There’ve been some interesting, and some less than interesting op/eds published in the wake of the Australia Institute report tigtog wrote about on the alleged sexualisation of girls in advertising. I want to leave that particular issue aside for a moment, and concentrate on the extension of the argument to fashions for young women.
In the not so good category, here’s Brigid Delaney:
The cultural climate of bodies bared and bling on display demands that a woman, regardless of body shape, occupation and culture, has a duty to not only follow fashion but also to make herself look as sexually desirable as possible.
It may demand, but do we need to heed?
IT ALMOST goes unquestioned that a young woman possessed of a fine pair of breasts must wear a tight, low-cut top. Women’s fashions come and go, but a certain cultural norm seems here to stay: dressing to emphasise your body and having a wardrobe full of clothes that let the world know that you are sexy and stylish. Clothes that get you noticed and appreciated.
Joining fashion magazines are tabloid newspapers, yielding hectares of editorial space not only to celebrities, but also to their clothes and their bodies. The implication is that we mere mortals should follow suit.
Delaney goes on to laud the veil and the burqa as resistance to sexualisation and consumerism. Well, maybe. Or well, whatever. I doubt that the reasons advanced in these terms are the primary reasons for Muslim women wearing the veil, and I think that one should be wary of extrapolating from one culture or religious tradition too easily to another.
Choice is missing both from Delaney’s advertising driven compulsions and from the religious imperatives many Muslim women face.
It seems to me that part of this debate polarises along similar lines to the more puritanical and the more sex-positive debates among feminists, and in particular, lesbian feminists. On this debate, I am in the sex-positive camp, but also (and it logically follows) the camp of choice.
I’ve observed, what in my eyes, is a positive trend in young women’s fashion over the last year or so. That is, that young women who are size 10 or 12 or 14 or 16 or 18 are quite happy to wear the ultra tight jeans, figure hugging tops and breast highlighting bras that are the current look. And they look fabulous. I like to think that many people are being taught by their confidence and curviness that feminine beauty comes in more than stick thin model form. And I like to think, sociologically, that these women are far less likely to fall prey to eating disorders. And I’d like to remind Dr Rush that there’s always been a feminist argument that women can choose for ourselves to dress as sexily as we like, and what the male gaze makes of it isn’t our responsibility. People would be familiar with that from the debates over defence tactics in rape trials, but the point about agency, confidence (and sass) is of broader application.
I think we have a lot more choice than the doomsayers of advertising mind control give us credit for. And I don’t cavil with anyone who wants to swim against the tide. I do just want to point out what swimming with the tide might mean, if it’s reappropriated and helps shape a confident feminine identity.
And if you’re interested in my take on the debate over girls and fashion and advertising, I want to point you to this fabulous article by Liz Conor.
Emma Rush’s report on the sexualisation of children in advertising has struck a chord with parents already angry at retail products that sexualise kids. Unfortunately Rush’s report is so literal and prematurely conclusive, I doubt it would score beyond a “C” in an undergraduate gender studies course.
Do take the time to read the rest.
But what I really want to get across is that the debate – as it’s morphed into one about young women generally – ignores the complexity of the choices and the social meanings of fashion. It’s too often patronising and puritanical, and denying women agency. Anyone who shares feminist ideals should know that’s not at all a good thing.
Her views on the veil and the burqa may be a little silly but she knows her Jane Austen pretty good. The above is her opening sentence, and I bet you fifty cents it originally said ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a young woman in possession of a fine pair of breasts must be in want of a tight, low-cut top’, until some sub who didn’t recognise it decided to ‘improve’ it.
Kim, I’ve never been able to decide exactly where I stand on this one (although I’m fairly sure that if the veil and the burqa are liberating, then we are in very deep sh*t). There are powerful arguments on both sides, I reckon, about feminism and ’sexy’ dressing. You must be quite anti-Twisty Faster and her scornful take on ‘empowerment’ then, yes? (If this has come up before, forgive and ignore me.)
It’s not so much that I am against Twisty Faster’s take, Dr Cat, just that I think the debate is too dichotomised and too strongly painted. I don’t necessarily argue that dressing like the young women I’m talking about are is empowering. You can still be disempowered in many aspects of your life and take control over some aspects of your identity. Inevitably that’s not an individual mode, but by adopting a fashion, but you can tweak it to your own self, and that’s what I think the non-stick-ish young women have been doing – en masse. I’m thinking like a sociologist from empirical observation rather than starting with the philosophical arguments, though they colour my observation. If that makes sense. It just seems to me there are a lot of social facts out there that get lost in these never-ending and usually rather predictable debates. I want to shine another light on the question/s.
I’m ashamed I didn’t recognise the Austen. Must have been those Maoist teachers at my Catholic girls’ school.
I thought the same thing about Austen when I read that sentence PC but I was glad they changed it. Seriously, how cliche. Sentences that beging “It is a truth universally acknoweldged … “, unless it is actually P&P, should be on you list of banned words.
