Attack on the WAGs: Explained

Just before Christmas I wrote a blog post which began by linguistically attacking ‘WAGs’. The reason for this was to dissect and discredit their social position because they personify values, concerns and ideals that many, myself included, believe are damaging to the mental health of young women. (Actually, there have been numerous studies which have proven that these ideals actually are damaging to mental health and social cohesion, but more on that later.) In the post I then went on to explain that in UK society today, where WAGs are accepted role models for women and adolescents, these values and ideals are damaging and degrade the interests of feminism. I then asked the readers of the post to highlight experiences or topics that have been alarming to their own sense of equality (which I termed ‘bullshit’).

That post received an interesting and varied collection of comments. The vast majority of the commenters clearly related to the sentiments in the post and shared their own thoughts and concerns regarding feminism and equality. However, there were a few that expressed unhappiness at the tone, content or assumptions (or all three) of my post. And although it really doesn’t bother me if not everyone sees my point of view or agrees with what I write, I do think that it is worth while exploring these conflicts of opinion whilst expanding upon my feelings on this topic

As I mentioned in my previous post, WAGs are now household names and their glamourous lifestyles, time consuming appearances and expensive possessions are splashed on the pages of the tabloid press, fashion press, gossip press and entertainment press. Increasingly they are becoming icons and role models for young women (and blueprints for young men on what they should expect a wife/girlfriend to be). Why is this dangerous and why do I feel it is necessary to attack them?

First up, I’m not attacking them in the tabloid sense of highlighting their cellulite or a whether they’ve had a bad hair day. I am attacking them for the values that they help perpetuate. And let’s remind ourselves they are not hapless figure-heads, thrust into the lime-light against their will. Of course the attention they attract from the media must be unpleasant a lot of the time, but as individuals they courted the media and embraced fame. The Queen of the WAGs herself, Victoria Beckham, wrote in her 2001 autobiography, ‘Right from the beginning, I said I wanted to be more famous than Persil Automatic’.

So many young girls these days respond to the question of what do you want to do with ‘be a WAG’. That’s a pretty sad state of affairs as far as feminism goes. I thought we (women) had more or less reached a point in history where it is generally accepted that your marital status is a part of your life, and no longer as description of life or your career. Being notable mainly for whom your husband is seems like a 1950s rather than 2010s reality to me.
The WAG lifestyle is showing young women that marrying a footballer or becoming a reality TV star will fast-track you to fame, wealth and wealth: that needing to try hard at school is probably only for the unattractive because their famous footballer-prince will whisk them away to go and shop at Gucci.

But of course, as I mentioned in that original post, most of the WAGs have careers aside from the fame that their unions brought them. And a couple of the commenters wished to remind me that the main three WAGs (Victoria Beckham, Cheryl Cole and Coleen Rooney, the latter pictured above) are ‘successful in their own right’: the assumption being that fame and the acquisition of wealth equates success. I would argue that wealth and fame don’t necessarily translate to success, and they certainly don’t breed happiness or emotional security either. There is enough research out there that has proven that the pursuit of material wealth (above the level required to provide yourself and your family with essentials) and celebrity is detrimental for mental health. ‘Affluenza’ is a fascinating book on this subject, and ‘The Spirit Level’ proves how income inequality (i.e. there being really wealthy and really poor people within the same society) is damaging to the mental and physical health of everyone in that society. The high wage bracket and celebrity as typified by a WAG lifestyle are just not healthy aspirations. And more broadly I would argue that promoting any lifestyle that is not attainable for more than 0.1% of the world’s population is not going to provide satisfaction either (but it will keep us consuming, of course).

I would also argue that the culture in which they function restricts their ‘successes’ to permitted spheres. The WAGs and the other females who live in their culture have their endeavours pretty much limited to involvement in fashion/appearance and entertainment. Whether they have no interest in life outside these areas or societal pressure is such that they are discouraged from pursuing them, the images presented to adolescent girls is worryingly restrictive in range.

