2023: forward to the past?

It’s that time again: the time when commentators of all kinds look back at the last 12 months, and pick out what they see as the most significant trends or the most memorable moments of the year. This blog’s annual round-ups have tended to be variations on a few well-worn themes; the details are different every year, but the overall trends are much the same. In that respect, as what follows will make clear, 2023 was fairly typical; but one thing several of the issues I’ve picked out have in common (something the title of this post alludes to) is an oddly “retro” vibe: they’re cases where an old form of sexism has been reinvented or repackaged for new times.             

1. Tech troubles

This year’s lists of WOTYs (words of the year) were dominated by a single theme: most major English dictionaries agreed that 2023 was the year of artificial intelligence. Though Oxford (which put its shortlist to a public vote) ended up crowning rizz, a slang term derived from charisma, Collins went with AI and Cambridge chose hallucinate (in the AI-related sense of “make stuff up”). Merriam-Webster’s choice, authentic, reflected concerns about AI’s capacity to deceive by mimicking or producing believable simulacra of real people: deepfake was also on its shortlist.

Feminists have their own concerns about recent developments in AI, ranging from the way large language models amplify sexist biases in the massive datasets used to train them to the implications of AI “companions”, whose increasing popularity I wrote about in May. But this year’s events reminded us that some of women’s most pressing technology-related problems are not new—and are still not getting the kind of serious attention, either from the tech companies or from policymakers, which we’ve seen being given to AI.  

In January, when the New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern unexpectedly resigned, there was speculation that the misogynist abuse and threats she’d been subjected to had played a significant part in her decision. Another female leader who resigned in 2023, the Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (though she clearly had other reasons for stepping down) spoke publicly both about her personal experiences of online abuse and her fear that it was driving women out of politics, or deterring them from entering in the first place.

We’ve known about this problem for some time. In 2016 a cross-party campaign (fronted by Yvette Cooper MP) was launched under the slogan “Reclaim the Internet”: it aimed, among other things, to pressure the tech companies to do more. But this initiative evidently did not achieve much. In 2017 a survey of women MPs found that one in three had seriously considered quitting because of the volume of abuse they received, and in 2019 a significant number chose not to seek re-election, citing abuse as a reason for their decision to stand down. Like tech’s other big misogyny problems–one being the ease with which violent and/or supposedly illegal pornography can be accessed online, by children as well as adults, and another being the proliferation of extreme misogynist content which is then promoted to young men on mainstream platforms like YouTube and TikTok—this one seems to be getting worse.          

2. Women beware women: the political rise of the female anti-feminist

But there’s one type of female politician who had a good year in 2023: the right-wing woman whose rhetoric is even more extreme, reactionary and authoritarian than that of the men around her. Though in most cases her main selling point is nationalism/racism, she will often position herself explicitly as a female anti-feminist, extolling women’s traditional domestic roles while making her own status as an exception, a woman in a position of public leadership, more acceptable by adopting one or more of the archetypal personae through which female power has historically been understood (mother, iron lady/warrior queen, seductress or “pet”). As a type she is far from new, but she has managed to reinvent herself: her politics may be backward-looking, but she presents herself as a thoroughly modern woman.

Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the “post-fascist” Brothers [sic] of Italy who is now the Italian prime minister, is a notable case in point. She has described herself as first and foremost a mother, and has emphasized her Christian beliefs, but she has also exploited her relative youth and sexual attractiveness in a way that sometimes makes you wonder if she’s trying to establish the bimbo as a new political archetype. She once posed for the media while holding a pair of melons to her chest (a reference both to her last name and to the slang meaning of “melons”, which is the same in Italian as in English), and at a NATO summit in 2023 she cut short a press conference on the grounds that her high heeled shoes were killing her. Like Marine Le Pen (who improved her performance in the last French presidential election by adopting a softer, more maternal image), Meloni seems to know what she’s doing: polls suggest that her brand of femininity is seen by many women as “relatable”.

