Long One Quote Review: Living Dolls by Natasha Walter

I spent an afternoon this week helping the wife of a classmate get set up ahead of their move into their new Aberdonian home. I was her chauffeur as she bounced around the city doing essential errands. To pass my time and to assure her that she wasn’t to feel rushed, I thought I’d bring along one of the books I was reading.

I chose to bring my Kindle because the books I was actively reading had the kind of front covers that don’t scream “Normal man sitting outside an upholstery shop” but “Uh… I think I’ll walk the long way around to avoid that man reading from what appears to either be a lurid piece of trashy erotica or an insane Catholic apocalyptic conspiracy text.”

Before I left the house, I had visions of the time I waited in the car park outside a post office while Wife-unit sent some care package somewhere. We had been re-listening to the utterly hilarious Stephen Colbert masterpiece “I Am America. And So Can You!” I found myself buckled over in the driver’s seat in a state of uncontrollable mirth as Colbert unfurled his insane satire of anti-gay marriage advocates. What I had not realised was that the windows were wide open on a hot summer day. Hence, the angry looks of dismay I received from one mother as she simultaneously looked back in scorn at me while protectively ferrying her children as far from my car as possible. Who could blame her? She had just heard Colbert’s preposterously pitch-perfect voice intone:

The biggest threat facing America today – next to socialized medicine, the Dyson vacuum cleaner, and the recumbent bicycle – is Gay Marriage.

So to avoid being the subject of car park suspicion, I left these two behind.

As it turns out, the top book is about architecture, war and cultural memory and it was given to me by my best friend. The bottom book is about the objectification of women and it was lent to me by my wife.

I finished Living Dolls this morning and it is superb. It probably says something about the undeveloped and shallow nature of my feminism that I much prefer these journalistic accounts of the situation as it stands in society rather than intellectually creative theory.

The book has two parts. The first half of the book details what the author, Natasha Walter, describes as “The New Sexism”. This is a re-treading of a story that Christians are very familiar with. There has been a coarsening of our culture around sex, lust and embodiment that is detrimental to the opportunities afforded to women. This part of the book could be read as a companion piece to Ariel Levy’s compelling Female Chauvinist Pigs. Walter begins with the apparently superficial observation that a grand marketing push is behind the pinkization of the world in which young girls grow up. But she then considers how the roseate effect has an unhappy influence on adolescent and young adult women. In the 1970s Barbie was commonly marketed as a lab-based scientist or an astronaut or an anthropologist in the field. Today, Barbie, like the Bratz, is exclusively a pretty thing who owns high fashion, customised pets and convertibles.

So in this section Walter considers the remarkably narrow beauty obsession, the normalisation of sex work, the prevalence of emotionally denuded attitudes to sex and most convincingly, the corrosive effects of internet pornography to argue that women coming of age today are in many ways less free than their counterparts a generation ago.

One of the great things about this section is how open it is to voices different from her own. She welcomes the input of the fairly conservative Romance Academy while also constantly reminding the reader that there is some merit to the argument that sex work can be an act of emancipatory empowerment for some women. This is not at anti-pleasure shadow of second-wave feminism.

What also struck me is just how dangerous the world is for women who enter into the sex trade. Regardless of why they get involved, they are about six times more likely to be subject to violence than women in wider society. The preacher in me was hungry for a chance to read 1 Peter and preach to congregations about how this is a Gospel issue Christians must continue to work on. It is easy for us to get agitated about the plight of women who have been trafficked. Of course, that work is important and needs to be supported. But the ongoing extension of grace and comfort to the more “ordinary” women in this line of work is essential.

She concludes this section by arguing that the feminist movement has been epistemologically hijacked by the ideas of the marketplace. In less fancy terms, she thinks that women find it hard to act in a feminist fashion because they think almost exclusively in terms of capitalism. The truth of this is seen in how every action can be justified by the declaration “that is my choice” or “that is just her choice.” The Market trains us to see us as consumers building our own life story through the selection of this option over that option. Of course, this is sociological fantasy. No man is an island and no woman is left unaffected when women forego any concept of solidarity and see themselves as uninfluenced and uninfluencable agents finding their self actualisation, whether that is through glamour modelling, pole dancing or just extreme pursuits of socially constructed concepts of beauty.