Anyways, in the aforementioned comments, I was reminded that Victoria Beckham has a successful fashion brand (see above). Indeed she does, a friend of mine is employed as a pattern cutter there in fact. But we need to think realistically about what a celebrity’s role in the fashion brand actually is. They do not go into the office 9am-6pm five days a week for months on end to sit and design every garment and work with alongside the technical team to actualise each style, silhouette and detail. With little or no training or experience in the industry, these celebrities are mostly figure heads/brands on which to focus the marketing. Their involvement in the design process is, at best, that of a creative consultant’s. Not to say that Victoria Beckham doesn’t have excellent taste to apply to choosing options presented to her, but let’s not forget that anyone with enough money can (and frequently does) set up a clothing label.

I was also reminded in the comments that Cheryl Cole similarly had a very successful singing career in Girls Aloud, and as a solo artist. I’ll be the first to say that she is a talented singer, beautiful and probably a very sweet. But I struggle with the term ‘artist’: she won her position in the manufactured pop group, Girls Aloud, by auditioning for a reality TV show. An army of stylists, make-up and hair experts, managers, song writers and publicists were deployed to create the formula that required them to dance, sing and smile when told to.

Speaking of Cheryl Cole, over the Christmas holiday I found myself reading a copy of Grazia magazine. There was a long-ish article about her and the range of footwear she has ‘designed’ recently. Obviously this was accompanied with a photo of Cheryl styled as if she was about to present an Oscar gazing at some swatches of leather as if making her final selection for the shoes that were clearly already available to buy in-store. But aside from the make-believe fashion designing, far more disturbed me about the article. Having provided a summary of Cheryl’s ‘terrible and humiliating year’ they then attest to the fact that she must be in a more positive place, because she’s put on a few pounds. This simply perpetuates the idea that a woman’s mental well-being is firmly indicated by her appearance. Also, they applauded her on what this article insinuated was one of her most notable achievements: her ability to wear really high heels! Not only are the WAGs and WAG-a-likes at the very centre of an appearance-fixated culture, but they are praised for repeatedly, professionally even, putting comfort aside and sacrifice the risk of bunions in the name of fashion. Any young and impressionable adolescent reading that article because she likes Cheryl Cole is going to come away from it with some worrying messages.

On New Year’s Day, I watched a few episodes of a horrendous TV show called ‘Pushy and Proud’. It’s an intentionally provocative but ultimately representational fly-on-the-wall style documentary which follows women who push their daughters into celebrity culture-approved modes of (alarming) conduct. The most disturbing protagonist of the many I had to choose from was a woman who worked as a beauty therapist, Jools Willis (pictured above). She existed firmly within the type of culture that iconises the WAGs and judges women on their appearance almost exclusively. In doing so, she had exposed her ten year old daughter to this culture. That very normal-looking little girl had become so concerned with her own pre-adolescent appearance that her self-esteem had corroded to the point that she experienced real anxiety. To assuage her daughter’s anxiety, the mother did not attempt to explain that she was lovely the way she was and then help her daughter enjoy a less appearance-obsessed childhood. No, she gave her daughter a spray tan, manicure and eyebrow tint, thus instilling in her that appearance modification is a short cut to emotional happiness. These actions and values also help to perpetuate the myth that young women’s greatest accomplishments will be achieved within the sphere of how you look and how many people are looking at you.

It is disturbing how increasingly young those being exposed to and affected by an appearance-obsessed society are. But the media is teaching us at all ages through the perpetuation of these ideals to value good looks as a reflection of our self-esteem. It helps to perpetuate the myth that women’s greatest accomplishments are achieved within the sphere of how you look and how many people are looking at you. And whilst WAGs continue to be held up as the icons at the centre of these damaging values that provide a blue-print for young women’s (and now children’s) ideals, I will continue to attack the WAG lifestyle.

