Sex and empowerment can go hand in hand.
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There's no contradiction between being a feminist and a model, writes Rachel Hills.
IF PARIS Hilton, Britney Spears and the 2005 cast of Big Brother had conservative tongues wagging about the effects of evil pop culture on helpless young women, the results of a recent British poll might just make them convulse.
The survey of almost 1000 girls aged between 15 and 19, conducted by a mobile entertainment company, TheLab, found that many young women's favoured role models were men's magazine models, with C-list celebrities Abi Titmuss and Jordan ranking higher in the hero worship stakes than author J. K. Rowling, The Body Shop founder Anita Roddick, and feminist Germaine Greer.
Almost half the respondents listed Titmuss as a role model, while 9 per cent chose Rowling and only 4 per cent Greer. Offered a selection of occupations, 63 per cent said they would rather be a men's magazine model than a doctor, teacher or nurse. The second most popular choice was "lap dancer", at 25 per cent, with teachers trailing at 3 per cent.
In Britain, the statistics got tongues convulsing, with tabloids and TheLab saying they signalled the triumph of celebrity culture over feminism, of glamour over young people's ability to choose good role models. Leave aside for a moment the irony of the same newspapers that plaster Posh, Becks and Kylie over their pages decrying young people's obsession with celebrity. What's more interesting is the assumption that feminism and celebrity are mutually exclusive, that sex and empowerment can't go hand in hand.
For most women who model or want to model for men's magazines and there are lots of them, if not quite TheLab's 63 per cent there is little contradiction between being an empowered, "independent woman" and posing in one's underwear.
As feminist ideas have merged into the mainstream, female celebrities have become feminist icons in their own right. When teenage girls think of strong women, most of them don't think of academics such as Greer or businesswomen such as Roddick, they think of women such as Beyonce Knowles, Alias's Jennifer Garner and the stars of Charlie's Angels. And not without reason: these women are known and admired for their smarts and self-determination.
And almost all young women's role models have shed their clothes for a men's magazine at one point or another. An FHM cover is now as normalised a career move for most actresses as a Cosmopolitan cover.
But it's not just actresses and pop stars who pose for men's mags for cash and exposure. Athletes do it in the lead-up to the Olympics. Businesswomen do it when their companies go bust. University students do it to pay for their degrees. These women aren't clueless bimbos with no other option than to pose in their knickers; they're women who experience genuine power and accomplishment in their daily lives.
And just as importantly, the language they use to justify their decision to pose is a language of empowerment. One that calls upon the tenets of contemporary feminism, even.
If feminism is about choice, they say, is it not their prerogative to choose to make some relatively easy money from looking pretty and adopting a sexy pose? If women such as Titmuss and Jordan drive expensive cars and score invitations to film premieres because men like to look at them, who's really being exploited, the model or the man buying the magazine?
But while the money is an obvious and important lure, it's not the only reason women pose. Nikki Webster did a photo spread for FHM to celebrate her 18th birthday.
Then there's the picture spread as sexual liberation.
After the backlash that pegged feminists as asexual, man-hating prudes, it has become fashionable for accomplished women to go to pains to prove otherwise that they may have law degrees or spend hours doing laps in the pool, but that doesn't mean they're not attractive, or that they don't like sex.
Likewise it has become fashionable for feminists, in acknowledging that the relationship between female sex models and the people who look at them isn't as simple or one-sided as it might initially seem, to play down the fairly obvious ways in which glamour modelling isn't so empowering to women.
It's not quite as simple as "young woman wanting to pose for men's magazines equals failure of the feminist movement" or even "equals low self-esteem". While most independent, empowered young women would agree that they deserve to be recognised for all their complex qualities sex appeal included before we lock glamour modelling into our feminist portfolios, we should pause to ask ourselves the question: when have women ever had to fight for the right to be recognised as sex objects?
Rachel Hills is an editor for Vibewire.net
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