The antifeminist female politician has also become a significant figure in the British Tory party, whose internal wars were, regrettably, a major driver of our national politics in 2023. She isn’t a completely new phenomenon (the obvious precedent is Margaret Thatcher), but I can’t remember a time when so many women were talked of on the Tory right as potential leaders. In some cases antifeminism is incidental to their political brand (Suella Braverman and Priti Patel, for instance, are more notable for being the rabidly anti-immigrant children of immigrants), but one of this year’s rising stars, the 41-year-old backbench MP Miriam Cates, brought it squarely into the foreground, underlining her status as a woman to watch with a speech at the NatCon conference which identified falling birthrates (she didn’t say “among white people” but that’s generally assumed to have been her meaning) as an “existential crisis”. Too many young people, she said (this obviously meant “young women”) were going to university and having careers instead of babies. (Footnote: Miriam Cates has a degree from Cambridge University and a career as a politician; she does also have three children, but given the demands of her job as an MP we can assume she delegates most childcare to someone else.)    

But as troubling as it is to hear this kind of rhetoric from an elected British politician, we Brits don’t seem to be in much immediate danger of being led by fanatically right-wing women. Their most senior representative in government, Suella Braverman, got the sack in November (prompting a reshuffle that brought a more traditional figure, “Daddy” David Cameron, back into the Cabinet). Meanwhile, the official inquiry into the handling of the Covid pandemic underlined the point that real power still belongs largely to the same privileged male public-school-and-Oxbridge types who have ruled us since time immemorial. The language these men used during the crisis (as revealed by the WhatsApp messages they exchanged) gave a good indication of their arrogance, laziness and hostility to any woman who raised concerns. The testimony of Helen MacNamara, the most senior female civil servant in the Cabinet Office at the time, was an incisive, albeit belated, contribution to feminist criticism of Boris Johnson’s monumentally incompetent and self-serving administration.

3. Misrepresenting male violence

Another subject which continued to make national headlines in 2023 was the high prevalence of violence against women, and the extent to which the justice system is failing women who suffer it. Since Sarah Everard’s abduction and murder by serving police officer Wayne Couzens in 2021 there has been a steady flow of new revelations about police officers either perpetrating crimes against women or covering up for colleagues who had done so. But while the media have been instrumental in bringing these cases to public attention, an academic book published in April, Alessia Tranchese’s From Fritzl to #MeToo, showed that their reporting of sexual violence is itself part of the problem, contributing significantly to the climate of disbelief, victim-blaming and “himpathy” (making excuses for male perpetrators) which enables so many violent men to evade justice.

Tranchese’s analysis of the language of rape reporting in UK newspapers provides clear evidence that language which implies that women who report rape are lying is not only still the norm, it has actually become even more entrenched in recent years. One of the developments that has helped to entrench it is the “celebrification” of news coverage since the 2010s: stories about male celebrities accused of rape or sexual assault are getting more space in newspapers, and these men are particularly likely to be given the “himpathetic” treatment. While it’s often assumed that #MeToo put a stop to this, Tranchese’s data suggest that its effect was in fact quite limited, and that the backlash that followed (which she documents in detail) may have entrenched the problem further.

Her point was demonstrated in September of this year, when a documentary that aired allegations about Russell Brand prompted a flurry of complaints that Brand was being unfairly subjected to “trial by media”. This view was expressed by commentators across the political spectrum, and none appeared to have noticed what Tranchese had pointed out: that women who report being raped or sexually harassed by a popular celebrity like Brand (or even one as lacking in “rizz” as Prince Andrew) are routinely put on trial by the media, in reports which implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—represent them as sluts, gold-diggers, vengeful obsessives and liars. Yet this form of “trial by media” does not raise the same concern that it might interfere with the pursuit of justice through the proper channels: it’s familiar, unremarkable and taken for granted. From Fritzl to #MeToo was not the most enjoyable feminist book about language I read this year (that accolade goes to Jenni Nuttall’s Mother Tongue), but in political terms it was probably the most important.   

4. Back to bullshit

One issue this blog has returned to regularly since 2015 is the never-ending flow of bullshit about women’s language masquerading as wisdom or science. There was something of a slowdown during the pandemic, but by the beginning of this year normal service had been resumed.