The Rise of the WABs

‘What the hell is Zoe on about today?’ you may be thinking. Well, the idea of WABs only came to me this morning, so I’m not entirely sure myself at this point but I'll start typing and see if it resolves itself by the end of this post. Let me apply some context...

At some point in the 2000s, the British tabloid press coined the phrase ‘WAGs’, an acronym which provides a collective term for the Wives And Girlfriends of high profile sportsmen, particularly the excessively paid members of the England football team. The queen of the WAGs is, of course, Victoria Beckham but there are many who have regularly graced the pages of tabloid newspapers and celebrity gossip magazines for years and are now house-hold names. Some of these women were celebrities in their own right before they shacked up with a footballer (Mrs Beckham, Cheryl Cole, Louise Nurding), even if that fame usually arose from dancing around in their pants. Others, such as Coleen Rooney, did little aside from sit their GSCEs before their relationship threw them into the limelight, but have since gone on to be something of a success in their own right, the popular assumption being that an interview and cover photo for Vogue has elevated her above the rest.

But the reality is that most of these women are in the position they are in because they are attractive and managed to ‘snag’ a footballer. It’s unlikely that their prized and envied relationships are based on mutual and balanced respect. The power is not equally distributed between the partners: their men hold most of the cards. Every one of these WAGs has been reportedly cheated on by their partners because it would appear that the role that they serve could be fulfilled by any number of attractive and attentive young women in the depths of China White, or whatever is the latest celeb hotspot. No matter how independently powerful and successful the WAG, no Vogue interview, perfume range or Gucci catwalk appearance seems to inoculate them from infidelity.

The pressure on the WAGs to appear beautiful, polished, on-trend, in control and happy despite swarms of paparazzi and Sun journalists feasting on any signs of weakness, must be off the hook. All the while, any hiccup in your relationship, large or small, real or fictitious is gleefully scrutinised and analysed endlessly in the press. But I find it difficult to feel sorry for or respect these women when they have, at every stage, courted and welcomed fame and attention.

Why do they subject themselves to this? Why didn’t they go and find themselves a hot accountant or supermarket manager? Because they have been sucked into believing that celebrity and column inches, no matter if the contents is positive or negative, equates to popularity, acceptance, power and success. They feel that it is better to be ridiculed in OK magazine for having cellulite than to receive no mention at all. The WAGs have also fallen for the patriarchal belief that being a successful man’s ‘other half’ is the best that a woman could ever achieve, and that the most promising opportunities will come from them merely ‘being’: ‘being’ someone’s girlfriend rather than ‘doing’ something interesting and fulfilling. In short, aligning themselves to a talented and/or notorious sportsman will provide them with more national attention and free champagne than even dancing in their pants could bring and if national attention and free champagne are your social currency, then being a WAG is a golden status. What worries me most is that so many young women see this as the life model to aspire to.

But thankfully there are many intelligent women that view the values that have seen WAGs elevated to role models as bullshit. These are the WABs: Women Against Bullshit. An alternate term to ‘Feminist’ if you will. I am most definitely a WAB. I’ve been uncovering and then calling bullshit on lots of stuff of late, for example, the way the fashion press creates and exploits women’s insecurities about their appearance to hawk the products sold by their sponsors. Caitlin Moran (pictured above), is another WAB, I dare say. She’s written a whole awesome book full of things she’s uncovered as bullshit designed to make women feel bad and prevent them from achieving what they are capable of.

Sadly, Feminism has and often still does get used as a derogatory term. The image the term's detractors wish to imply is that of angry, hairy, sexually frustrated women who hate men and wish all females could live separately in some commune which resembles a Herbal Essences advert. In reality a Feminist is someone, male or female, who believes that women deserve equal status and opportunities to men. Simple as. I don’t know how we can reclaim that term and rid it of its bad press. I do think, however, that not being afraid to use the ‘f’ word and to talk openly from time to time about the negative experiences and inequalities (AKA bullshit) that you’ve experienced due to being a woman is a good place to start.

