the individual, but how can today’s society not see the dangerous and drastic effects caused by this consumer culture it is so engulfed within? This seems to have become our way of life, continuously judging and comparing ourselves against how we appear, or believe we should appear, when put side by side with images printed in magazines or displayed on a computer screen.  Popular culture perpetuates identity norms, focusing on the portrayal of women and the constant need to change oneself, physically and mentally, in order to emulate the seemingly flawless images, created by the media.

With the vast growth of the Internet ‘self image’ has turned into a worldwide phenomenon, causing women, in particular, to concentrate on an unhealthy need to continuously present the best, most attractive, images of themselves, both online and in person. With the rise of social networking sites like Facebook, Bebo and Myspace, physical appearance has quickly become the focus of our everyday lives. People have adapted their personalities and personal profiles to conform to societies ideas of ‘beauty’, ‘youth’ and ‘perfection’ causing “our bodies [to] become increasingly distanced in images, increasingly viewed as ‘resources’ and increasingly lived as ‘things’ to be seen, managed and mastered.”  Which is the reality? The ‘people’ we present via these Internet profiles or the physical being or body that is presented in the real world. These online networking sites give us the time and control to portray ourselves exactly how we want, allowing us to edit photographs before they are broadcast to the masses or simply avoid uploading images we believe to be substandard. They allow us to manage aspects of our lives that when human contact is involved, we cannot. However, the muting of our physical selves does not just stop with photographs, with most people mentioning their best assets alongside some witty or well thought through, ‘about me’. It seems we have become obsessed with perfecting these virtual versions of ourselves.

Our deranged ideas of ‘perfection’ continue on from the computer screen, and stem from the millions of images presented to us on a daily basis through advertising and the media. “The tendency in late capitalist culture is for our bodies to become objects and commodities,” and because of this women are unknowingly forced into becoming a ‘product’ in order to prove their self worth. Which according to adverts like L’Oréal ‘because you’re worth it’ is determined by our external beauty and apparent youthfulness. Buying these products will not now, or ever miraculously turn the consumer into Cheryl Cole or Penelope Cruz, yet we are still spending outrageous sums of money in order to try and achieve the unachievable, this polished end product conceived by the minds of white heterosexual males. Predominantly male ran magazines such as FHM, Nuts and Front falsely convince men that a Barbie doll figure consisting of a tiny waist and a massive chest is true beauty. So how hard can it be for women to conform to such an ‘easy’ fantasy? In 2006 Dove tried to open our minds with its campaign for ‘real beauty’, with a television advert named ‘Evolution’ a short stop motion movie showing the before and after of a commercial beauty advert and coming to the conclusion that ‘No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted.’

However, with only one company trying to break away from these ‘perfection’ stereotypes the remainder of our consumer culture is yet to sit up and listen. Our addiction for beauty is furthermore fed by television series such as Desperate Housewives and Sex and the City, both shows based around women conforming or trying to conform to societies vision of perfection. Programs like these, although slightly exaggerated, mirror the way women are living within our culture today, with all main characters at some point showing their frustration when explaining that there is always someone more ‘beautiful’ that themselves. With episode titles such as, ‘Models and Mortals’ and statements like ‘I just know no matter how good I feel about myself, if I see Christy Turlington, I just want to give up,’coming from the mouths of women we look up to and aspire to look like, it becomes harder to prevent beauty from being societies driving force.

Youth and beauty have rapidly become two words women seem to be stuck in a vicious circle with. So much of our time is spent trying to catch up with something that always seems just an arms reach away. If Madonna can do it, where are we going wrong? However, we are forgetting a couple of the vital elements of the ‘beauty’ regime, Photoshop and Money. Unlike these celebrities we idolise, we are not ‘lucky’ enough to wake up to a personal trainer and an entire squad of trained personnel to adhere to every one of beauty wants and needs. The closest most of us will ever get to this ‘helping’ hand is from magazines aimed at the female market such as Heat, Reveal and Closer, who dedicate around one hundred and fifty pages a week in order to ‘help’ us follow the eating habits and training patterns of Cheryl Cole and Coleen Rooney. In order to try and feel better about our own body image we grab these cheap yet appalling magazines off the shelves like they’re going out of fashion, religiously turning through pages titled ‘bikini bodies 2010, the good the bad and the WEIRD!’ and ’Kerry falls off the diet wagon AGAIN!’