In January I spotted what looked like a new riff on the familiar theme of How Women’s Language Holds Them Back, in a Harvard Business Review article headed “Research: men speak more abstractly than women”. Which is a problem, apparently, because “our studies have shown that people tend to associate abstract language with power and leadership”. So, if you want to be seen as a leader, try waffling vaguely about “intangible concepts”. And if you’re wondering how that fits with another common piece of advice for women—namely, “cut out the fluff and be direct”—let me remind you that this kind of logical thinking will get you nowhere. On Planet Bullshit the only rule which applies consistently is that anything women do–or are said to do–with language can and will be used against them.

Later in the year I revisited the more familiar bullshit claim that women are incapable of forming a sentence without using the word “sorry” after stumbling across some training materials which set out to cure trainees of their addiction to the S-word by confronting them with the shocking fact that in the course of her life the average woman will apologize no fewer than 295,650 times. And where did this statistic come from? Why, from a survey conducted by an online florist! Whose purpose, needless to say, was not scientific but commercial: it was designed to persuade us that, since verbal apologies have been rendered meaningless by overuse, we should consider buying “apology flowers” instead.  

In July one of the world’s leading newspapers, the New York Times, took the unusual step of publishing an op-ed in which the writer Adam Grant (a professor of organizational psychology at the Wharton Business School) defended women’s use of so-called “weak language” as a rational choice, given the evidence that women who follow advice to speak directly and assertively are liable to be judged “abrasive”, “strident” and unlikable. It’s an argument that feminist linguists have been making for decades; but perhaps now that a man has made it, people might actually start taking it seriously.

5. (M)adwomen: reinventing sexism in advertising

As annoyed as I get about bullshit advice (especially when it makes use of garbage “research” like the online florist’s survey while resolutely ignoring the existence of actual research on language and gender), my most rage-fuelled post of 2023 (and also the one that got most page-views) was about another old chestnut, sexism in advertising: more specifically, the way the use of verbal innuendo and sexualized visual imagery has spread from its original home in ads for products like women’s underwear to charity-led campaigns about women’s health.

Once again, this was not the first time I’d broached the subject. In 2021 I criticized a campaign which claimed to be raising awareness about cervical cancer screening by urging women to post a cat picture online, choosing a longhaired, shorthaired or hairless cat to show whether their pubic hair was “bushy, bare or halfway there” (cat = pussy, geddit?). Could efforts to encourage women to have smear tests get any more tasteless? The answer, it turns out, is yes: in Manchester in November, North West Cancer Research unveiled its latest campaign, featuring 3D images of disembodied female legs alongside a slogan its creators described as “playful and a bit cheeky” (though I’d call it “demeaning and a bit rapey”): “don’t keep ‘em crossed, get screened instead”.

A lot of people who objected to this campaign assumed it must have been designed by men, but in fact it was produced by a female-led creative team at an agency whose website stresses its feminist credentials. Unfortunately it is part of an industry whose feminism leans heavily on half-baked ideas about “empowerment” and sexual “agency”: hence the assumption that using sexualized words and images in the context of cancer prevention is witty and “edgy” rather than offensive (except of course to dried-up old prudes who haven’t caught up with the latest thinking). For this agency’s next awayday I’d recommend a daytrip to Tate Britain, whose current exhibition of late 20^th century British feminist art, Women in Revolt! might help them understand why those of us who remember the 1970s (that golden age of sexist advertising) aren’t impressed. The issue isn’t that we’re old: we’re just puzzled and disappointed to see younger women reinventing a wheel we spent our own youth trying to put a spoke in–partly [irony klaxon] so that future generations would be spared the relentless sexism we grew up with.

6. Books, old and new

Speaking of late 20^th century feminism, November brought the sad news that Dale Spender had died. Though her contributions to the women’s movement were many and varied, particularly in her native Australia, in Britain she was probably best known as the author of the 1980 feminist classic Man Made Language, in which she argued that using a language made by men forces women to internalize and reproduce a male-centred view of the world. My post about Spender explained why I didn’t (and still don’t) agree; but it also explored the reasons why her book spoke so powerfully to many feminists, and reflected on the way it challenged me to formulate my own ideas coherently (a process whose end result was my own first book). It isn’t always the writers you agree with who inspire you, and you don’t have to agree with other feminists about everything to admire and respect their contributions.