And you know what? I AM angry at a lot of those experiences and inequalities. I AM angry that women still earn on average a third less than their male colleagues. I AM angry that as a teenager I was made to feel that I was worthless unless someone fancied me. I AM angry that female friends of mine who have decided they don’t want children regularly have their decision questioned by strangers and acquaintances alike. I AM angry that a social expectancy has developed that I should spend chunks of my hard-earned wages on getting most, if not all, of my pubic hair waxed off (i.e. ripped out). That anger is ok, it is good in fact. It can be used as a motivational tool to try and uncover the causes of potential damage to women’s esteem and prospects.

So what about you? Do you suspect you maybe a WAB? What bullshit have you uncovered recently?

The Capsule Wardobe

Whether you are a sewer, shopper or both, I think most women living in developed countries would admit to feeling overwhelmed at times by the choice of clothing and accessories to buy or make. You could be wandering down the high street, or surfing Burdastyle in search for inspiration; there is just so much on offer that we are almost drowning in options of ways to clothe ourselves. But it is fashion magazines that provide the arena in which this clothing claustrophobia reaches fever pitch. Their pages are flooded with ‘key trends’ and ‘current looks’ which intend to throw us into wardrobe-turmoil by insinuating that without them, our appearance (and therefore how we will be perceived) is not up-to-date or relevant.

The magazines then act like a trusted friend, promising to aid us in figuring out how we can adopt these looks with helpful articles like ‘How to Wear This Season’s Colour/Boots/Trousers/Prints/Whatever’ whilst coincidentally both pedalling the wares of their advertisers AND the idea that fashion magazines themselves harbour ‘fashion insider’ knowledge that make them indispensible to us uninformed mortals. There are, as you may have guessed by now, not enough words in the English language, for me to fully express my dislike for this process.

Don’t get me wrong, I truly believe that clothing and style can be fun and are great tools for self-expression. And fashion trends can be fascinating windows through which to view shifts in wider social cadence. But the fashion press and clothing brands work together with one primary aim: to make money. Nothing more noble than that. And they achieve this largely by trying to make women feel irrelevant, lacking and rubbish about our appearance. They offer ‘solutions’ in the form of products to buy, but the speed of the turnover of these ‘must-haves’ means that us consumers will never feel satisfied and relevant for long unless we pump some more of our wages into the machine.

Therefore, it is fascinating, is it not, that even fashion magazines’ writers and editors apparently aspire to ‘evolving’ beyond the frivolity of the never-ending cycle of new looks and trends they adopt, season after season, in order to stay on top of their game. It is as if they are acknowledging that the money-making merry-go-round their roles perpetuate is not sustainable, and they are looking towards the future when they will have been exhausted by their professions like race-horses being put out to pasture. I am talking, of course, about The Capsule Wardrobe.

The research conducted by Courtney Carver, author of Project 333, leads her to define The Capsule Wardrobe in these terms:

1. collection of clothes and accessories that includes only items considered essential
2. a person’s basic collection of coordinating clothes that can be used to form the basis of outfits for all occasions
3. a set of clothing, normally around 24 items, which can be mixed and matched to create a wide variety of outfits.

The Capsule Wardrobe is a something, paradoxically, that fashion magazines (and now increasingly fashion blogs) have devoted a lot of column inches to over the years. It is treated with the same tone of the rest of the standard fashion press copy: that it is the ‘fashion insiders’, rather than the general public, who are most qualified to determine what such a precisely crafted, carefully edited selection of garments should comprise of. The extent of the dichotomy that fashion magazines are also permitted to state what a basic, trend-less selection of clothes should look like, is frankly alarming to me. The definite article (The) in The Capsule Wardrobe, as these things are always discussed, would also suggest that it really is a singular entity that all women must yearn for. Such articles are never titled ‘A Capsule Wardrobe’, are they? Yet the magazine articles and blog posts on ‘The Capsule Wardrobe’ never managed to agree on what that should consist of. Anyways, there is a lot to take issue with here, regarding both the assumptions of what a capsule wardrobe is, and who gets to shape it.

