In June 2007, a media circus descended on a detention center in Lynwood, California. Here, in the space of that single month, the socialite Paris Hilton was locked up, released on medical grounds — and then locked up again.
A 400-strong swarm of paparazzi buzzed around her, serious political figures were moved to comment and the veteran US interviewer Barbara Walters, who has sat down with a multitude of world leaders, divulged that Hilton had called her and said she had both “become much more spiritual” in jail and had dry skin without her moisturizer.
It was the day of Hilton’s final release that Abi Moore snapped. A creator of Web content from Lewisham, south London, Moore had been working on a film about Naomi Halas, a pioneering chemist researching a treatment for cancer. It was one of a series of CNN films about visionaries — CNN being the very network that also ran Hilton’s first post-jail interview.
Moore spent the day of Hilton’s release flying from Texas to the UK and, hard as she tried, she couldn’t escape the story.
“The next day I was at work. Everything was still Paris-crazy and something inside me went ‘Twang!’ I called up my sister, Emma, and said: ‘What do you think about setting up a Web site for girls, with real role models?’” she says.
The result was PinkStinks, a site that includes lists of impressive women in sport, film and technology, statistics on sex discrimination and a role model of the month (it’s currently Maggie Aderin-Pocock, who makes instruments for space missions). As its name suggests, the Web site is also pitted against the “culture of pink” which dictates that girls must embrace traditional femininity — a love of princesses and all things shocking fuchsia and sickly salmon.
“The princess culture starts from the minute a child is born,” Moore says, “and it ends up, for teenage girls, with Paris Hilton, who is the ultimate princess. If 32 percent of our girls model themselves on Paris Hilton [as a 2008 survey of teachers found], we’ve got a problem.”
It’s certainly true that we are living in an odd, unsettling culture, with strong women eerily absent from the public eye. It can feel as if we are bequeathing young girls — those who arguably need role models the most — a barren landscape. As women have grown more socially powerful, it seems that the wider culture is pumping out images intended to put us back in our place.
So, for example, over the last five years we have seen a media obsession with sex objects in turmoil, a group that includes Hilton, Britney Spears, Anna Nicole Smith, Amy Winehouse, Kerry Katona, Lindsay Lohan and Katie Price. Then there is the obsession with women as wives and girlfriends. Earlier this year, the English news pages were filled with stories about soccer players’ wives, a media obsession ever since the 2006 World Cup. This focus on women as appendages to powerful men infected the general election campaign, too. While female MPs were almost invisible, the demeanor and appearance of Sarah Brown, wife of former British prime minister Gordon Brown, and Samantha Cameron, wife of the current British Prime Minister David Cameron, was reported in ever more exacting detail.
In a number of recent polls, the top female role model has been the British singer Cheryl Cole, a hyper-feminine icon who has faced her own day in court, is as well known for her marital tribulations with soccer player Ashley Cole as for her drive and determination and apparently sells more magazines than just about any other UK cover star.
When I speak to teenage girls about her status as a role model, they seem a bit bemused.
Bronte Norman Terrell, a student who is in her late teens, says that she likes Cole, “and she’s gone through a break-up and all that, but I don’t personally feel she’s done anything especially inspirational. The media seem a lot more concerned with celebrities and footballers’ wives than they are with anything serious.”
Bronte’s friend Rhiannan Brown echoes this.
I ask whether she finds the focus on women’s psychological problems surprising, and she says: “No, because that’s what the media feeds off at the end of the day — but it does surprise me that you hardly ever see men in that situation.”
Caitlin Walton-Doyle, 15, says that “nice women in the public eye are often overshadowed by the drug addicts and the surgery addicts.”
Is there any other woman in the public eye right now whom they look up to? After a while, Rhiannan suggests “Beyonce — I like the way that she’s so subtle about her personal life and her marriage, and I think she really does respect herself.”
No one can come up with any others.
Does a lack of strong female role models matter? The subject can seem ridiculously fogey-ish and fusty. In 1998, when the actor Emma Thompson was put on a government list of female role models, she memorably said her “immediate response was an overwhelming desire to go out and score a load of cocaine.”
Talking to Bronte and Rhiannan, however, you quickly get a sense of how unrepresented they feel — and therefore disengaged. Take the fact that only 14 percent of members of the current UK Cabinet are women.