As for the article, I would rather be subjected to the prying eyes of men than the scornful and smug stare of Delaney. Both are looking at objects, not people.
kim,
a few points:
1) from my understanding, the veil/burqa does not represent an extreme modesty, but an extreme sexualisation of the female form where the hair and extremities are sexualised not unlike the western breast and arse focus.
2) How much ‘choice’ can 8-12 yo girls have or exert? How much ‘choice’ do you want to give them? Besides the whole other issue of fabricating ‘consumer choice’ in capitalist societies, you are slipping from the targeted age group of the report to encapsulating a non-age specific femininity. I know this is the point of your post! Rush’s original point was about ’sexualisation’ interfering with childhood play and learning, but the sorts of ‘young women’ you are talking about are much further down the path of producing subjectivity and engagiong in the world on their own terms.
Sorry, glen, I should have made it clearer – the “choice” argument I’m making is not meant to be about kids. I’d endorse Conor’s points:
I didn’t much care for the tone of Liz Conor’s op-ed: it seemed to me to miss completely something very important and good about Rush’s report, namely that it was written in simple mince-no-words language, and was (I imagine deliberately) kept very short, which meant it was highly accessible to people without tertiary educations in gender studies.
But I agree completely with you, Kim, and the title of your post. To present women’s fashion as a ‘choice’ between the burqa on one hand and low-cut tight stuff on the other just reveals that the writer (any writer who does this, and there are plenty) is only interested in seeing fashion as a tool of oppression. They think you can only choose between sexy oppression on the one hand or terrorist oppression on the other. If you choose sexy oppression you are doubly damned because you lack ‘modesty’. That’s a travesty.
These people are behind the times, anyway; the big thing in womens clothes at the moment is volume: full-skirted summer dresses, gathers and shirring and pleats and lots of fabric.
I’m with Anna on the necessity for an immediate editorial moratorium on lame imitations of the opening sentence of P & P. Though Austen has plenty of interesting things to say about modesty and feminine ‘restraint’. Elizabeth’s muddy petticoat is a good place to start….
Yep, the pumpkin dress is in, Laura!
I’m very partial to the 50s summer frock myself…
fair enuff!
hey did anyone save a copy of the ‘electronic appendix’ to the Rush report? I wanted to use it in class today talking about Crary’s book “Suspension of Perception” and Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle” but the Australia Institute has taken it down. if anyone has it could they post it somewhere or email it to me? I would really appreciate it!
Check your mail Glen.
By the way, glen, would you care to expand on your argument about choice being impossible under capitalism? I’m not sure that it was possible any more under feudalism or in any premodern society. I’m not arguing our choices shouldn’t be more unconstrained, but the rhetoric of total choice seems to me to be a utopian fantasy.
Perhaps more properly, as Laura intimates, we’re confronted with a series of dichotomised but unpleasant choices – or rather, moralisers want to force us into them.
The paradox about fashion Simmel pointed to almost 100 years ago is that we use it to distinguish ourselves from others in a uniform and urbanised world, but our individuality is necessarily expressed through slight modifications to fashion which is a collective thing.
Of course, it’s a product of capitalism but so is most everything else. I’m not sure how many rejectionists really want to live in a yurt and spin their own cloth.
And the fact that Jeans West almost went broke in 97 when no one bought the many many pairs of orange and lime jeans on offer might be instructive.
Kim is of course right that choices were even more constrained in premodern societies.
And I suspect there is something interesting about body confidence and eating disorders. There’s an ARC grant for someone lurking in this thread!
I’ve always maintained that sexiness comes from within. I’ve been very attracted to many women on the basis of how they carry themselves. A confident (not arrogant) person is attractive.
Also, after all these years, jeans and tee shirt are still my favourite
And the fact that Jeans West almost went broke in 97 when no one bought the many many pairs of orange and lime jeans on offer might be instructive.
It wasn’t only Jeans West who got very badly burnt that summer Mark! I was working in Just Jeans at the time and have extremely pleasant and vivid memories of what a total disaster it was. As well as orange and lime (hideous, artificial, fluoro orange and lime, not nice subtle citrus colours) there was an equally nasty aqua, and it was all matched with tacky white denim jackets and vests.
That was the year we later referred to among ourselves as the time when the peasants revolted.
“I doubt it would score beyond a “Câ€? in an undergraduate gender studies course.”
That’s a pass, isn’t it? She makes it sound like a bad thing.
I much prefer to think about women having control over our bodies – internally and externally – than making ‘choices’.
Now I remember the true horror, Laura!
My partner at the time bought an orange suede jacket which I think she wore twice. It was very orange.
Laura: “…As well as orange and lime (hideous, artificial, fluoro orange and lime, not nice subtle citrus colours) there was an equally nasty aqua, and it was all matched with tacky white denim jackets and vests.”
Lime jeans and white denim vests? Great globular clusters! Who’s in charge of dressing you people — Cecil Beaton?!
Actually, that’d be kind of a fun idea. OK, everybody in Melbourne get in line, and let’s try it again from the top: and a-one, a-two, a-1-2-3-4…
THE-NIGHT-THEY
IN-VENT-ED
CHAM-PAGNE…
Fashion has been in a steady decline following the phasing out of ‘choose life’ tee shirts.
me: “fabricating ‘consumer choice’ in capitalist societies”
kim: “your argument about choice being impossible under capitalism”
kim, unless you are referencing something else I may have written in a fit of drunken sugared-up neomarxist rage, which is very possible with some of my comments on LP, then we are talking at cross-purposes.