The first is the idea of ‘essential’. That is an incredibly subjective term, both in terms of what society you live in, and within your own society. In fact, I doubt that even my best friend and I could agree on what garments we consider ‘essential’. Ditto with the term ‘basic’. Why do so many of them always contain a basic white buttoned shirt?! What good is that to a woman with a toddler, or who works with animals?! I haven’t worn, or had use for, a white shirt since I was a waitress in a pizza restaurant some eight years ago! Why is so much of it black, white and grey anyhow? Isn't the colour and the print, for many people, the fun bit about getting dressed each day? Also, from a fashion writer’s perspective, what a capsule wardrobe would consist of changes with the seasons, years and decades anyhow, so why all this time spent trying to define the indefinable?

Of course, there have always been some writers and bloggers who deal with this topic with a more relaxed definition of ‘The Capsule Wardrobe’ means, taking into account the individuality of both style preference and lifestyle needs. Currently, there are whole blogs devoted to creating a 24-piece ‘mix and match-able’ collection of clothes which can, presumably, be altered to accommodate new trends as the owner desires. But isn’t that actually just ‘A Wardrobe’?

If you believe the statement that women in Western countries usually wear 20% of their wardrobes 80% of the time, and 80% of their wardrobes only 20% of the time, then aren’t we usually dealing with a limited section of our clothes at any one time anyway? Are they suggesting that we get rid of everything else we already own? What happens when you fall behind with your laundry and a proportion of those 24 things are dirty or hanging on radiator to dry? What happens when you don’t live in LA and actual weather systems kick in, and ‘The Dressy T-shirt’ and ‘The Basic Shirt’ just aren’t going to cut it and you’re wearing ‘The Cardigan’ and ‘The Sweater Vest’ together every single day for three months until Spring shows it’s face again? What happens when you get bored of staring at yourself in the mirror in your one basic cardigan? Are we meant to be operating on a one-in, one-out system here? If something new gets bought, does something else need to be discarded?

Obviously I’m being facetious here, I doubt anyone writing a magazine article or blog post about creating a Capsule Wardrobe is genuinely proposing there are strict guidelines to be adhered to, or that ‘24’ is some sort of numerological lucky number: the Holy Grail of wardrobe contents if you will.

I’m all for halting mindless and panic actions in favour of making well thought-out selections of what to add to our wardrobes (be that through shopping or sewing) in the attempt to reduce the quantity of landfill and amount of damage clothing and fabric production reaps on our environment. It makes sense to make selective decisions about what to consume and what to pass on to if we no longer wear an item and someone else could benefit from it. But forgive me for being suspicious when it’s fashion ‘experts’ who are dictating this process.

The basic crux of what I’m saying is this: normal women (who don’t make their money by having the contents of their wardrobes scrutinised) really don’t need fashion writers telling them what their wardrobes should contain. We already all have our own ‘Capsule Wardrobe’. It’s the stuff we wear most of the time anyway. What that consists of should be as personal and individual as you are (and it already is). For example, since I made it, I wear my leopard collar batwing top as often I can get away with because I love how it feels, it looks good with my black jeans and generally it reflects a casual version of my personal style as it stands today. To me, it is both ‘essential’ and ‘basic’. Yet I wouldn’t expect, and certainly wouldn’t want, to see someone else to rock a similar top several times a week. Your jeans that you wear pretty much every day because they are comfy and make your bum look good? They are ‘The Jean’. The boots you wear a lot because they don’t leak when it’s been raining? They’re ‘The Boot’. Your plain cardigan with the loose button that you haven’t had a chance to stitch on again because you’re wearing it most of the time? You guessed it, ‘The Cardigan’! See? You’ve already got a capsule wardrobe. Let’s spend more time enjoying getting dressed and being ourselves, and less time worrying whether it is all mixes and matches!