Having built a case layer upon layer from the experience of a pink girls section and a blue boys section in a toyshop, in the second part of the book Walter further extends her argument about the dollification of society’s perspective of women by turning her attention to what she calls “The New Determinism”.

In the first section we are necessarily dealing with a sort of impressionistic discussion of a broad interpretation of societal trends. One could quibble and fight with any single point. But in this second section her targets are focused on a social movement of scientists with a particular narratival agenda. She name calls Steven Pinker and Susan Pinker, Simon Baron-Cohen and Helena Cronin as researchers who are pushing a particular story of what it means to be human whereby our nature is determined by our genes. Aided and abetted by a media only too happy to find “scientific proof” that will resolve the complex travesty of gender imbalance, these voices have created a widespread social sense that girls will be girls and boys will be boys. It’s just science.

But whether the half remembered research you draw on to come to these conclusions is neuroscientific experiments with infants or hormonal analysis of testosterone in the womb or the spectacularly stupid arguments about differing size of the corpus callosum, all of these arguments are stretched or outright bogus. In debunking this scientrific determinism, Walter doesn’t seek to propose a competing hypothesis. She is not a scientist. She just read the papers she found in the footnotes. In many cases, the claims were inflated interpolations that bordered on the fraudulent.

Now a digression might be apposite here. Steven Pinker and Helena Cronin are at the forefront of the new Atheism movement. They have a very strongly held philosophical position that sees natural selection as the key that unlocks all that we do not yet know. As their friend Daniel Dennett puts it, natural selection is, for them, a “universal solvent”. They take this agenda to their research. We all take our agenda to our research. But that agenda is never brought back into play when the research is presented and a media that seeks to perpetuate a certain idea of progress through science doesn’t have the time or nuance to bring it up either.

The reason this matters is because at base, the problem isn’t shoddy science. The problem is that this new determinism is, at base, anti-human. It is fatalism. It is dismissive of the role of human society and culture, the potential for change and transformation. It betrays a hallmark of heresy – it repudiates its own dogma. Natural selection is about the potential of all organisms to adapt. When misapplied in territory where it has no purchase, its effect is to deny the potential of humans to adapt.

Here is Walter, making her point:

In the eyes of those who subscribe to biological determinism, there is a good fit between the world as it is today and the innate aptitudes of men and women. There is no dissatisfaction, there is no frustration, there is no misfiring between our desires and our situations. Every aspect of inequality that we see today can be explained by the different genetic and hormonal make-up of men and women; if women earn less, if men have more power, if women do more domestic work, if men have more status, then this is simply the way that things are meant to be.

– Natasha Walter, Living Dolls, 209.

This is the best kind of feminism in that it is humanism. Walter has not just struck a blow for women but in so doing she has liberated men. The bullshit of determinism doesn’t just truncate who women can be. It offers non stop crap about men lacking empathy and being less verbal, it subjugates boys under ideas of masculinity that have no bearing on the full diversity of expression available to human beings. Autism is not extreme maleness. The princess is not the innate ambition of women.

But at the same time, Walter does not for a moment deny the biological grounding of gender. Her position is not “socially constructed”. Her position is not “biologically determined”. Her position is not even “nature AND nurture”. These are all models that are insufficiently adaptable to account for human beings. Instead, her intention is to encourage us to cultivate in our society the opportunity for full human flourishing. As she ends the book:

Because the dream that feminists first spoke about over two hundred years ago is still urging us on, the dream that one day women and men will be able to work and love side by side, freely, without the constraints of restrictive traditions. This dream tells us that rather than modelling themselves on the plastic charm of a pink and smiling doll, women can aim to realise their full human potential.

– Walter, 238.

That vision must still excite us and command our attention.

Your Correspondent, Just a puppet, like Roland Rat or the Queen