A few weeks ago, I saw my two nephews. My mum keeps a big box of our old toys, and the three-year-old loves the kitchen set: he delights in plonking radioactive-looking broccoli florets on plates or, learning from trips to Starbucks with his mum, making me “mint teas” in empty paper cups. It brought back memories of my twin sister and I playing house — coddling our existentially staring Baby Annabells, cooking up imaginary banquets and sassily roleplaying with fake flip phones. Is there anything so harmless?
But recently, make-believe has had a facelift. Gen Alpha — aged around 13 and under — have grown up to the sound of pinging iPhones. The effects of omnipresent social media have yet to appear in their entirety, but recent studies have reported, aghast, that among other things young children now “swipe” books instead of turning the pages. What is less discussed is the fate of that narrow window between girlhood and womanhood, where imitation — of our mothers, sisters, TV idols — informs the adults we become.
Enter the tween skincare addicts: girls as young as 10 slathering excoriating retinoids on their baby faces, scanning beauty aisles for hyaluronic acid formulas, bookmarking videos of the best “dupes” of £300 La Mer moisturisers. These girls are copying women who are, in turn, trying to prevent the ravages of age. It’s a closed circuit with one clear beneficiary: skincare companies such as Drunk Elephant which, TikTok detectives speculate, uses bright packaging to deliberately entice the youngest potential customers.
So-called “Sephora kids” have become a new virtual bogeyman, with videos of throngs of tweens queuing up at the beauty department store raking in thousands of likes and indignant comments. Viewers complain of children leaving samples spilling over counters, dragging parents to tills to drop a week’s wages on It-products, or slapping on lotions with the exuberance of a rebellious daughter digging through her mum’s makeup bag. For this is exactly what it is: ancient bottles of Estée Lauder Double Wear and dusty Bobbi Brown blushes found during tip-toeing trips to your mum’s bedroom have simply been replaced with slick, silicon-free Bubble and Glossier cleansers name-checked in online beauty “hauls”. Tweens have always roleplayed as the adults they see — the difference, now, is that these are strangers online espousing the rites of a new purification cult.
In the glossed, plucked and pouty world of TikTok, anything and everything can be improved, filtered and fixed. A decade ago, when millennials began deploying filters and Facetune, photos of pub crawls and freshers weeks gave way to selfies with lolling dog tongues and colossal lashes. Gradually, women began to self-fashion to resemble these filters: they would paint on, or inject in, a Kardashian cheekbone, a Jolie lip or the Tipp-ex white teeth of a Love Islander.
But Gen Z has bucked the trend to embrace “wellness”, with its fixation on “natural” looks and lifestyles in such a way that medication, meditation and skincare have turned the scrutiny inwards. Balking at the artifice of noughties glamour, with its visible extensions, orange foundation and boob jobs, Gen Z has moved towards an extremely effortful effortlessness in the form of the minimalistic “clean girl aesthetic”. The clean girl sweeps her hair into a claw clip French twist. She has a clear complexion perfected with an arsenal of skincare solutions, and if she wears foundation it must be so light as to be virtually undetectable. She is always flushed, probably having just come in from a “hot girl walk” to fetch a matcha latte. And she can probably be found journalling, manifesting, setting relationship boundaries or drinking CBD-infused kombucha.
The look has been accused of being fatphobic, classist, ageist and racist. But what is less discussed is its focus on ritual: “clean girl” skincare regimes are not simply a lifestyle trend but a purification rite to distinguish apostles from the silicone-filled, lush-lashed “dirty girls” who are not, never, like us. The trend’s implicit snobbery attempts to rein in bodily mess and discomfort — after all, the overriding sensations of girlhood — and to erase any trace of effort. It completes the horrific logic of beauty: I am the standard, and look — I didn’t even have to try. With such an obsession with prevention, of ageing, ugliness and, above all, unwellness, did Gen Alpha ever stand a chance?