I did it with my third years today, where we talked about the spectacle and populations of consumers as markets. From the Crary (orig. ital.):
The ‘collective individuation of populations’ is what I bang on about continually on my blog and elsewhere (here, in comments). I treat the ’spectacle’ as a way of engaging with a biopolitics of the image. What is at stake is the production of certain populations (markets). It gets really tricky when the transversal dimension of the spectacle is taken into account. Here is a simple (and actually oversimplified) example: There is a single market for Falcons/Commodores, if you do not want a Falcon or a Commodore you therefore belong to a different market. The ‘choice’ between a Falcon or a Commodore is a non-choice because you have already been individuated into a certain population (of Falcadore owners).
There is no single media text (advertising) that will do this, rather the event of your individuation is transversally distributed across a number of media. Massumi calls this a becoming-together. My innovation is the transversality of the media event (derived from Guattari). This is going to become ever more important with the accelerating proliferation of ’screens’ (ala Virilio) or ‘interfaces’ and associated cross-platform media events.
Another example is the way John Howard has led the collective individuation of a certain population of nationalist, ‘middle-class’ and mostly conservative voters. The problem for Beazley is that for Labor to win power he either needs to harness the enthusiasm of this population for his own devices and produce a consumerist non-choice or individuate another population along different axes, which is very difficult, and offer a real choice.
Non-choice and choice terminology derived from Boorstin’s notion of event and non-event.
oh and thanks Laura!!! you are such a superstar that someone should make a dance called the ‘Laura Dance’ that is so wicked that heaps of peeps make their own versions of it and post them to youtube tagged with “Laura’s dance” yes, become the buzz! BECOME THE TAG!
Skirting fashion for a sec, the problem with the illustration is that according to health and obesity demographics, the plethora of young women in size 16 and 18 may actually be exemplifying eating disorders.
Apart from this health related issue, of course large girls should feel comfortable to wear hawt clothes ( i always think the goth look works for big gals but then of course i would..).
OR to not wear clothes. (Australians do tend to follow the English in their prudishness in regards to nudity, rather than the less hung up Europeans).
glen, I’m still at a loss as to what you mean by “choice” and “non-choice”.
I’m kinda following it Mark, but it is overly jargon dense.
Let’s see if I’ve got it glen: if choices are artificially constrained, either through actual physical barriers or emotional barriers along group-identifier lines, then what consumers/citizens are offered is really a “non-choice”.
This relates back to Susoz’s comment that she’d rather ensure women have control over their own bodies rather than just an array of “choices”. (eg whether it’s called manure or organic fertiliser, it’s still all actually crap)
I think this choice rhetoric is so frustrating..It’s a woman’s choice to wear a push up bra, it’s a woman’s choice to wear the veil, but in reality, our choices are severely restricted as women and we can’t fail to acknowledge the context in which these choices are made and the influences behind them. Are women wearing push up bras in certain parts of Africa? Of course not, because breasts are not hyper-sexualized as they are in our society! Why are women wearing the veil? In some cases..it’s for spiritual reasons…in some instances it’s for protection from rape and harassment and again, there’s this underlying idea, as in america, that women’s bodies are “the sex”. Check out a radio show I did with Sheila Jeffreys on Beauty and Misogyny. It’s pretty much my point of view stated much more eloquently. go to http://www.ffiles.net and click on the download tab..then click on the Beauty and Misogyny picture and you’re ready to go!
I just happened across this thread many months after the discussion so this is probably a post into the ether but c’mon are we still talking about ‘choice’ as this utterly decontextualised thing we possess/exercise through our individual free will? And let’s not forget, going back to what we’re talking about here – children as empowered, smart, competent, self-aware and choosy consumers – (I guess I have myself and my own kids to provide a reality check against this assumption – on a daily basis..) The problem is the discussion about children and their consumer patterns (I guess) continually and quickly morphs into generalities about size 16 women choosing to wear tight pants (hurray!) – so that women and girls are collapsed immediately into the same category, with the same competencies and capacities. (This almost never happens when we talk the problems that boys face as consumers, learners or whatever). A bit insulting for women but even more worrying in the imposition of womanhood onto girls of any age (because there are massive differences not only in capacities amongst girls but huge gaps between a 6-year-old and a 12-year-old girl). It would be useful if we could particularise who we are talking about when we talk about these beings with so much control and choice. ( Mostly we are talking about a fairly normative and privileged child-suject.)
By the way, Mark, what exactly do you mean when you say there is something “interesting about body confidence and eating disorders” (is it the relationship between low self-esteem and eating disorders that you’re referring to)? If not, ;et me know and I will apply for that lurking ARC grant, pronto!
Oh dear, ShelleyK, I really can’t remember. I was looking at some studies on the incidence and distribution of eating disorders for a course I was teaching last year but it’s completely gone from my mind now!