Why do middle-class mums go to the gym for pole-dancing classes? Because, says Ariel Levy, they have been conned by kitschy, slutty ‘raunch culture’
Some version of a sexy, scantily clad temptress has been around through the ages, and there has always been a demand for smut. But whereas this was once a guilty pleasure on the margins — on the almost entirely male margins — now, strippers, porn stars and Playboy bunnies have gone mainstream, writing bestsellers, starring in reality television shows, living a life we’re all encouraged to emulate. Prepubescent girls wear ‘thong’ underpants, their mothers drive off to the gym for pole-dancing classes after lunch.
Last week Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop, hit out at what she called ‘pimp and ho chic’. ‘A lot of people seem to think that it’s cool to be a pimp or a ho,’ she said. ‘But it’s not cool. The reality is dark, evil, appalling and unregulated. There are thousands of ads, mostly focused on women and young girls, that say you are not attractive, you are not sexy, you are not intelligent unless you look like this. Something has gone very wrong.’
What Dame Anita called ‘ho chic’ I call ‘raunch culture’, and it’s everywhere. Men and women alike have developed a taste for kitschy, slutty stereotypes of female sexuality — we don’t even think about it any more, we just expect to see women flashing and stripping and groaning everywhere we look.
Not so long ago the revelation that a woman in the public eye had appeared in any kind of pornography would have destroyed her reputation. Think of Vanessa Williams, crowned the first black Miss America in 1983, and how quickly she was dethroned after her nude photos surfaced in Penthouse.
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