“It’s boring when you see men in the House of Commons arguing and you just see a woman in the background, nodding her head,” Rhiannan says.
There is a growing body of research that suggests strong same-sex role models are especially important for young women. In 2006, for example, Penelope Lockwood of the University of Toronto undertook a study in which male and female students were all given a fictional newspaper article about someone who had succeeded in their chosen field. While some read about a woman, others read about a man. After finishing the article, the female students who had read about the woman rated themselves more highly than those who had read about the man. There was no such split among the male students.
It’s not surprising that role models would be more important to women than to men. In a male-dominated culture — in which men make up 78 percent of MPs in the UK and 95 percent of FTSE 100 chief executives — men and boys, and specifically white, middle-class men and boys, have an army of examples who show that success is possible. For women and girls, the individual success stories become all-important. It’s these female one-offs who make it clear that the glass ceiling is permeable. Ultimately, if the ideal is to have women and men represented equally in our major institutions, it is exceptional women who might lead us there.
And those figures who bolster negative stereotypes? In her recent book Living Dolls: the Return of Sexism, Natasha Walter examines the idea of “stereotype threat,” the notion that “the performance of individuals in certain fields may be heavily affected by their knowledge of what is expected of the group to which they belong.”
For instance, she writes, Courtney von Hippel, of the University of Queensland, showed that if women were given a driving test and were told it would “investigate why women are worse at driving than men, they were twice as likely to have an accident in the test than were women who were not reminded of the stereotype.”
Which makes you wonder how the constant images of women as unhappy, addicted sex objects and soppy, devoted wives are affecting young girls.
Of course, role models don’t have to be in the public eye or be part of pop culture. “My mother” is often the top result when girls are asked for their primary role model, and while this can sometimes seem a slightly stock response, in cases where it is heartfelt it is clearly ideal. What could be better than the most impressive woman you know being the one who is also, very likely, closest to you?
How about those historical figures who are trotted out as examples, the Marie Curies and Florence Nightingales? Again, these are important for women, and for some girls they’re genuinely inspiring.
Rosie Smith, an 18-year-old from London, tells me she has been reading Edith Wharton lately, “and it’s writers like that, who have been in societies where women didn’t really mean anything at all, who I really look up to.”
On the other hand, their stories can feel too removed from our own to provide any useful guide.
Fortunately, role models can come in different guises. As a teenager, I found the very phrase a bit repulsive and would have found the idea of looking up to someone honorable but antiseptic — a total non-starter. But during that period — the 80s and early 90s — there were a lot of women in the public eye, real and fictional, who bucked the present trends in one very specific, very important way: They didn’t seem overwhelmingly interested in appealing to men. There was Marmalade Atkins, Roseanne Barr, Floella Benjamin, Cyndi Lauper, Oprah Winfrey, Martina Navratilova, Elaine from Seinfeld, the Guerrilla Girls, the women of the Riot Grrrl movement. These women were savvy and self-possessed. They did what they wanted. They had interests. They had talents. They took care of business. They were, in their own way, distinctly powerful.
There are, of course, women like this in the public eye now, but they are not necessarily the people whom the media choose to focus on. Some are celebrated on Moore’s Web site — Shanaze Reade, the champion BMX racer; Rebecca Adlington, the double Olympic gold medalist; Marjane Satrapi, the graphic novelist and animated film director; Majora Carter, environmentalist; Martha Lane Fox, businesswoman; Lubna Hussein, Sudanese women’s rights activist. To that list, I would add Meryl Streep, who appears to be having more fun in her early 60s than ever before; the women of the feminist groups Southall Black Sisters and Object; actor Mo’nique and Venus and Serena Williams, who have dominated their sport while developing all kinds of other interests as well.
If only the mainstream media were less interested in picking over the tribulations of women often barely out of their teens, who would, in most cases, never want to be a role model or claim to be one, but who become, by default, all that their peers ever get to see.
On the plus side, the circus surrounding Hilton and her ilk seems to be moving on to some degree. And there was such a negative response to the devoted wifeyness on show in the election campaign that hopefully, in years to come, that obsessive coverage will seem a strange, anomalous blip.
Moore says she often faces criticism of what she is doing, but keeps at it anyway.
“People ask why, as the mother of two young boys, I’m interested in this,” she says. “And I think, well, I don’t want my boys growing up thinking that this is what women are, or that this is all that women want to be.”
Strong female role models would benefit us all.
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