The Public Woman E-Book

Joan Smith

• Herausgeber: The Westbourne Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Women have never had more freedom yet questions of inequality persist from the bedroom to the workplace. A quarter of a century after the publication of her seminal text Misogynies, Joan Smith looks at what women have achieved - and the price they've paid for it. From Amy Winehouse to Pussy Riot, from the veil to domestic violence, a war is being fought over women's bodies and minds. Smith shows how misogyny has assumed new and dangerous forms as we confront an economic, social and religious backlash. But that's only part of the story. The female eunuch has become The Public Woman, and she isn't going to go quietly. Written with wit and passion, this forensic analysis sets out what we're up against - and how to fight back. 'Brilliant … A compelling rap sheet of 21st century misogynies and a reprimand to anyone who declares the battle for gender equality is over' - Robin Ince 'Joan Smith dares to expose woman-hating in all its forms. She does not shy away from naming religion and cultural relativism as barriers to liberation, and names men and the system of patriarchy as the problem. Read this book, not least because it will open your eyes to how much needs to be done before we consign male supremacy to the museum of ancient reli.' - Julie Bindel

Leseprobe

THE PUBLIC WOMAN

JOAN SMITH

Joan Smith is a novelist, columnist and human rights activist. She has been involved in campaigns for free expression, authors’ rights, and literacy in Sierra Leone. She currently speaks for Hacked Off, the organisation which represents victims of phone hacking. She is an honorary associate of the National Secular Society and supports Republic, the campaign for an elected head of state.

http://politicalblonde.com/ @polblonde

ALSO BY JOAN SMITH

Fiction

A MASCULINE ENDING WHY AREN’T THEY SCREAMING? DON’T LEAVE ME THIS WAY WHAT MEN SAY FULL STOP WHAT WILL SURVIVE

Non-Fiction

MISOGYNIES CLOUDS OF DECEIT HUNGRY FOR YOU DIFFERENT FOR GIRLS MORALITIES FEMMES DE SIECLE (ed)

CONTENTS

Introduction

DISPLAY

Britain’s Got Narcissism

Polar Disorder

Performance

Vagina Cantata

CONFORMITY

Queen Wag

Calm Down, Dear

Crystal’s Story

Keeper of the Flame

Veiled Messages

COERCION

Possession

’Tis Pity She’s A Whore

Buying Power

The Witches of Perugia

Conclusion: Women’s Rights Are Human Rights

Declaration of the Rights of Women

Notes

INTRODUCTION

How are women supposed to make sense of the world today? The hugely popular TV series Sex and the City reminded us that we enjoy unprecedented freedom, compared with previous generations: we can have sex when and with whom we like, live with a partner or on our own, have children when and if we want to, and get further in our careers than any women in history. The series was American but a lot of other women identified with it, loving its playful combination of sexual pleasure, female friendship and high heels. The main characters talked about things – how hard it is to make equal relationships, professional rivalry and the pain of break-ups – which are part and parcel of a modern woman’s life. Obviously I’m thinking mainly about secular Western culture here, even if I’m writing shortly after Cosmopolitan launched in the Middle East for the first time. But it’s easy to forget how recently women’s lives have changed even in Europe and the US, allowing us to pursue dreams and ambitions our grandmothers could scarcely have imagined.

Only a century ago, in the run-up to the First World War, life was very different: British women didn’t have the vote, couldn’t stand for Parliament, were not allowed to graduate at Oxford and Cambridge, had to pass stricter tests to get a divorce and were barred from a number of professions including the law and accountancy. The home was a safe place, as long as you obeyed the rules laid down by husbands and fathers, but marital rape was legal and domestic violence never talked about. A woman’s reputation was fragile, and a woman who divorced or had children outside marriage faced a lifetime of ostracism and shame. The process of radical change, of opening up the public world to the other half of the human race, was begun by brave and far-sighted women who campaigned on one front after another: for the vote, for women to be allowed to enter the professions, for an end to the economic discrimination which kept women dependent on men. In terms of recorded history, the citadels fell remarkably fast, but it often didn’t feel like that for individual women; when I applied for my first mortgage, women were still being told that their salaries didn’t ‘count’ because they were only working until they became pregnant.