I believe the tone of many fashion magazines and fashion columns, that they possess superior knowledge of how everyone should present themselves, is insidious and damaging. As I say, clothing styles and trends are interesting: they can reflect certain social and personal moods, and they can be fun to dabble and play with. But anyone pretending to have any more of a handle than you do on deeply personal areas like what you wear, how much you weigh or what shape your pubic hair should take, is both mistaken and can piss off, IMO. Women have enough hoops to jump through and ways in which they are made to feel inferior and unworthy. Do you think men give a shit about how many garments they own, or should own? Or if they have the definitive basic peacoat?

It also interests me that The Capsule Wardrobe is, in many ways about restriction, self-imposed restriction. That in an era when we have so much on hand, we are implementing rules to help us negotiate all this choice, be it food or possessions, including clothing. But that’s an area I’d like to expand upon another day. Right now, I’ve got to go and count my pairs of trousers!

How I Consume

Today I’d like to talk about how I consume stuff. I’m not talking about edible or drinkable stuff (which you could argue I do in slightly ill-advised quantities!), but all the other things in my home like the stuff I sit on, eat my dinner off and fill my wardrobe with.

My Magic Questions

When I figure out I need, or could do with (more on that distinction later) a product, my brain goes through these stages:

1. Could I/we (me and my boyfriend) do without buying it? For example, I’m going on holiday but don’t have an ‘easyjet-sized’ suitcase. I could go and buy one, or I could borrow one from a friend and make sure I bring them back some chocolates to say thanks. Another example: we have friends coming over for dinner but don’t have enough chairs. Answer: use the garden furniture and make a joke out of it! Both these examples happen regularly round these parts.
   
2. Could I make it? This applies mainly to clothing and accessories currently, but also soft-furnishings and gifts for other people. This is an area I hope to expand in the future.
   
3. If it’s a bit fat ‘NO’ to the questions above, then it leads to: Could I get it second hand? And so often the answer is ‘yes, the thing I would like can be bought second hand’ by either hunter-gathering my way through charity shops or spending a bit of time trawling on eBay.
   
4. If the answer to the above question is still ‘NO’, or we require the item quicker than the gods of charity shopping are willing to grant it to us, we buy the item new but the best quality we can afford so that it should last the longest amount of time before needing to be replaced.

I write endlessly on this blog about question number 2: making things. In this post I want to go into my thoughts on second hand, but really many of the reasons for me preferring to buy second hand are the same as why I choose to make rather than buy my own clothing.

So, as we’ve clarified, if I find I need or would like something new, I’ll usually see if I can get the thing second-hand before heading to the shops or amazon. Now, a LOT of people find second hand stuff to be a bit (or very) gross. The thought that someone else has owned and touched and used their thing before they had it makes them uncomfortable. I’m not judging anyone’s responses, but I feel it would be valuable to think about why that that response is their primary one.

'New' is a new concept

The first thing to take into account is the notion that all possessions must be ‘box-fresh’ straight from the shop or delivery depot is a relatively new one. When my grandparents were my age in the 1940’s, they were skint, working class Londoners, newly married, making their home and going about their business. During this time, and for all their lives leading up to that point, second hand was usually how you got most things. Furniture, clothing, shoes, pots and pans, etc. etc. all were bought second hand or acquired from members of their family; all those things had lives beyond the initial owner. Of course, the Second World War halted most domestic product manufacture and import, but many poorer people in the UK had been living this way for their whole lives even before war broke out. Obviously, I’m not idealising those horribly tough years, and I’m not necessarily saying that given the ability to do so, my young grandparents wouldn’t have chosen a new product over a second hand one, but I am saying that I see how they rubbed along and post-war, raised a family without Primark or Wilkinson’s (probably the UK equivalent to Wal-Mart) and that is what I aim to do also.