Though I can’t compete with Spender’s lifetime output of over 30 books, I’ve written a few more since the 1980s, and the most recent of them, Language, Sexism and Misogyny, was published just before Christmas. It’s my attempt to assess what’s changed—and what hasn’t—in the 50 years since language became a serious subject of feminist study; it covers many of the subjects I’ve written about on this blog, and it’s aimed at a similar kind of audience (i.e., it’s not just for specialists in linguistics). If anyone who’s reading this post would also like to read the book, you can find the details here.

As ever, I’ll end by thanking everyone who’s visited Language: a feminist guide in 2023, and all the other feminist researchers and writers who’ve contributed to this year’s posts through their published work or their suggestions and recommendations. And whatever may happen in 2024, I hope it will bring you at least some of what you wish for.    

Don’t keep ’em crossed: how not to get ahead in advertising

The photograph below, taken at Manchester Piccadilly station earlier this month, shows an installation commissioned by North West Cancer Research to encourage more women to get screened for cervical cancer. Which is, of course, a worthy goal; cervical cancer screening can save lives. But when I first saw this photo, what I mostly felt was rage. I was so angry, I immediately reposted it with a critical comment on Twitter/X. Evidently this struck a chord: within a couple of days my tweet had racked up 134K views and prompted numerous replies from other women who found the installation “awful”, “crass” and “disgusting”. In this post I’ll take a closer look at what the problem with it is—and why that problem is so common in women’s health campaigns.

The installation consists of five large display boards arranged in a line. Mounted on each of the middle three boards is a disembodied pair of crossed female legs. They’re like the legs you see on mannequins in the hosiery sections of department stores: long, slender, and carefully positioned for aesthetic effect. They begin at the top of the thigh and end in Barbie-style feet wearing high-heeled court shoes. They are “diverse” insofar as they represent a range of skin colours, but there is no diversity in relation to age, body-size or personal style. The imaginary woman these legs belong to is clearly young, slim, and conventionally feminine. On its own the visual element of the display could easily be mistaken for a lingerie ad: it’s far from obvious what legs have to do with cervical cancer. But the connection is spelled out in the verbal message, which is split between the two outer display boards. Both parts address the viewer directly and in the imperative: on the left, “don’t keep ‘em crossed”, and on the right, “get screened instead”.

While there are many things to object to about this installation, the thing I found so shocking that it rendered me temporarily speechless was that injunction “don’t keep ’em crossed”. It’s offensive because the crossing and uncrossing of a woman’s legs is a well-worn metaphor for sexual continence or incontinence. That’s the real reason why girls are taught that it’s “ladylike” to sit with your legs crossed (and “unladylike” to sit with them apart): while this is often presented as a matter of aesthetics or good taste, what it’s really about is modesty, in the sense of chastity. By adopting a posture that completely conceals her genital area, a woman signals that she is not available for sex.

The flipside, of course, is that the uncrossing of a woman’s legs becomes a sign that she is open to sexual propositions. When I was growing up in the 1970s people often said, about both rape and unwanted pregnancy, that all a woman had to do to prevent it was “keep her legs crossed”. This was a commonplace form of victim-blaming and slut-shaming, but it also had a flipside which might be called “prude-shaming”. The woman who did “keep ’em crossed” could be accused of denying men access because she was “uptight”, frigid and sexually repressed. Which is also what “don’t keep ‘em crossed/get screened instead” implies—that it’s uptightness that stops women from getting screened.

This sexualization of a medical procedure is offensive in its own right, but if the aim is to increase the uptake of screening it also seems strategically ill-conceived. If women are really deterred from getting smears by a prudish reluctance to open their legs, then surely it would make more sense to try to take sex out of the equation, and talk about smear tests in the same way you’d talk about any other medical procedure involving the probing of a bodily orifice. These are, after all, quite numerous: if sexual references are not a staple feature of campaigns encouraging men to get their prostates checked, why should they have any place in campaigns about cervical cancer?  

