It's my affair: a feminist rant.

I was listening to Woman’s Hour this morning and heard a really interesting debate. It was about the sexualisation of young girls and its effects on girls’ attitudes to sex generally as they grown up. The panellists were Valerie Walkerdine, a professor of social science at Cardiff University, Gigi Durham, the author of a book called The Lolita Effect, and Eleanor James, a member of the feminist campaign group Mind the Gap. It was a great discussion – very intelligent and impassioned. Lots of good points were made about the objectification of women. Pole dancing classes and university beauty pageants were linked to the increasing marketisation of female sexuality. Durham pointed out that these things establish for women an unhealthy link between sex and sex work. I felt encouraged listening to James, a former student activist, who talked eloquently and intelligently about the issues at stake.

There was one moment in the debate, however, which depressed me – actually it made me sad. James was explaining what lead her to her critical feminist perspective on these issues. She told us that she had been ‘a chubby teenager’ and as a result of pressure from magazines, TV programmes, etc, had suffered from a number of eating disorders. Her reference to these eating disorders was almost casually dropped in to her account. There were no gasps of shock or other reactions of surprise from the other panellists; what she was describing was not particularly out of the ordinary. And that’s what made me feel sad – that in our culture we know, we expect, that many teenage girls will hate their bodies so much that they will resort to extreme ways of physically punishing themselves – they will starve themselves until they are weak and unable to function, or gorge on food and punch their stomachs until they throw up. What madness is this?

It made me think of a couple of seemingly unrelated experiences from the last week. On Saturday I went to a rally in support of the indefinite strike action at Tower Hamlets College by UCU members in response to the massive cuts the new principal is imposing. There was a long procession of speeches from various local activists, ranging from brief messages of support from other local unions to tub-thumping calls for revolution. The highlight of the speeches, however, undoubtedly came from 2 former students of the college – 2 young Bengali women from the area – one wearing hijab, one not and one of whom is running the Facebook group in support of the strikes. It was a simple speech - they expressed their outrage at what the principal is proposing, talked about how important further education is in the Tower Hamlets community and made an impassioned plea to everyone to support the striking lecturers in whatever way they could.

As I thought about these inspirational women afterwards I was reminded of the infuriating argument that springs up in the media from time to time that we should ban Muslim women from wearing headscarves. The argument goes that these garments are a symbol of a refusal to integrate and to embrace citizenship and western values. Now, I am no fan of women being forced to wear anything, but I am also no fan of women being forced to take anything off. And what greater symbol of integration, of citizenship, of participation in society, could there be than speaking at a rally in defence of a local public service, or organising an Internet group in support of the strike. Hijab or no hijab, give me that over pole dancing classes any day.

The second thing I thought about was a moronic debate that has been had in the media this week about a motion being tabled by the Society of Chiropodists and Podiatrists at the TUC Conference. The motion puts forward that employers should not have the right to force women to wear high heels as part of a work dress code, in recognition of the various health implications wearing heels can have, especially if women are having to stand up for long periods of time. Fairly uncontroversial, I would have thought – women should not be forced to wear uncomfortable footwear if they don’t want to. But no, this has been seized upon by newspapers from the Daily Mail to the Guardian and been portrayed as union busybodies wanting to BAN HIGH HEELS. Why all the interest in what, to me, is an uncontroversial and fairly minor motion being tabled at the conference? It seems to me that people are interested because – as in the debate about headscarves - society is always interested in what women wear and what they look like; we are public property and everyone wants to have their say. Would there be the same kind of response in the media if this was about male footwear? I think not.

Maybe these links are tenuous. It does strike me, however, that if the idea were to take hold that it is up to women what they wear and doesn't matter that much anyway, then teenage girls might hate themselves less.