Millennial columnists have long lamented the “puriteen“: the Gen Z archetypes who swerve drink, drugs, sex and debate for wellness, regimen and homogenous “wokeness”. As a Gen Z, I think this characterisation is mostly exaggerated — a classic of the “in my day” genre. But online, within a few hours of liking the right videos, you could very quickly be led by algorithms to believe that not a single person under 25 has ever shagged, shouted or spewed. As a generation, we seem extremely put-together — and it is this facade that children and tweens are copying. Brace-faced girls lining up to spend their pocket money on premium skincare products are mimicking the performativity of their older sisters who, after long shifts “getting ready with me” on TikTok live, settle down to nights of bed-rotting, doom-scrolling and goblin-mode catatonia.
We Gen Zs know wellness is just another fantasy — but as long as influencers play pretend, tweens will pretend back. There is a danger that Gen Alpha — who are destined to grow up with exceptional internet-forged cynicism but are too young to have yet mastered this — will take my generation’s puritanical tendencies at face value, seeing them as essential and, dare I say it, cool parts of femininity. It is clear to anyone who watches a nine-year-old talk to camera about the lathering power of a cleanser that they are, quite simply, taking it all way too seriously.
And yet the awkward, gawky grossness of being an adolescent girl is incredibly important. I spent a memorable summer before starting secondary school hunching around in patchwork linen tunics with white, lace-trimmed leggings, looking like something out of an avant-garde retelling of Oliver Twist. If that seems impossible to visualise, all the better.
I didn’t get social media — specifically, Facebook — until I was 19; at the time I’d mumble something about it not “aligning with my principles” when in reality, I was self-conscious and self-aware enough to know that no digital footprint should exist of the painfully uncool strangeness of my girlhood. Although my lameness was probably exceptional, I am now so glad of this foresight: adolescence, a delicate and desperate thing, is made of private fantasies and bodily weirdness. When exposed to the disinfectant sunlight of social media, how can young girls expect to develop any sort of “authenticity” — which is, after all, social media’s holy grail? Might these children, with every squirt of their Bubble Bounce Back Balancing Toner Mist, be aligning themselves with visions of womanhood which sterilise reality and originality?
What happens when the specific oddness of this time is combined with the purification rituals of women in their twenties and thirties? Jonathan Haidt, in his latest book, has written of the displacement of “play-based childhood” with a “phone-based” version by the early 2010s; one result of this is that today’s teens, already beset by mental health problems and doomed to an extended adolescence by our dire economy, are expecting to emerge perfect from prepubescence as miniature 30-year-olds.
So yes, little girls playing dress-up with luxury skincare products, while expensive and pointless, is not the end of the world. But the compulsion to do chemical peels when you haven’t even started your period might kill that tender, excruciating unknowingness of being somewhere in between little and big, an age at which only the bedroom mirror should bear witness to the way girls love and lament their changing faces.
Sowerby does not seem to acknowledge the existence of genuinely masochistic individuals either male or female. These people exist as any serious study of paraphilias will show. Are these people supposed to put up with “vanilla” sexual practices which might not be at all satisfying? Do they not have a right to seek out a complementary partner to explore the sexuality they have either been born with or acquired in early childhood due perhaps to experiences they have no memory of? There are probably thousands of people who are now able to enjoy sexual fulfillment in the context of loving relationship since BDSM has come out of the closet. There is exploitation in non BDSM sex as well.
No doubt we’ll be told that it was an islamic variant of BDSM in Rotherham and Rochdale etc.
I know that there has been a push to decategorize certain sexual proclivities as mental disorders in order to destigmatize them (the word heteronormative often comes up in these discussions). And yet, beyond the obvious criminal acts committed which can and should be prosecuted, I still detect some form of mental illness in these narcissistic fetishes that even jail time can’t cure. Sexual activity, like all biological activities, should be sustainable and enriching. What they get from physical degradation and spiritual (or, if you will, psychological) impoverishment is beyond me.
Agreed. But mental illness? I dunno.
