Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

acknowledges that having to grow up in a hailstorm of media messages encouraging female erotic availability might make life a little confusing for young women struggling with sexual feelings and anxious not to earn the shameful label of slut – but the same dialectic condemns young women as wanton strumpets, serial-shagging, binge-drinking and vomiting our worthless GCSEs into storm drains with our knickers around our knees. Apparently unable to glance at a glossy magazine without becoming pregnant, anorexic, or both, today’s young women are imagined as special objects of pity and contempt. This gleeful horror at female promiscuity is peddled by right and left-wing pundits alike, and has little to do with feminism.
     
    “There has been a change in the sexual behaviour of young women, but it isn’t as dramatic as the media make out,” said Dr Petra Boynton, a sex educator and academic. “Most young people still don’t lose their virginity until they are over sixteen. If you take the generation who are now in their forties and fifties, many of them were having an awful lot of sex as young people, much of it unprotected sex. As adults we’re very quick to look at young people and say, ‘oh gosh, aren’t they awful’, but a lot of conversations that seem to care for young people actually end up being very moralistic about their behaviour, and start becoming discussions about what they should and should not wear, say and do.”
     
    There is, of course, a class element to this understanding of sexual victimhood. Hand-wringing tabloid articles about teenage pregnancy are invariably accompanied by model-posed photos of furiously smoking young women pushing prams around sink estates and scowling; in respectable magazines and political rhetoric, this translates to backhanded references to ‘girls from deprived areas'. ‘Sexualisation’ is all well and good when middle-class parents order in crates of champagne for their teenagers’ ‘sweet sixteen’ parties, but utterly deplorable when hip-hop-listening working class kids attempt to Get Their Freak On. “The perception is that it’s only certain young girls who get pregnant,” explains Boynton. “It’s the bad teenage girls who get dressed up in short skirts and hit the town. Class is often associated with the worst aspects of negative sexual stereotyping.”
     
    In 2010, a British tabloid photographer snapped a picture of 20-year-old teaching assistant Sarah Lyons cavorting in Cardiff centre with a pair of pants around her ankles, and she temporarily became the face of female reprobation across the world. Never mind that she wasn’t exposing any naughty bits; never mind that dancing with a pair of knickers around your ankles is perfectly legal behaviour; never mind that the pants in question weren’t the ones she’d been wearing, but a comedy pair of David Hasselhoff knickers a mate had picked up in a bar. Never mind that poor Ms Lyons was on a course of antibiotics and was, in fact, stone-cold sober at the time: the new postergirl of binge-drinking man-women everywhere was suspended from her job pending a disciplinary inquiry, for the dubious crime of having fun in public.
     
    The newspaper in question was NewsCorp’s The Sun, whose famous page three section features topless glamour models every single day, part of a public dialectic which only has a problem with women dancing in their pants in public when they aren’t getting paid to perform. In the storm of public moral approbation that followed, columnist Quentin Letts blamed feminism for spawning “an entire generation of loose-knickered lady louts”.
     
    “British girls have become fat-faced ‘ladettes’, goose pimples rising on the skin of their exposed thighs as they clack-clack-clack along the pavement en route to the weekend disco, destination bonk…Older generations would call these women ‘slappers’ – and they would be right.” 2
     
    Not satisfied with fat-shaming, mocking women’s bodies and clothes and branding us slags for any attempt to own our own sexual desire, Letts goes on to declare feminism the source of all social ills, taking detour after spluttering, purple-faced detour through teenage pregnancy, the decline of traditional marriage, drugs, free love and immigration as symptoms of this supposed pandemic of female degeneracy. It doesn’t matter that the hordes of drooling young amazons apparently roaming the streets of our glorious nation in a savage rut