All of that’s gone now. In the UK, women have got to the very top in politics, business and the judiciary; we’ve had a woman prime minister, foreign secretary, a couple of female home secretaries and the first woman Supreme Court judge. More women than ever are becoming doctors, lawyers, journalists and company directors; girls have been out-performing boys in A levels and female applicants to university dramatically outnumbered males (393,096 girls compared to 307,065 boys) in 2011.1 Offices have as many women working in them as men, forcing slow but visible changes in the culture of work, where employment conditions have changed to ensure that women (and to a lesser extent men) can take time off to have families. Some battles are still to be won, notably equal pay, but there’s never been a better moment in Western history to be born female.

So why doesn’t it feel like that? Why is it still so uncomfortable to be a woman? What is it about this public world that makes us feel anxious, marginal, unwelcome? There’s plenty of evidence that that is how we feel, from cries of outrage about sexism on social networking sites to a new wave of political campaigning. The SlutWalks movement started in Canada but was quickly taken up in other countries because young women feel threatened by and blamed for sexual violence, just like an earlier generation who went on Take Back the Night marches. From Toronto and London to Cairo and Tunis, public space still isn’t as safe as it should be for women, who suffer everything from routine harassment on the street to forms of sexual violence including rape. In the West, we live in societies which have made a legal and ethical commitment to equality, and the UK has dedicated institutions – a government minister for women and equality, and an Equality and Human Rights Commission – which are supposed to guarantee it. Yet something has gone wrong in practice, creating a chasm between what we expect and actual experience.

In the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, British women are faring much worse economically than men, bearing the brunt of the Coalition government’s expenditure cuts and suffering record levels of unemployment. Women still do most of the caring, whether it’s for children or elderly relatives, but are the number one target for right-wing politicians who like to blame struggling single mothers for ‘broken Britain’. Education is more important than ever – girls like 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai in Pakistan have risked their lives for it – but celebrity magazines present a bland catalogue of Wags, royals and singers as role models. Why is there such a dearth of alternatives, sending the message that girls can be clever and proud of their bodies? How are they supposed to develop healthy forms of self-esteem when huge billboards advertise lap dancing clubs, showing young women as sex toys? We know that paying for sex is more popular than ever among British men, and the demand is so great that foreign women from the ruined economies of Eastern Europe and the slums of West Africa are being trafficked into the country to work as sex slaves. Meanwhile, in the north of England, child prostitution rings have been exposed in one town after another.

No wonder women are angry, all over the world. They’re lobbying Parliament in the UK, holding demonstrations against sexual harassment in the Middle East and creating innovative forms of protest in Russia. (I couldn’t have written this book without raising a cheer for the punk collective Pussy Riot.) In India, thousands of women took to the streets to protest against male violence after a horrific case – the rape and fatal torture of a medical student on a bus in Delhi in December 2012 – exposed the state’s abject failure to ensure safety and equality. The internet has played a vital role in a new wave of feminism, enabling women in different countries to connect and compare experiences of campaigns and activism. In the UK, young women are rejecting hostile stereotypes on websites such as www.ukfeminista.org.uk, while The Vagenda (www.vagendamag.blogspot.co.uk) provides a space to respond to sexist articles in the media. Hollaback! (www.ihollaback.org) and the Everyday Sexism Project (www.everydaysexism.com) encourage reporting of sexist abuse and street harassment. Two Facebook campaigns, No More Page 3 and Turn Your Back on Page 3, attracted thousands of signatures in a matter of weeks. Instead of having to plead for attention from the mainstream media, the founders of these campaigns have found themselves courted by editors who’ve suddenly realised they need to take them seriously.

We’re living in an age in which feminism has returned in new and exciting forms, and I’ve written this book to add to the argument I made almost a quarter of a century ago in Misogynies. When I began writing that book, I thought – I hoped – that woman-hating was a historical phenomenon. I was documenting attitudes that had been around for thousands of years, teasing out links between misogynist literature in the Roman republic and the crimes of the Yorkshire Ripper. Misogyny was ubiquitous, but it had flourished in unequal societies and I didn’t think it was inevitable. In traditional cultures, boys spent their early years with their mothers, growing up to realise later that women had low status and were even despised, with disastrous effects on relations between adult men and women. I believed that the development of more equal societies, an aspiration which many men supported, would change all that. Adults would be able to create new relationships, based on respect and mutual pleasure, and I still think that’s happened to some extent. What’s also happened, however, is a backlash against gender equality of staggering viciousness.