To classify an adult’s behavioral preference as an illness would tend to imply that it is somehow beyond the control of the individual…even that it was inflicted upon the individual against his or her will It is to suggest that they are ‘victims’ of a sickness and can, conceivably, be cured of this sickness, in the same way we are all periodically victims of cold viruses & suffer from the resulting upper-respiratory illness until it, too, is vanquished.
I’m not at all sure that’s true.
Rather I think these corruptions are — for the most part — deliberate choices made by adults who recognize completely that what they are doing, what they enjoy (for whatever reason), is indeed ‘beyond the pale’….abnormal (given an extraordinarily broad spectrum of normal)…and cruelly perverse.
To take an extreme case, I would suggest that Dr. Mengele at Auschwitz was not suffering from any kind of mental illness…that he was not a hapless ‘victim’ of a psychological disorder that drove him to commit acts of unspeakable evil…rather that he himself consciously and deliberately made evil & horribly perverse choices (choices that clearly he must have enjoyed).
As Auden put it, “Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.” To your point, we — thank God — don’t grasp or understand what pleasure they receive from the physical, emotional, and spiritual degradation they inflict.
Is the idea here that if someone gets pleasure from hurting another person, it’s not evil if they happen to get turned on sexually by it as well?
What is disgusting is disgusting.
What is cruel & predatory is cruel & predatory.
Pain is pain; humiliation, humiliation; violation, violation.
It doesn’t matter if the prime mover is male or female, famous or obscure, performative or private….these horrendous, unspeakable acts in which real people are deliberately hurt, made to vomit, bleed, or even worse are wrong, evil, and utterly unacceptable (or should be unacceptable) to any good, moral / civilized human being.
But of course they’re not.
Or perhaps it’s simply that there are not as many good people as we think there are…or perhaps the separation between right & wrong is more obscure than we think it is?
When we debate these philosophies within the purposely constructed ‘weirdness’ which is the world built by people like Manson & Gaiman, et al… the distinctions become even more difficult to grasp…and lines blur (as Robin Thicke might put it).
Ms.Sowerby speaks of the the ‘naivety of the fans’. But were they? Truly?
It’s hard to think of a 14 year old Goth as being an unwordly innocent when she forwards graveyard shots of herself with sex toys and shouts, “I wanna rape Twiggy!” at concerts she has no business attending (with tickets purchased with her mother’s money). Are we surprised…was she…to receive in response ‘tender love notes’ from Marilyn which whispered his own ‘sweet nothings’: To Jen, you cum-guzzling gutter s**t, love Marilyn”?
Sadly, tragically, I don’t think anyone is surprised…not anymore.
So if God is dead…no heaven, no hell, and everything permissible… if the only thing which separates ‘good’ (whatever that means) from ‘bad’ (whatever that means) is consent. Do you consent? Do you agree? Do you want it and do you want it badly enough? And if the answer inevitably, increasingly is YES, and Hell Yes….well then…what remains?
‘If that’s all there is to the…circus…then let’s keep dancing…let’s break out the booze and have a ball.’
Ms. Sowerby’s focus here seems to be how much this kind of perversion hurts women…and quite clearly it does. But it also hurts men. Most importantly it hurts God as it corrupts and destroys what is most transcendent in Man, reducing Love and its sexual expression to grotesque, pain-filled perversion.
Yes I submit. To my appetites…to yours…to theirs…to whatever Influencer I follow…to more upvotes and attaboys on an infinity of utterly meaningless media…to my bottomless compulsion to do whatever it takes to sit at the cool kids table (be that in Manson’s bus or Gaiman’s garden or Epstein’s island or Diddy’s parties, et al.)
And Gaiman knows this; Manson knows it… every RockStar, every Celebrity, every Politician, PDiddy, Jeffrey Epstein, the Guy who ran the ‘Girls Gone Wild’ franchise…every Major & Minor League WannaBe… they all know: if you wanna sit at the Cool Kids Table… you’ll need to debase yourself to another’s whims. And they also know…. as in every pyramid scheme there ever was, you yourself will then be submitted to by endless Others.
