Lauren takes the cat o'nine tails to
Women Who Whore Themselves.
This rant actually started in my head when, of all things, I was watching Kylie Minogue's latest video. Kylie's spinning around, out of her head, knowing he's feeling her cos he likes it like this (or whatever the idiotic words are) and about halfway through she gets onto the bar of the club she's dancing in and starts behaving like a sodding bar girl in a fifteenth-rate Bangkok brothel. I don't mean that she's actually bouncing ping-pong balls from her fanny but she certainly looks as if she's got stuff up there that's dying to pop out. And the day before I helped some friends move house, and every time we hauled another piece of furniture through their front hall my eye fell on the pile of magazines stacked up there; the top one was GQ or Esquire or one of those upmarket men's magazines which feature half-naked celebrity chicks on the cover, and this one was Kylie's sister Dannii, sitting in a tiny silver bikini with her legs open, one of her hands between them, and a come-hither expression on her face. It might have been the opening shot for a Playboy spread.
Enough, I thought. This is out of control. I tried to imagine Robbie Williams or Ricky Martin dancing like a male stripper in their videos or posing like a gigolo about to rip his dick out of his thong, and though the images this called up were more than pleasant, they were also frankly inconceivable. Most of the so-called female entertainers nowadays seem to feel that if their public personae don't look like seventh-rate hookers, their careers will go down the pan.
And it's not just singers. Look at Angelina Jolie, who lets herself be photographed like a cheap whore with her hands down her bra or her knickers for an endless series of men's magazines and then whines in serious interviews about how everyone expects her to be the bad sexy girl of cinema and she wants to be taken seriously as an actress. Or all the British women TV presenters who strip off regularly to advance their career. Denise Van Outen (kind of like a lad version of Barbara Windsor, for the non-Brits reading this) at least plays with her image, makes fun of it, scatters her conversation with endless filthy Carry-On type innuendos; but she's still in the non-existent bikinis and little bunches, sucking lollipops because that's what the boys want to see. It's making me angrier and angrier. No wonder the successor to Denise on the programme that made her famous, the Big Breakfast, was an underwear model famous for having big tits who couldn't string two words together. She was crap, they sacked her, and the media pulled her to pieces - it became another way to put women down, give this unqualified milk cow a job of which she was obviously completely uncapable and then humiliate her for it.
I recently read an interview with Alan Davies, a British comic/actor, where he mentioned that his girlfriend was a children's TV presenter who wasn't doing as well in her career as she would have done if she'd agreed to pose semi-naked for the men's magazines. It makes me sick. Who ever asks Jamie Theakston or Johnny Vaughan, their male counterparts, to show a square inch of excess flesh (though I for one would love to see Jamie in the altogether)? They don't have to, and so of course they don't. And Italy is even worse. Last week a book came out by some ugly old man excoriating all the Italian female TV presenters who've had plastic surgery. With, of course, an endless stream of photographs of their mouths, tits and bottoms. How the hell does this disgusting wrinkled old stegosaurus think these women manage to look the way they do, conform to this artificial image of beauty, without extensive soya implants and collagen lips? And how the hell does he think they get ahead in their careers if not by letting their new attachments be photographed while they pretend to play with themselves?
Look at Christina Aguilera, hair bleached to buggery, smeared in a quantity of makeup that even Jackie Stallone would think was excessive. Trailer-park jailbait. For all I know there's a pretty girl under there but who can tell? And Christina doubtless thinks that without the bleach and the industrial quantities of blue eyeliner and those ghastly fringed outfits, no-one will look at her twice. Look at Sarah Jessica Parker on Sex And The City, a programme I like (mostly), who in the second series seemed to have been dressed to resemble a Seventies disco whore in hotpants, high heels and a cut-off beaded top to go out for coffee on a first date. Give me a break. I wouldn't mind so much if the guys were feeling obliged to reciprocate with Lurex leggings and tight tank tops but of course they're not, they can still wear their chinos and loose-fitting shirts and gawk at every single inch or foot of flesh the women are showing. And who could blame them?
I can't even imagine what mental convolutions these women go through. I can't imagine what goes through the head of Dannii Minogue or Angelina Jolie as they spread their legs for the photographers and toy with the pubes peeking out of their G-strings. Or when they see these images of themselves on newsstands throughout the world. Give me an honest whore every day, or even a girl who models for Penthouse. At least they're delivering on their promises.
And let me make the distinction between whores and tarts clear, for those of you who may be puzzled. Words like these have always been used to diminish women who enjoy their sexuality. I've always found it interesting that the words for women who have sex for money are used against women who just like doing it - don't they realise what a difference there is? Women who enjoyed it were called whores - as if whores enjoyed it, as if they weren't carrying out their side of a business deal. It was the classic male fantasy, that all prostitutes secretly adored doing it and couldn't get enough. And it was a female way of putting down other women too. Women who were scared of their own sexuality wanted to punish the ones who weren't.
That's why we're reclaiming the word 'tart' here on this site; it's about women behaving 'badly', according to the rules of conventional society. Women who follow their own impulses and trust their instincts, without worrying what society will say. Women who have solidarity with others (see Stella's rant last month) but reserve the right to criticise those who are playing the old system and, yes, whoring their bodies without even following through. Women who can drink six midori margaritas a head and call their friends old slappers and raving tarts, like our gay male friends call their friends screaming queens, enjoying the knowledge that we're taking these words back and giving them our own meanings.
Don't misunderstand me - I'm not saying women shouldn't look sexy all we want. Jesus, play with the messages and be Elizabeth Wurtzel proclaiming the values of bitchiness (that's not a bad book, by the way) and give the finger to your readers, naked to the waist. I saw a picture of Sharon Stone years ago in a magazine, wearing white men's jockey shorts and big black boots, a cigar in her mouth, her hands over her tits and a wicked expression on her face. Now THAT was sexy. But don't get your thighs sucked out and your tits filled up and pose on the cover of a men's magazine playing into every single pathetic fantasy of the endlessly available, brain-dead, media whore. Because when you get older and wrinkled you will realise how worthless you are, by the standards you were instrumental in trying to create. And don't come crying to us Tarts when that happens. Or at least not to me. Because my solidarity doesn't extend that damn far.
Anyway - I suppose she's not harming anyone, so it doesn't really matter. Personal taste I guess. To each her own/his own... you can keep her if you wanna. 
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