Recently, while having coffee with a friend in her house, her seven-year-old daughter wanted to pin up a picture in her bedroom that she had just printed from the internet, writes Breda O'Brien
Had I not been familiar with the anime television animations devoured in my own home, my eyes would have popped even more than they did.
The cartoon image featured a vaguely Asian, black-haired teen in a black mini-dress that displayed lots of cleavage and was also so short that it showed her white knickers. My friend took a deep breath, and said, "Sweetheart, I don't think that picture is very respectful to women." Her seven-year-old promptly burst into tears.
"But Mum, she is beautiful!" When the tears had been dried, and a compromise negotiated, which involved a different image of the same anime character where she looks cool, competent and also wears clothes, my friend pulled a face. "So this is where we are now. A seven-year-old's idea of beauty is looking like a teenage hooker."
I think it is called having an Ariel Levy moment. Ariel Levy wrote a book called Female Chauvinist Pigs - Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. Her thesis is that women decided that true liberation lay in outdoing men in every area, but especially in the area of raunch.
Oddly enough, this ends up with women acting just like an adolescent male's fantasy - buffed, waxed, tanned and not just always available, but enthusiastically available.
Ariel Levy wants to know what, exactly, is liberating about a vision of sexuality based directly on the fantasy world inhabited by porn stars? She is in her early 30s, and mercifully for her, also beautiful, or else she could have been dismissed as another "pruney old thing", grim and repressed, who just doesn't get that all of this is not exploitative, but empowering of women.
Actually, we have another pruney old thing, Hugh Hefner, to blame for a lot of this. When he began, porn was a solitary, seedy refuge for the desperate. By building an image of the refined bachelor who enjoys the finest writing, wines, clothes and leisure pursuits, and who also happens to enjoy images of naked beautiful women, he moved porn right into the mainstream.
However, by the 1980s, Hefner was beginning to look like the sad old goat he really is. Playboy was losing money. Enter his daughter, Christie Hefner, who realised that in order to be commercially successful, women had to buy the Playboy dream, too.
If ever you wanted proof that Playboy is absolutely mainstream, you only had to watch RTÉ's documentary, Made in America, last week. It celebrates Irishwoman Lorna Donohoe. She went to America with nothing and now is a linchpin of the re-vitalised Playboy empire. Repeatedly, we are told that Playboy symbolises the good life, it is funny, naughty, sexy and independent, and what woman wouldn't want to be part of that?
Lorna spends her time organising launches of Playboy underwear ('it's not slutty, it's sexy') in top shops, and exhibitions of "classic" Playboy images in galleries all around the world. She is smart, successful, rich and patently a nice woman. Only a prude or a begrudger would not be happy for her.
Except that it is all about sales, and if making money means that you have to tap into the lucrative market that younger and younger girls represent, sure what harm is that?
Playboy logos now decorate lunchboxes and pencil cases. Once Carrie in Sex and the City wore a rabbit head necklace, Playboy was officially cool again. Sex and the City was about sex and shopping.
Every little girl is being trained to believe that success lies in being good at both.
Ariel Levy is at her best when detailing the effect this has on teenage girls, who have never experienced any other culture, except one where the major demand on women is to look "hot" and be good at sexual performance. They end up, she concludes, with "confused bodies and confused minds", where many of them are sexually active, but have no idea what they really want sexually, and what their own desires and needs are.
While in many ways, Levy's analysis is astute and astringent, in other ways she fails to see connections. For example, she sees the early days of feminism when abortion rights were secured as halcyon days.
She believes that the feminist movement then was not splintered as it is today when some factions oppose prostitution and porn, while others categorise it all as legitimate sex work that should be protected like any other form of labour.
She does not consider that the "right to choose" slogan paved the way for much of this. The right to choose appears utterly reasonable, in that choice is central to human autonomy. However, what was different about this slogan is that all choices are rendered ethically neutral. The idea that some choices are not valid, or that some choices are wrong, is no longer admissible.
Ironically, anti-pornography feminists found themselves hoist by their own slogan when they attempted to say that pornography was inherently exploitative, whether or not there was consent involved. Not so, the pro-pornography faction declared triumphantly. Women were simply exercising their right to choose, as are female patrons of lap-dancing clubs, or those who devour every word and image printed about Paris Hilton. To say that some of these choices might be damaging, or just moronic, is to be judgmental, and you can't have that.
Meanwhile, we are supposed to raise strong, empowered girls not just despite the fact that their role models bear a striking resemblance to porn stars, but because they do. One would be tempted to despair, except that common sense has a wonderful ability to resist attempts to drown it. For example, parental pressure forced toy manufacturer Hasbro to change its plans to market a line of dolls based on the Pussycat Dolls, whose look might best be described as stripper chic, to six- to nine-year-old girls.
What our teenagers need now are parents, and other adults who help their children to see and satirise the current vision of sexuality as tacky and clueless.
In short, people who see that it is high time that the empress got some clothes on.