Natasha Walter Quotes

The imperative is to better oneself not through any intellectual or emotional growth, but through physical remaking. Such media encourage young girls to believe that good looks rather than good works are at the centre of the good life.
What makes these messages particularly attractive to young women is that they constantly return to the language of empowerment and opportunity.

This equation of empowerment and liberation with sexual objectification is now seen everywhere, and is having a real effect on the ambitions of young women.
[...]
When we talked about empowerment in the past, it was not a young woman in a thong gyrating around a pole that would spring to mind, but the attempts by women to gain real political and economic equality.

But after a while, obeying a new script that has just occurred to her, she begins to behave differently from the way she has acted the last two times they have met. She begins a false performance of openness, as if she has succumbed to his persuasiveness.

The rise of a hypersexual culture is not proof that we have reached full equality; rather, it has reflected and exaggerated the deeper imbalances of power in our society. Without thoroughgoing economic and political change, what we see when we look around us is not the equality we once sought; it is a stalled revolution.

To repeat some of the most basic facts: women still do not have the equal political power they have long sought, since only one in five MPs is a woman. They do not have economic equality, since the pay gap is still not only large but actually widening. They do not have the freedom from violence they have sought, and with the conviction rate in rape cases standing at just 6 percent, they know that rapists enjoy an effective impunity in our society.

In the US where the girls are doing not as well as boys in some tests, the information seems to be interpreted as showing that girls just aren't as good at these things so we can't expect them to be mathematicians. But here in the UK people are reacting to boys not doing as well as girls in maths exams by saying, what can we do about that, we need to fix that ... This difference is telling.

The ease with which prostitution is presented as an acceptable choice for women dismisses the psychological trauma that actually seems to be not the occasional, but the inevitable, result of selling sex.

Laura could see how hard her mother tried to focus on the needs of the moment... She knew that strategy very well; it was the one she had used for years. You must keep your gaze on the immediate scene: the plates that needed clearing, the dresses that needed ironing, the vases that needed fresh water, while the clouds above you gathered and dispersed and gathered again.

We cannot pretend that this is all about women as victims, when many women are deeply complicit in creating and selling this culture.

Maybe it is only a quiet, day-to-day loyalty that is worth having; maybe the grand love or the great gesture is always doomed.

And the mainstreaming of the sex industry reflects that inequality. It is still women who are dieting or undergoing surgery on their bodies; still women stripping in the clubs while the men chant and cheer; still women, not men, who believe that their ability to reach for fame and success will be defined by how closely they conform to one narrow image of sexuality. If this is the new sexual liberation, it looks too uncannily like the old sexism to convince many of us that this is the freedom we have sought.