I say “campaigns”, plural, because the NHS and cancer charities have form for this. In 2021 the health app myGP ran a bizarre online campaign suggesting young women could remind their social media followers about the importance of regular smear tests by posting a picture of the type of cat (long-haired, short-haired or hairless) that best represented the current state of their pubic hair. The cat, obviously, was code for the explicitly sexualized term “pussy”. And it’s not just cervical cancer that gets this treatment. One Twitter commenter reminded me that in 2020 the Sun newspaper, which for several decades was famous for featuring a daily topless pin-up photo on page 3, ran a campaign to encourage breast self-examination whose title and slogan was “CoppaFeel!”. And in Canada a campaign to raise awareness of ovarian cancer renamed women’s ovaries “ladyballs”: its slogan was “have the ladyballs to do something about it”.

These campaigns persistently use the register of laddish banter, sometimes in combination with the visual language of pornography, in which women are reduced to their component body-parts (and often, as in this case, shown without faces, the most individualizing and emotionally expressive parts of the human body). It’s as if the designers are incapable of viewing female bodies from anything but a heterosexual male perspective, or of talking about diseases that affect thousands of women (some of whom will die from them) in anything but a laddishly jokey way. Does that not suggest an extraordinary level of obtuseness about, or indeed contempt for, women’s own experiences and feelings?

But if you’re assuming that the “don’t keep ‘em crossed” campaign must have been developed by men, I regret to tell you that you’re mistaken. The PR agency North West Cancer Research used, Influential, is led by women; a report on the website of Prolific North, a hub for digital and media professionals in the north of England, makes clear that women dreamed up those disembodied legs and came up with that repulsively rapey strapline. What were they thinking? Karen Swan, a director at Influential, explained to Prolific North that

We wanted a campaign that was playful and a bit cheeky in order to grab our audience’s attention, so the strapline “Don’t keep ‘em crossed” was perfect.  

Cara Newton, head of marketing at North West Cancer Research, agreed, saying they’d wanted a campaign whose launch would create what she described as a “real moment”.

When I first saw the installation I did have a “real moment”, of the Proustian variety: it transported me straight back to my teenage years in the 1970s, when “playful and cheeky” sexism was ubiquitous in popular culture. Some of the older women who commented on my tweet also made that connection, drawing comparisons with 1970s British favourites like the Carry On films and the Benny Hill Show. One recalled a piece of health messaging that makes Influential’s effort seem almost tasteful: when she had her first child in 1979, there was a poster in the maternity ward promoting breastfeeding with the message “Breast is best, and Dad can suck on the empties”.

Commercial advertisers in this period often used wordplay that gave their ads a sexist/misogynist subtext. Below, for instance, is an ad for the UK hosiery brand Pretty Polly in which a sexualized image of women’s legs is given a witty caption–“for girls who don’t want to wear the trousers”–that has both an innocuous reading (“for women who prefer wearing skirts”) and a sexist one (“for women who want to be dominated by men”) which is also a dig at feminists, with their presumed desire both to dominate men and to look like them. Influential’s installation is very obviously in this tradition: it uses the same combination of visual imagery (disembodied legs/high-heeled shoes) and verbal innuendo.

Back in the day, this kind of thing certainly grabbed feminists’ attention: it inspired complaints to the Advertising Standards Agency, stickering campaigns on the London Underground (“this advert degrades women”) and illegal spray painting of graffiti on street hoardings (Pretty Polly was one target for this form of activism, as seen below).  

It may be because I’m old enough to remember this that the “don’t keep ‘em crossed” campaign makes me so angry. How did we get to the point where women designing a women’s health campaign in 2023 can reinvent the wheel of 1970s sexism without apparently seeing a problem? Even if they were genuinely unaware of the connection between uncrossed legs and rape, why did they think a cancer prevention campaign needed to be, above all, “playful” and “cheeky”? Why is it still assumed that you can’t get women’s attention by addressing them as serious human beings?       

If you did want to take a more serious approach, one thing you’d need to do would be to think seriously about the reasons why many women are reluctant to be screened. Both in this campaign and in myGP’s earlier cat-themed effort, the key problem is assumed to be embarrassment, and the solution is to joke women out of it. But while embarrassment may be a factor, it’s certainly not the only problem. As many women who commented on Twitter observed, for a non-negligible subset of women the smear test is particularly daunting because of its potential to trigger memories of sexual assault and/or traumatic experiences giving birth. Women who avoid screening for trauma-related reasons are hardly going to be receptive to the “cheeky banter” approach.