The effect these magazines and images have on us is not however a positive one. The bikini bodies being slated are in fact normal, healthy womanly figures, which we are being lead to believe, are somewhat flawed and unfortunately these lies don’t just stop with tacky magazines. Photoshop has become a vital tool for our consumer culture, with no image being shown to the public left un-touched. These images we are trying so hard to emulate will always be beyond our reach.

Madonna before and after Photoshop

So why is it that “Between 1992 and 2004, breast augmentation procedures in this country went from 32,607 a year to 264,041 a year – that’s an increase of more than 700 percent,” and girls as young as sixteen are opting to drastically and permanently change their physical appearances to feel beautiful? Not yet

out of my teens I already know three young, gorgeous girls who have taken their bodies under the knife in order to achieve a more ‘womanly’ and ‘beautiful’ figure. These three individuals all work in the Glamour Modeling or Pole Dancing industries, where the need to appear ‘porn star perfect’ comes before ones physical or mental condition. They are convinced these risks must be taken in order to ‘make it’. The rise in television channels showing back-to-back episodes of Extreme Makeover and The Swan a “reality series… in which average-looking women were surgically, cosmetically and sartorially redone to look average in a shiner, pornier way” have driven women to conform to this false idea of ‘perfection’. We are once again taken back to these physical images the media are selling to us as examples of ‘beauty’ and ‘freedom.’ Ideas conjured up by heterosexual males in our society, and passed back to us as ‘our own’. Women have been lead to believe that looking like Pamela Anderson is a healthy objective to aim for and with the rise in ‘quickie surgeries’ like Lunch hour Botox it seems we have whole heartedly taken on the impossible task of achieving what this male dominated society is asking of us. Women have been manipulated into believing that achieving the best body, even if it means resorting to plastic surgery, is empowering and sexually liberating. Together with the explosion of pole dancing and burlesque classes, which are now offered in most gyms as a sexy and creative way to express oneself, women are slowly being removed from their own comfort zones and molded into objects of male sexual desire. With seemingly confident spokespeople for the sex industry, including Jenna Jameson, author of ‘How to Make Love like a Porn Star’ saying that, “ ‘being in the industry can be a great experience’ because ‘you can actually become a role model for women’ ” proves just how naïve women in today’s society have become. In the book Female Chauvinist Pigs, author Ariel Levy goes on to explain that “Jameson like most employees of the sex industry is not sexually uninhibited, she is sexually damaged” as Jameson tells her she was,

“beaten unconscious with a rock, gang raped and left for dead on a dirt road during her sophomore year of high school; she was life threateningly addicted to drugs before she was twenty; she was beaten by her boyfriend and sexually assaulted by his friend. She also [says] “To this day, I still can’t watch my sex scenes.’”

When looking into these industries, we are lead to believe it is glamorous and sexually freeing to cut up our bodies and/or strip for a male dominated audience, drawing us all closer, with everyone wanting to experience what it is like to feel powerful and in control of their bodies.

In conclusion we have become so wrapped up in the need to be beautiful that we do not know how to live our lives without it. These images we are bombarded with every day, now control what we do on a day-to-day basis. They are physically running our lives. Until we reach this delusional goal or hopefully realise that what we are reaching is in fact unreachable we are going to continue to spend our time and hard earned money on trying to attain this ‘perfection’ we see in our consumer culture. If this is the reality of what it is to be ‘beautiful’ why do we still feel the need to desperately cling onto, and continuously climb this ladder of ‘perfection’? Surely upon closer inspection, we should realise “that you still can’t bottle attraction.”

Adapted from an essay.
All quotes from ‘Female Chauvinist Pigs‘ by Ariel Levy and ‘The Body and/in Representation, Self/Image by Amelia Jones