Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism by Natasha Walter Page B

I saw three young women at the bar wearing Playboy bunny outfits: pink cuffs, black lace knickers and basques, black stockings, stilettos and pink bunny tails. Assuming they too were here for the competition, I went to chat to them. ‘What competition?’ said one, a smiling, rosy young woman with her bobbed dark hair pushed back under her bunny ears. ‘No, we’re here for Sam’s birthday. She’s twenty today.’ ‘Whose idea was the costume?’ I asked. ‘Mine!’ she said. Two of the women are secretaries, and one is a full-time mother. ‘I’m allowed out on Thursday nights,’ said the mother eagerly. ‘This is my me-time. I get away from the family. I can be myself.’ Then they went into the toilets to check their outfits, and got the bathroom attendant, a tall young black woman in a long-sleeved T-shirt and black trousers, to take photos of the three of them on their digital camera. I watched as they stood close together, pouting with hands on hips, breasts thrust out, before they went back to the bar.
    I returned to the cluster of young women who stood around the Nuts team. One of the girls to be chosen, Tania, was wearing a blue lace dress that started low on her breasts and ended just below her knickers, and was saying goodbye to her friends, Nikki and Katie, who wished her luck and perched outside the changing room. Nikki, in a black minidress and silver wedge sandals, had the face of a Botticelli madonna, with a pointed chin and wide-apart blue eyes. I asked her if she was entering thecompetition. ‘No, I already do modelling,’ she smiled. ‘I’m in a final for a big competition on Monday. I’m here for Tania – she wants to break in now.’ Katie joined in. ‘I’ve been modelling for a couple of years,’ she said. ‘I’ve got an agent, he found me online.’ In this context, modelling means glamour modelling, the coy words for posing almost naked for men’s magazines. ‘I’ve done a shoot for FHM,’ Katie said. ‘My boyfriend’s a bit protective of me – he doesn’t like people seeing me as an object.’ I wondered if she also worried about that. ‘I did at first, but you get used to it, honestly.’ When I asked who their role models are, their responses were immediate: ‘I’d have to say Jordan,’ said Katie, naming the woman most famous for her huge breast implants and appearances on reality television. ‘I really admire what she’s done.’ Tania came out of the changing room, her exquisite hourglass body now clothed in red hotpants and crop top. She’s already done some modelling, but not yet topless. ‘I will do,’ she said, ‘when the time is right.’
    Although sales of Nuts and Zoo have entered a real decline since their early heyday, 1 their influence is as real as ever. They have contributed to an ongoing cultural shift, in which the business of what is coyly called glamour modelling – in which women may be naked, but won’t expose the genitals – has massively expanded in Britain. When Nuts was launched in 2004, the belief was that the young men who would buy it would want articles about football and cars, rather than pictures of women – and if there were to be women, they should be the acknowledged beauties of the film and television world. But its direction changed quickly. The editors found that while readers might say they wanted to see Jennifer Lopez on the cover, actually the editions with ordinary-looking girls – girls from reality television, girls who were photographed in their local nightclubs, girls who sent in photographs of themselves in their bedrooms – sold and sold. The magazines began to make images and words far more explicit, with pages crowded withpictures of young women in thongs. Nuts became a shorthand for a certain kind of culture, a laddish, explicit culture in which women were seen in their underwear or not at all. Together with its main competitor, Zoo , it dragged all the men’s magazines in the UK, including the once more