Another thing that makes women hesitant is their knowledge that screening is often painful. Some Twitter commenters recalled occasions when they had said they were in pain and been ignored or told it was their own fault for not “relaxing” (the “uptightness” problem again). One woman healthcare professional who had been on both ends of the speculum described that instrument as “grim and bitey”, and wondered why more resources had not been devoted to improving its design, which has barely altered since it was invented.

In this particular case women may not have to endure the pain for much longer. Almost all cervical cancer is caused by the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), and since a vaccine against HPV became available the case-rate among women young enough to have been offered it has dropped dramatically. Recently the NHS announced that it hopes to eradicate the disease by 2040. Which will, if it happens, be very good news. But it will not solve the larger problem, which is the longstanding tendency, now well-documented by research, for medicine to take women’s pain less seriously than men’s.

Hysteroscopy, for instance, a procedure used to investigate symptoms that could indicate uterine cancer, is typically performed in NHS clinics without pain relief (other than the over-the-counter painkillers women are advised to take beforehand), though it is so painful that it is not uncommon to have to abandon the procedure midway through. Colonoscopy, by contrast, a comparable investigative procedure which is also performed on men, is usually done under sedation.

It isn’t only women’s pain that gets dismissed as trivial. NICE, the body which approves NHS treatments, recently issued guidance suggesting that women experiencing menopausal symptoms like insomnia, mood swings and brain fog should be offered cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT). So, either they think the problem is in women’s minds, or else they think women should be satisfied with a treatment that helps them cope with their symptoms as opposed to one (HRT) that relieves them by targeting the cause. As one woman asked, will they also be recommending that older men with erectile dysfunction should be offered CBT rather than Viagra?  

This systemic sexism is the larger context in which health messaging for women needs to be seen. The problem with campaigns like “don’t keep ‘em crossed” isn’t just their crassness: even if the form of the message were less offensive, if its content still boils down to “stop being a prude and get a smear test” then it will still be treating women who avoid screening like irresponsible silly girls, while ignoring the evidence that many are deterred by their prior experiences of being patronized, insulted, dismissed or blamed.    

That said, there’s no getting away from the crassness—and that part of the problem could easily be fixed if the producers and commissioners of health messaging for women simply decided to stop using sexualized language and imagery. It isn’t just feminists, or women over 50, who find this inappropriate and offputting. Women may also object to it for religious or moral reasons, or because they find its humour tasteless, or just because they don’t see how it’s relevant. In Canada, some women criticized the 2016 “ladyballs” campaign for insulting their intelligence; one wondered if a campaign about testicular cancer would refer to men’s testicles as “brovaries”. Yet the marketing and PR professionals remain convinced that their “provocative” and “cheeky” approach is the right one. Why are they so wedded to the idea of sexing up cancer? Do they really know their audience, and do they actually care what it thinks? 

In that connection I find it interesting that Karen Swan’s comment, quoted above, begins with the words “we wanted a campaign that…”. By “we”, presumably, she meant the creative team at Influential. And what agencies like Influential want from a campaign isn’t always what’s most effective for the target audience. Of course they have to pay attention to the client’s brief (if they didn’t they’d find it hard to stay in business), but they also want their campaigns to be noticed and evaluated positively by their peers. And for that purpose, being provocative has its advantages: a campaign that generates controversy is also one that gets attention.  

This strategy was famously used in the so-called “bra-wars” of the 1990s, when rival bra manufacturers and their advertising agencies competed to produce more and more “daring” ads. First we had the Wonderbra “Hello, boys” campaign, which put supermodel Eva Herzigova’s breasts almost literally in the viewer’s face: the giant billboard version even prompted fears that it would cause traffic accidents by distracting male drivers. Then came Gossard’s even more provocative depiction of an underwear-clad model reclining in what appears to be a haystack over the line “Who said a woman can’t get pleasure from something soft?”. This thinly-veiled allusion to erect penises attracted so many complaints that Gossard was forced to switch to “when a firework is smouldering, stand well back”.