Let me list some of the manifestations: women who say they’ve been raped are abused – and have their identities revealed – all over the internet. Disbelief of victims is so reflexive that men who evidently pose a danger to girls and women, such as the Soham murderer Ian Huntley or the serial killer Levi Bellfield, who abducted and murdered Milly Dowler, are able to carry out assaults with impunity for years. Domestic violence affects one woman in four and we’re becoming familiar with the dreadful phenomenon of ‘family annihilation’ in which angry men slaughter their entire families. Across the world, women are being tricked and coerced into prostitution, and – as the story of ‘Crystal’ reveals in this book – forced to work for little or no pay as domestic servants. Even when women get to the top, they often do it by adopting the behaviour and values of the most sexist men, as I argue in a chapter on the former Sun and News of the World editor, Rebekah Brooks. Then there is the return of religious extremism, probably the most overt of all the attempts to reassert patriarchal values, which tries to persuade women that they don’t have the same right to enjoy public space. The incidence of ‘honour-based’ crime is increasing in the UK, exemplified by the horrific rape and murder of Banaz Mahmod, whose killing was planned by her own relatives. At the same time, in one Middle Eastern country after another, the Arab Spring has brought conservative religious parties to power, threatening women’s hard-won rights across the region. As I was writing the book, I thought many times of the great Egyptian feminist Hoda Shaarawi, and how astonished she would be to see the return of the veil in her own country.

I don’t think any of this is an accident. I see it as a warning, a message that if women insist on living in the public world, we’re on our own: the female eunuch has become the public woman, but the price of giving up the protection of patriarchy is that we have to take our chances in a harsh world. How true that is was brought home to me during the writing of this book, when the Jimmy Savile scandal sent shock waves across the UK. In a matter of days, a supposedly ‘much-loved’ TV presenter was exposed as a narcissistic sexual predator who had been targeting teenagers, most of them girls, for decades. His illegal activities apparently went undetected by a series of institutions, including Broadmoor special hospital and the BBC, whose journalists were stopped from exposing his activities even after his death in 2011. Some of Savile’s victims had complained, either at the time they were assaulted or when they were older, but they were not believed until the revelations turned into a torrent in 2012.

The scandal marked a huge failure of child protection in the workplace but it also did something unexpected, creating a space in which alleged victims suddenly felt able to talk publicly about the sexual abuse and harassment they’d experienced as children and adults. It became clearer than ever that a sexist culture existed in many organisations, not just the BBC, which allowed much worse behaviour to flourish – and it was not merely a historical phenomenon. In the 1970s and 1980s, employers did not have to produce codes governing accusations of sexual harassment and in any case it was often senior executives who were the worst offenders. But even in 2013, when such codes are common in both the public and private sector, victims still have to weigh up the likely damage to their careers if they make a formal complaint. Indeed, the argument of this book is that sexual harassment is one of the ways in which women are made to feel uncomfortable – outsiders and interlopers – in the workplace. It’s not always conscious but there’s an elision here of two ideas which has dire consequences for women: if a woman insists on her rightful place in the public world, some men will assume that she’s publicly available.

I’ve written this book as a challenge to that notion. The public woman is a sexual woman but on her own terms, not those dictated by misogynist bosses, politicians and clerics. She’s a lot of other things as well: smart, educated, independent, sexy – if she chooses, of course – and open to equal relationships with other adults. While this book may seem dark at times, and I found some of it gruelling to write, I end on an optimistic note. The principle of gender equality is widely supported in the modern world but it requires new ways of thinking if it’s going to be achieved on the ground. Women are first and foremost human beings and we have the right, like men, to move freely between the public and private worlds. Contemporary notions of human rights fail to address women’s specific experience, and I’ve tried to remedy that with my own declaration of women’s rights for the 21st century.

Finally, I would like to mention several people who were always willing to discuss ideas with me and encouraged the writing of this book: Sarah Green, Caroline Coon, Annajoy David, Lucy Popescu and Natasha Lewis. I’m grateful to the Poppy Project for introducing me to ‘Crystal’ and ‘Sonya’, and I’d like to thank both women for talking to me about their experiences. I also have to thank my inspirational publisher Lynn Gaspard, who needed only a single conversation to grasp what I wanted to do. Her belief in me and the book has been invaluable.

