Bad girls: A history of unladylike behaviour
‘The Living Doll’ – Noughties and beyond
If ladettes in the Nineties prompted worries that 'this wasn’t what feminism was for’, those fears only became more intense in the decade that followed. Alongside an acceptance that women had never had it so good was a feeling that they were squandering the hard-won victories of their forbears and actually colluding with a male- dominated society in which women are viewed first and foremost as sex objects.
American writer Ariel Levy coined the phrase 'raunch culture’ in her book Female Chauvinist Pigs as a way to label this self-objectifying trend. In Britain, Natasha Walters’ books Living Dolls exhibited some of the same concerns. Both were anxious that liberation and empowerment had become confused with the right to strut around in high heels and get your tits out. Pole-dancing classes, glamour-model career aspirations and plastic surgery became emblematic, topics that many writers fretted over (and still do). “I’m not at all knocking these people, but there is a tendency to slut-bash in that literature,” Dyhouse suggests.
via Feminist Philosophers