This change in language was forced on Gossard by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), the body which regulates print and billboard advertising in Britain, and which adjudicates complaints about it from the public. But overall, their response to complaints about the bra-wars ads was surprisingly restrained. Gossard was only required to remove the “something soft” reference, while complaints about “Hello, boys” were dismissed altogether. The ASA’s adjudication said that “the copy lines invest [the model] with a particular personality and sense of humour”–or in other words, “Hello, boys” was not offensive and dehumanizing, it was just “playful and a bit cheeky”.

By contrast, a couple of ads which took a similarly playful and cheeky approach to men’s underpants, using close-ups of the model’s crotch area alongside jokey captions like “Loin King” and “Full Metal Packet”, were judged to have breached the ASA’s rules about “taste and decency”. Women’s breasts might be a legitimate subject for cheeky humour, but men’s penises were no laughing matter. Asked about this apparent double standard, an ASA spokesperson said: “The Authority reacts to prevailing standards. To some extent we live in a sexist society, and to some extent we reflect that”.

But by the mid-1990s it had also become possible for the makers of sexist ads to deploy a different argument, one that wasn’t about humour or playfulness–that using sexualized images of female bodies to sell products was not, as 1970s feminists had argued, degrading to women, but on the contrary, empowering. The women in the ads were not mere objects, they were agents; far from displaying submissiveness, they were making a statement about the power of female sexuality. The bra-wars ads might look to the uninitiated like 1970s sexism on steroids, but in fact what they represented was an “edgier”, more modern form of feminism. If you couldn’t see that a supermodel in a Wonderbra was the ultimate symbol of female empowerment, that was probably because you were a middle-aged, pearl-clutching prude.

This line went down well with the art-school/cultural studies crowd, and “Hello, boys”, in particular, is still remembered as “iconic” and “groundbreaking”. But that assessment overlooks an interesting if less well-known postscript to the bra-wars story. Both the UK companies involved, Gossard and Playtex (the makers of the Wonderbra), changed their marketing approach dramatically after realizing that the “iconic” bra-wars campaigns had done more to enhance the ad agencies’ prestige than to increase sales of the product being advertised.

In 1996, when Playtex announced that a new campaign for their Affinity range would feature the “elegant” but “accessible and clean-cut” Helena Christensen, the company’s account director at Saatchi and Saatchi explicitly related this change of direction to the controversy around Gossard’s “something soft” ad, saying “we don’t want to offend or upset women, which I think these ad campaigns do.” When a woman later became marketing director at Gossard, one of her first actions was to sack the agency that had created “something soft”, explaining, “I want to advertise to women, not men”. Even if they weren’t offended, market research showed that women were unimpressed by sexy poses and suggestive straplines. What they most wanted from a bra ad was “a good representation of what the actual bra looks like”.

Though this backlash against hypersexualized, controversy-courting bra ads was described in one report I read as a return to “the ethos of a bygone age”, in reality it was more like a return to the basic principles of marketing: if your aim is to sell more bras you should design your advertising for the people who actually buy bras. And that principle also applies to women’s health campaigns. To the professionals who design them it may seem obvious that effective advertising is “provocative” or “edgy”, and that sexualized imagery is “empowering”: those ideas are simply the water today’s creatives swim in. But if the reception of “don’t keep ‘em crossed” shows us anything, it surely shows it’s time to pull the plug.  

Many thanks to everyone who commented on my Twitter thread    

Pussy riot

Last week was Cervical Cancer Prevention Week, and the NHS-approved myGP app used its Twitter account to suggest that women could raise awareness about the importance of regular screening by using the hashtag #myCat to share ‘an image of the cat that best reflects your undercarriage/flower/bits (technical term, vulva!) current look’. The accompanying image of three cats–long-haired, hairless and short-haired–was captioned ‘Bushy, bare or halfway there’.

What, we might ask, do pubic hairstyles have to do with cervical cancer prevention? An answer eventually surfaced: in a survey of over 2000 women, a third of the respondents said they would avoid going for screening if they hadn’t waxed or shaved their ‘bikini area’. So, #myCat is intended to address a real issue. But it’s an odd way to go about it: who, confronted with this survey finding, would think, ‘I know, let’s reassure these women that no one’s going to judge them by running a campaign that invites them to share the current state of their pubes on social media, through the ever-popular medium of a cat pic?’