Joan Smith London, January 2013

DISPLAY

BRITAIN’S GOT NARCISSISM

Once upon a time, little girls dreamed of marrying a prince and living happily ever. Now it seems they aspire to have breast implants, date a footballer or two, marry an Australian crooner and a transvestite cage-fighter – not at the same time, obviously – date an Argentinian male model and launch a range of pink-themed accessories. Katie Price, formerly known as the glamour model Jordan, has done all of these things by her mid-30s and fans flock to her public appearances. She easily fills bookshops when she signs copies of her autobiographies (four to date), selling her dream of celebrity to other women. It’s not hard to see that Price represents a very modern kind of success: she is a former Page 3 girl who has made millions by branching out into ‘reality’ TV shows, appearing in celebrity magazines and newspapers – including writing a column for the Sun – and promoting her own line of cosmetics. She isn’t shy about what she’s achieved, boasting in her first memoir Being Jordan,1 which was published when she was 26, that she owns two houses ‘with a fair bit of land’, two flats, several ‘very nice’ cars including a Range Rover and a Bentley, and three horses. Price is, in other words, the quintessential media personality and her success is inextricably linked to her willingness not just to incarnate fantasies – markedly different ones for men and women – but to act as an inexhaustible source of stories. In the relatively recent circumstances of a 24-hour media cycle, supported by a raft of publications parasitic on TV shows, she has provided one drama after another. Since her late teens, her private life has been lived out in public and it hasn’t all been roses and tiaras: in a nod to the late Princess Diana, Price’s narrative is also about overcoming adversity, from her struggle as a single mother to her repeated disappointments in relationships. At the beginning of her career as a glamour model, a single date with the footballer Teddy Sheringham was considered sufficiently big news to be reported on the front page of the Sun; later she had a longer relationship with another footballer, Dwight Yorke, who is the father of her disabled son Harvey. Other famous boyfriends have included a couple of pop stars, Dane Bowers and Gareth Gates, and the Formula 1 driver Ralf Schumacher. She met her first husband, Peter André, during an appearance on the ‘reality’ TV show I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! and the rights to their wedding photographs were sold to OK! magazine. The couple had two daughters together and an acrimonious divorce, after which Price married Alex Reid, a cross-dressing cage-fighter whose female alter ego goes under the name Roxanne. For her second wedding, Price opted for a ‘private’ ceremony in Nevada where the happy couple was reported to have celebrated by visiting pole-dancing clubs in Las Vegas. Back in the UK, Price’s ex-husband André broke down on Sky News when the presenter, Kay Burley, asked him how he’d feel if Reid wanted to adopt his two daughters. In the midst of this roller-coaster narrative of passion, jealousy, recriminations, TV confessions and sponsorship, Price’s marriage to Reid lasted a year. When it ended, she began stepping out with male model Leandro Penna, while Reid enjoyed a brief relationship (and had a child) with a former winner of Celebrity Big Brother, Chantelle Houghton.

Price no longer does glamour modelling but that hasn’t reduced her public profile. The case for her as a role model is rooted in the notion that she has achieved something which has almost sacramental status in modern culture: she makes choices. Choice is the holy grail of unfettered individualism, so much so that it doesn’t actually matter if someone’s choices are spur-of-the-moment or downright unwise. Contemporary scepticism about Freud’s ideas has had the unfortunate effect of banishing the concept of the unconscious, to the point where celebrities are insulted by the suggestion they might be doing something for motives they don’t fully understand. There are few better examples of this than Princess Diana, who made catastrophic choices about men and showed not a glimmer of insight into why her relationships kept going wrong. Diana exemplifies a species of female narcissism which is repeatedly misread in popular culture, glamourising stunted ambition – wanting fame and admiration – and erasing any requirement for personal responsibility. Since her death, one woman after another has followed in her footsteps, seizing the opportunities offered by the entertainment industry, ‘reality’ TV and talent shows. Like Diana, they’re known by their first names – Katie, Cheryl, Jade, Alesha, Kerry, Victoria, Tulisa – and like her they tend to come from backgrounds where education isn’t valued. In her first memoir, Price is adamant that this is the life she always wanted:

I’d always wanted to be a model; either that or a pop star – or both! I can almost hear you thinking, She must think a lot of herself. But I don’t. I’ve just always been a bit of an exhibitionist. I love showing off and being the centre of attention.2

Price’s insistence on the importance of choice is evident in her repeated excursions into cosmetic surgery. She became a Page 3 model with perfectly natural breasts but she wasn’t satisfied with them; she went ahead with the first operation even though it meant she could no longer appear on Page 3, which had a rule banning models with implants. She insists her decision had nothing to do with an ex-boyfriend who told Price her ‘boobs’ weren’t big enough and boasted about his previous girlfriend who’d appeared on Page 3. She writes:

But, when I saw his ex, I thought, Stuff it, if she can make it so can I. She was attractive, but nothing special, and I didn’t think her boobs were that impressive. I tried to ignore Gary and kept my dreams alive.3

This episode could stand as a catalogue of the illusions and insecurities of female celebrities. It speaks volumes about self-deception, low self-esteem – often a trait of self-confessed exhibitionists – and corrosive rivalry with other women. The popular press loves the latter, reporting celebrities’ feuds over husbands and boyfriends with relish; the ‘cat fight’ is a staple of tabloid culture, confirming age-old stereotypes about women, and the resource they’re fighting over is usually men. The message for anyone outside the charmed circle of celebrity is that other women can’t be trusted, and even teenage girls need constantly to measure themselves against their friends and make sure they come out on top. It’s a world which exists outside modern value systems which stress altruism and equality, and it’s so divorced from reality that repeated bouts of unnecessary surgery are treated merely as proof that a woman is an agent in her own life. Add to that a distortion of feminist ideas in popular culture – the personal has replaced the political – and it’s easy to see how Price has achieved a weird form of cultural domination. ‘Some people want designer clothes. I want a designer body,’4 she once said. It’s as simple, and artificial, as that.

For millions of girls and young women who avidly watch MTV or shows like I’m a Celebrity, The X Factor and Britain’s Next Top Model, the conclusion is straightforward: academic qualifications don’t matter and looks are everything. They bring famous boyfriends, celebrity husbands, expensive cars, big houses and (eventually) large families in their wake. Nor is it difficult to know what to aim for, for the women who inhabit this world look pretty much the same; regardless of their ethnic background, they are all young and boyishly slim with flat stomachs, small waists, big breasts and big hair. At a time when almost 60 per cent of the female population of the UK is overweight or obese, what they don’t look like is the average British woman, and the bodies which fill pages of celebrity magazines are bound to inspire envy and anxiety. Getting and maintaining the look is hard work, demanding a great deal of exercise and a severely restricted calorie intake, but the primary purpose isn’t better health. It would be no bad thing if women thought more about diet and exercise, reducing the risk of conditions associated with excess weight and inactivity, but that is emphatically not what the celebrity lifestyle is about. The desirable body shape is that of a pubescent girl with large breasts, a species of girl-woman who barely exists in real life, and Price understands that fact very well. In Being Jordan, she singles out a famous woman who’s never admitted to having breast augmentation and observes:

You only have to look at her – skinny all over except her boobs … I cannot believe she achieves that big-cleavage, boobs-standing-to-attention look with tit tape alone: it’s good, but it’s not that good.5

There’s an unnerving combination here of professional scrutiny – the anecdote emerges from a ‘you-show-me-yours’ session in a ladies’ lavatory – and rivalry. To be clear, Price isn’t suggesting there’s anything wrong with cosmetic surgery. In the book she treats it almost casually, joking about the possibility that she might have a fourth ‘boob job’, and the numbers of women following her example are growing. Well-known women who haven’t had implants, such as the singer Rihanna, are frequently the target of speculation: why does she put up with small breasts when she could easily afford a new pair? Not having surgery is the oddity, as though getting a new pair of ‘boobs’ is no more momentous a decision than buying a new winter coat.