You just have to leverage the deal and avoid unwanted, tell-all, investigatory exposure.
A thousand Amens. And, of course, many men won’t get it.
But what is it exactly that many men won’t get? I’d really like to know.
That monstrous people are capable of doing monstrous things to the innocent and unwary? Certainly we all know that.
That sex, as a full-contact sport, occasionally — in the fog of passion — produces outcomes for either participant that are painful, or uncomfortable, or discomfiting, or unwanted…and that most of those are entirely unintentional?
That high-risk, intimately-vulnerable engagement with strangers is not an especially wise choice?
What don’t we get?
Marilyn Manson is only popular with the ladies because he is a Rock star(or was). Beyond fame and money, he has no obvious redeeming features. He isn’t good looking, he hasn’t got hot body, we can hope that he has a great personality although he isn’t particularly famed for having one. I imagine someone like him was bullied a great deal in childhood, possibly by girls, and I see his stage persona as an embodiment of that bitterness. How many of these women were with him because he is a Rock star, how many would’ve been attracted to him if he wasn’t?
and Neil Gaiman was the closest that his genre had to a rock star. (yes, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore … but they didn’t really behave that way). Unfortunately this turned out to be true in more ways than we were thinking.
Nature appears to have given us pleasure, a good feeling, as an incentive to reproduce. Pain is the opposite of pleasure, so those who follow the Marquis seem to be going in the wrong direction. Pleasure encourages pursuit, so we embrace it: pain encourages repulsion and we are disposed to avoid it. Mutual pleasure thus seems more desirable than the infliction of pain on another. To reverse these ideas is destructive, not positive. As for ‘pushing boundaries’, that may work, positively, in art, when perceptions are enhanced, but otherwise it is an adolescent preoccupation with testing, which leads nowhere without the possibility of finding a positive result. Manson and Gaiman would seem to be following this latter pathway.
Not sure if you realise just how odd this form of reasoning is. You start from assumptions (not facts) and then deduce contra factuals. Quite clearly human beings (and quite a lot of them) do get off on mixing pleasure and pain, or at least fantasising about it. So clearly you are starting from the wrong assumptions.
Before we even start on this debate, perhaps we need a bit more honesty (and information) on female sexual tastes. Too many people seem to operate on the assumption that men are pervy, women are vanilla, when men are vanilla, women are bored might be closer to the truth.
It’s clear from the massive worldwide sales of FiftyShades that there is a lot more going on in women’s heads than is often assumed. Could it be that what they want from men is a chance to indulge those fantasies without guilt or embarassment?
Kathleen Stock was worth an argument but this is not even worth disagreeing with. It is just a feminist rant.You notice how everything is about evil men exploiting ‘women and girls’, without even considering that the women involved are taking decisions and making choices too. Apparently men have a responsibility to save women from their own decisions, even as they respect the power and agency and right to decide of all women?
Just one brief phrase worth remembering. BDSM and other dark things are indeed “a way to process darkness.” For both sexes. Maybe someone who could briefly go beyond her rigid ideology and preconceived notions and look at reality could make something of that.
First, you can’t base an argument on extremes.
Most people who try to read de Sade will simply find themselves unable to do so. First the acts described are horrific beyond what anyone would anticipate, and second (apart from some amusing bits about important people of the day indulging in bizarre sex acts) he’s a repetitive bore.
None of what he describes has anything to do with suburbanites indulging in a bit of BDSM to spice up their love lives.
Second, BDSM can only be described as sadism directed against women if you ignore situations where the roles are reversed. Clearly power is involved, but powerlessness seems to be just as attractive to adherents, male and female, as does power.
Yes, Sowerby missed an opportunity to connect with more readers here by treating what is typical as a universal. The so-called exceptions to the usual sex of the participants are common enough to break down sex-based assumptions—or should be. What of the dominatrix? What of submissive or mentally controlled non-hetero men? Perhaps the now daily articles on this subject matter will clear up some of this, at least BTL.