The ‘no one’s going to judge you’ message has been conveyed in other ways too. In verse, for example: ‘The nurse isn’t fussed/ if you haven’t had a trim/ She’s looking at your cervix/ not your lovely hairy quim/ The nurse don’t care if it’s jungle or fluff/ It’s about saving lives/ not a nice neat muff/’.

As well-intentioned as all this may be, it points to a serious problem with the language of health messaging on this subject. In an effort to make the messages more ‘relatable’, their creators persistently resort to language which is either vague and euphemistic (‘undercarriage/flower/bits’) or overtly sexualised-slash-pornified (‘quim’, ‘muff’). #myCat manages to be both at once: ‘cat’ is being used here as a euphemism for ‘pussy’, which may have originated as a euphemism itself, but is now a sexualised term not only for women’s ‘bits’, but also for women themselves, imagined as men’s collective prey (‘he spends his life chasing pussy’).

To many women (as their Twitter responses made clear) this language, in the context of a cancer prevention campaign, is not relatable, it’s offensive. Are men ever addressed in such a coy and cutesy way? One woman on Twitter, @iseult, addressed that question with a male-oriented riff on #myCat:

Share an image of the chicken that best reflects your chicken tenders, beanbags, gangoolies (technical term testicles!) current look. Use the Hashtag #myChickenBalls. Tell and tag your friends to let them know

@Iseult is right: It’s hard to imagine this getting onto, let alone off, the drawing board.

But as I pointed out back in 2015, men and women aren’t in the same position when it comes to talking about their ‘bits’. Large numbers of people are profoundly ignorant about female sexual anatomy: one of the studies I discussed in my earlier post (conducted in 2014) found that 50% of women under 35 could not locate the vagina on a diagram. In another study, 65% of respondents said they avoided using the words ‘vagina’ and vulva’, which they regarded as embarrassing or offensive. Yet another study suggested that most words for female sexual organs are perceived to be degrading (the main exception was ‘vagina’). And there is little agreement on what nonclinical terms like ‘pussy’ and ‘fanny’ actually refer to.

These findings do pose a problem for health messaging, in that the language health professionals might prefer to use may be unacceptable, or unintelligible, to the women they are trying to reach. With men this is less of an issue: they might not know what or where their epididymis is, but they’re not going to confuse their penis with their testicles, or be too embarrassed even to utter those words.   

It might seem that the solution is straightforward: education. No girl (and actually, no boy either) should leave school without having learned both the relevant anatomical facts and the associated terminology. And I do think that’s important, but it’s not as simple as it sounds, and on its own I don’t think it’s enough.

The underlying problem here—the root cause of the ignorance, the reticence, the retreat into vagueness and euphemism—is shame. And school is often where that starts. Research has found that girls in school are routinely subjected to body shaming and sexual shaming, which–to quote one girl who was interviewed for a recent report–they ‘just have to put up with, because no one thinks it’s a big deal’. A teacher who was quoted in the same report specifically referred to boys harassing and shaming girls with intrusive questions about their pubic hair—how much they had and whether they shaved it. Is it any wonder young women feel the anxieties which the poem I quoted earlier decries as trivial?

Perhaps it’s to myGP’s credit that they don’t pile shame on shame by simply castigating young women for their stupidity; but what they’ve chosen to do instead is not much better. The suggestion that women should tell the world (in cat-code) if their pubes are ‘bushy, bare or halfway there’ has something in common with the kind of harassment I’ve just mentioned: in both cases women are being sexualised in a context where that’s incongruous and unwelcome. Seriously, did no one at myGP see how weird this is? If someone’s actual GP commented on her ‘bushy undercarriage’ she’d have grounds to make a formal complaint, and I don’t think the doctor would get very far by saying ‘well, I’d heard that a lot of women are self-conscious about their pubic hair, so I was just trying to be reassuring’.

MyGP is not, of course, an actual GP, but it does represent the NHS, and its mode of address to women should reflect that. I’m not saying that public health messaging has to be rigidly factual, humourless, and couched exclusively in coldly clinical language. But women are not children, and the cancers which affect them are not cute, sexy or a joke. I don’t know if #myCat will raise awareness about cervical cancer, or persuade more women to turn up for screening; but it has certainly made me even more aware than I was before of the sexism that still pervades both our language and our institutions.