Of course there are several unspoken words in Price’s narrative, and one of them is class. The big-breasts, big-hair, tiny G-string look she incarnated at the beginning of her career appeals to the aspirant working class: Sun readers, natural Tory voters who may have turned to New Labour briefly in 1997, and their values are based on hard work and self-interest. Price’s narrative, which is all about personal ambition and acquisition of material goods, is perfect for them but it isn’t received so warmly elsewhere. There’s an undeniable snobbery behind ‘Essex girl’ jokes but there is also a problem about a system of values based on little more than unquestioning admiration for youth, beauty and wealth. The first attribute in that list is often the prerequisite for the other two, something that isn’t always appreciated by people who behave as though getting older is merely a poor lifestyle choice. But it also means there’s a disjunction between working-class notions of beauty and what middle-class women aspire to, exacerbating preexisting class divisions. It’s evident in the contrast between celebrity magazines, whose heroines are singers, models and veterans of ‘reality’ TV shows, and glossy fashion magazines such as Vogue. It isn’t that the world of high fashion offers healthier role models for women: far from it. High fashion regards big breasts with disdain, to the point where some of the most successful catwalk models barely have them at all. The large-breasted girl-woman of celebrity culture has no place in the twice-yearly fashion shows staged in London, Paris and Milan by the big couture houses, where a very different body type is in the ascendant. Here the boy-woman is in demand, a young and slender model with angular cheeks and jutting hip bones, in effect an adrogyne who looks – and in some cases is – starved by comparison. The fashion industry has often been accused of promoting eating disorders but the quest for thinness became ever more extreme in the first decade of the 21st century, culminating in the notorious cult of ‘size zero’. The sinister symbolism of the phrase – it suggests a vogue for women who weigh nothing – seemed lost on top designers, who had come to regard a healthy size 12 as seriously overweight. A series of tragedies ensued on the international circuit, where three models died within the space of a year after suffering eating disorders. Ana Carolina Reston from Brazil was 21 when she starved herself to death on 15 November 2006; she was 5ft 8ins tall, weighed 40 kg, and had been living on a diet of apples and tomatoes. The Uruguayan model Luisel Ramos was only a year older when she died on 2 August 2006, just after coming off stage at Montevideo fashion week; Ramos was 5ft 9ins tall, weighed 44 kg, and hadn’t eaten for several days before the show. Six months later her younger sister Eliana, aged 18 and also a model, died from a heart attack brought on by malnutrition. It should have been a wake-up call to the fashion industry, but to this day many catwalk models continue to have a body mass index which would put them in the anorexic category. Not much hope, then, of high fashion providing more attainable standards of female attractiveness than the celebrity-obsessed entertainment industry.

When Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex that ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’,6 she wasn’t thinking about silicone implants and liposuction. She was suggesting that what girls were encouraged to aim for as they approached adulthood in the middle of the 20th century was inauthentic. They had to suppress feelings and ambitions to concentrate on fulfilling male ideals of womanliness, and the result was the female eunuch that Germaine Greer would go on to write about. (Beauvoir’s own formula, by the way, framed women as ‘intermediate between male and eunuch’.) Beauvoir was thinking chiefly about social characteristics, the behaviour women felt they had to adopt to please fathers and husbands, but there was already a literal aspect to the process. For at least a century, women had been wearing corsets and other garments to achieve more womanly figures, and tight-lacing had been blamed for fainting and other health problems. At least corsets could be removed with a sigh of relief at the end of the day, but the desirable body shapes of the 21st century have permanent effects. An aversive attitude to food affects hormone cycles and weakens bones, while the insertion of silicone bags into tender flesh has long-term consequences. (In 2011, a scandal about sub-standard French implants fitted by private clinics sent hundreds of women to their GPs, pleading to have them removed.) It’s as if the Greek myth of Pygmalion – the artist who sculpts a statue of a perfect woman and brings her to life – has been read literally, persuading girls that the body they’re born with is simply raw material in need of extensive alteration. Becoming a woman has never been such hard work, a fact that’s obscured by a popular culture which normalises and celebrates various forms of artificiality. When Kate Moss, Victoria Beckham, Cheryl Cole and Katie Price appear endlessly on posters, websites, book and magazine covers, most women are going to feel abnormal.

In the 21st century, that’s feminism, surely? These women are famous, rich and successful, and they enjoy lifestyles which are widely envied. In fact, Price is open about the extent to which her assumptions about gender belong in a pre-feminist age. Writing about her glamour-modelling days in Being Jordan, she enthuses about how much she much she enjoyed adopting ‘provocative positions’ that ‘look naughty’. She loves wearing ‘girly’ colours – pink, white, baby blue – and hot pants, cropped tops, G-strings, high heels and ankle socks.7