Why can’t we just say that sadistic feeling and behaviour is bad in general, though all too human, for any person, perpetrator or victim? I understand and accept your distinction between dress-up role play and deep-dive capture. But we’re not talking about ‘weekend dabblers’ in most of these instances. And the shaming campaigns against people like Gaiman and Manson are non-binding (cheeky pun not intended, but kept), at least so far. Manson paid a fine and at least one settlement and Gaiman will probably lose his reputation but not all of his audience, nor willing/semi-willing targets. Maybe he’ll go to the next level and attract an apologist cult over time, like de Sade has, including among some academics.
My point is that she is concluding something general about BDSM (most participants in which will be “weekend dabblers” as you describe them) from extreme examples like de Sade. The writings of de Sade describe things that are horrific, not distasteful. I mean really horrific! Think beyond anything in the concentration camps.
I know. I read extended excerpts of his work in Forbidden Knowledge by Roger Shattuck, a book I recommend to those feeling brave and mentally stable. He makes a sustained and learned version of the case I’m picking at in response to these BDSM articles.
Some kinds of knowing and experience are dangerous to the mind and spirit in a way that is likely to affect the actions of SOME that are exposed to it. (Just about anything will ‘trigger’ somebody, but there are matters of likelihood and degree with that too). Sometimes it’s better to opt out, and to eschew the idiotic nerve of people like the intellectuals who actually celebrate de Sade as a liberationist hero, when he was a legit sicko and real-life sexual criminal.
I understand your point on both comment boards too. There are matters of degree, and I don’t suggest a continuous through line from dress-up fun to an ever-more-real torture dungeon, or something like that. I just think that a little chaste self-distancing is warranted for most of us. There’s plenty to fancy short of pain and humiliation, and pleasure isn’t the highest human good, especially in amoral isolation.
I really don’t think warnings or disapproval amount to a meaningful infringement on someone’s right to ‘spice it up’ behind closed doors or even on full internet display. Those in the know, whether in control of the forces they’re flirting with or not, can dismiss or laugh at squeamish alarmists like me, perhaps with good reason.
It is unfortunate that both articles, especially Sowerby’s, reveal some anti-male bias in making their claims. I don’t think that invalidates all the points made, but it does weaken both arguments. Perhaps we can reach a point where a quality that is/seems more common among one group—like dangerous naïveté among young women—is not taken to be representative, much less bone-deep essential, for the whole group. I’m a stubbornly hopeful person, but I’m not holding my breath.
It’s what happens with poorly aimed scatter-gun blasts at vaguely defined targets.
Clearly there is a vast & chasmic difference between nameless, faceless acts of deliberately cruel perversion inflicted upon the innocent and unwary….and sexual game-playing within the context of a loving relationship. What a husband and wife enthusiastically choose to do within the private confines of their marital bed is entirely up to them. And if it involves a toy chest full of who-knows-what and ’50 Shades of Grey’ /Babygirl play-acting, that’s their business, not ours.
I suspect Sowerby would probably agree.
The problem with the essay is the confusion of these two conditions / contexts with the ill-defined & unsubstantiated assertion that our ” noxiously “sex-positive” culture .. increasingly privileges the titillation of men above the safety of women and girls.”
Though I believe de Beauvoir was a fan. And presumably Angela Carter argued this precisely because some people thought he was a feminist libertine.
Sex and the power dynamics between men and women are inseparable. Add another layer of power between a famous rockstar / author and it is easy to make the case that these men indeed exploited the women mentioned in the article (and I agree they truly did judging by their statements).
In most if not all cases, there are simply less consequences for men to face than women when engaging in sex (whether vanilla or kinky sex). Where I disagree with Poppy’s take is the “return to stringency the simplest of demands” and the jettisoning of kink apologists”.
Sex will never be risk-free. Sure, things like BDSM and aggressive-roleplay heightens that risk that women (and sometimes, men) will encounter, but it is that same risk that heightens the excitement and thrill of sex. Having sex with your partner in the confines of your bedroom is safe and comfortable, but a sudden tryst in a risky dark alleyway or an abandoned shed can fuel that thrill. That’s why most fantasies involve deviance and, yes, kink. I have never heard of anyone (yet) saying they fantasize about having sex with their partner of 10 years in the same bed, in the same bedsheets, doing the exact same thing for the exact same 10 minutes.
I think a healthier way to approach sex, kink, and relationships in general is a concession that not everything we will experience in a sexual encounter will be good. It is a spectrum –
On one end there are the “I don’t like this” and “I don’t mind”, on the other end, you have the “it’s okay” and “I like this”.
Not everything done to you that you did not particularly enjoy was done with malice or ill-intent. In the same way that not everything that you did to your sexual partner that he or she didn’t enjoy was with malice. I concede that women will always be at a disadvantage in these scenarios and the consequences for women will, more often than not, be far greater.
What’s the solution? Either we take Poppy’s position and “return to stringency the simplest of demands” or… we become open to the idea that not all we experience during sex will be good and something we will enjoy. There is a fine line between rape and rough-play that got a little too rough for your liking or verbal-humiliation play that hit a little too close to home (“You like this, don,t you? You dirty, boring, little housewife that can’t even make me a proper sandwich!”).
Sex is messy (sometimes literally) and complicated. But I think they’re part of what makes it fun.
Sex and the power dynamics between men and women are inseparable. Add another layer of power between a famous rockstar / author and it is easy to make the case that these men indeed exploited the women mentioned in the article (and I agree they truly did judging by their statements).
In most if not all cases, there are simply less consequences for men to face than women when engaging in sex (whether vanilla or kinky sex). Where I disagree with Poppy’s take is the “return to stringency of the simplest of demands” and the jettisoning of kink apologists”.
Sex will never be risk-free. Sure, things like BDSM and aggressive-roleplay heightens that risk that women (and sometimes, men) will encounter, but it is that same risk that heightens the excitement and thrill of sex. Having sex with your partner in the confines of your bedroom is safe and comfortable, but a sudden tryst in a risky dark alleyway or an abandoned shed can fuel that thrill. That’s why most fantasies involve deviance and, yes, kink. I have never heard of anyone (yet) saying they fantasize about having sex with their partner of 10 years in the same bed, in the same bedsheets, doing the exact same thing for the exact same 10 minutes.
I think a healthier way to approach sex, kink, and relationships in general is a concession that not everything we will experience in a sexual encounter will be good. It is a spectrum –
On one end there are the “I don’t like this” and “I don’t mind”, on the other end, you have the “it’s okay” and “I like this”.
Not everything done to you that you did not particularly enjoy was done with malice or ill-intent. In the same way that not everything that you did to your sexual partner that he or she didn’t enjoy was with malice. I concede that women will always be at a disadvantage in these scenarios and the consequences for women will, more often than not, be far greater.
What’s the solution? Either we take Poppy’s position and “return stringency on the simplest of demands” or… we become open to the idea that not all we experience during sex will be good and something we will enjoy. There is a fine line between rape and rough-play that got a little too rough for your liking or verbal-humiliation play that hit a little too close to home (“You like this, don’t you? You dirty, boring, little housewife that can’t even make me a proper sandwich!”).
Sex is messy (sometimes literally) and complicated. But I think they’re part of what makes it fun.
Are there no female sadists?
Surely people make films about female sadists, such as the documentary film “Fetishes” (1996) by Nick Broomfield which explored Pandora’s Box, a professional BDSM establishment in New York City.
Should men be wary of female sadists? (Is this a trick question….)
“Surely people make films about female sadists”
“Nymphomaniac” by Lars VonTrier comes close.
I thought the main character was masochistic.