Kick-Starting Consumerism

After the Second World War ended, both the UK and US governments decided the best course for economic recovery was to kick-start the manufacturing industries. But the industry that needed to grow even more than car, washing machine or vacuum cleaning production to make this happen was the advertising industry to create and keep up the desire for these products. It was the advertising executives that constantly pedalled the idea than brand-spanking-new products would make you a happier, better person, and reflect your social standing as higher than those around you.

Quality or Quantity

Of course, the desire to be happy, better, and of higher status were not created by the advertising industry, they were always there. My grandparents wanted those things as much as the next person but, and here’s the crux of the thing, they always sought them through quality rather than simply newness. In fact, they held that notion their whole lives. I remember how my maternal grandmother, who had grown up in very poor conditions, in her later years would be absolutely thrilled with a gift of an expensive, high-quality, used coat from my paternal grandmother (who was wealthier and thoroughly middle class), infinitely more so than by a new, but evidently lower-quality, coat bought on a market stall.

The world of advertising had to almost drop the concept of quality from its list of concepts to pedal. Because if you market a product as the best quality within its field, with subsequent longevity, why would the consumer need to buy another from the same company for many years? Once the post-war homes of the US and UK had their TV, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, car etc. sales faltered and the advertising world had to find new desirable attributes to market to convince consumers to up-grade those tired old models they bought just a few years ago. Which is obviously why quality has also fallen off the list of priorities for most manufacturers: you’d probably need more than two hands to count the amount of times you’ve heard people say ‘they don’t make them like they used to’!

Advertising and Manipulation

When you see advertisements from the 1950’s today, they look relatively naïve, almost child-like in the simplicity of their messages. But as trying to create ‘need’ to consume already existing products got tougher, advertising got smarter. Advertising has used and manipulated the knowledge gleaned by psychology since the grandfather of modern advertising, Edward Bernays, deployed his uncle, Sigmund Freud’s, theories of psychoanalysis in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Obviously there are many excellent books and documentaries tracking the rise and development of advertising and its relationship with society, but it’ll suffice to say that it has got so clever and insidious that so much of it effects our choices and mind sets so we don’t really know what we genuinely want and/or need. The difference between 'want' and 'need' is also worth taking a look at.

'Want' and 'Need'

It serves the advertising and manufacturing industries to keep ‘need’ and ‘want’ blurred. Now, I know I am very fortunate having been born into a stable family in one of the first world nations, so I’m highly aware that this statement is extremely relative, but the course I have chosen for myself has always been, relative to my society and peers, low paid. Before I started to really think about these things around my mid-twenties, I used to get pissed off and feel aggrieved that I couldn’t afford all the things that I felt I ‘needed’ and ‘deserved’, like a new pair of black jeans or patent, cone-heeled mary janes from Topshop, etc. But I ‘had a word with myself’ and started to realise that I in fact just wanted those things, and then I began to look at how those notions of need/want got mixed up. Choosing to buy second hand not only saves me money (last year we kitted out an unfurnished one-bedroom flat for just £130 by only buying second hand furniture and accepting free items that were kindly offered to us, oh, and finding one clothing rail on the street) but also means I am somewhat out of the radar for all those advertising messages. Not watching much TV and no longer buying heavily advertisement-laden magazines also helps me with this.

Negative Impact on Esteem

Also, so much product advertising relies on exploiting and perpetuating our insecurities. It feels makes us feel bad about ourselves and our lives and then suggests the way to feel better is by purchasing this dress or sofa etc. But the key to happiness and fulfilment clearly doesn’t lie in buying those products because if it did, then we’d all be happy with what we’ve just bought and the whole thing would grind to a halt.

There is a horrendous series of advertisements on TV at the moment for an online department store called ‘Very’. One of the adverts shows a pretty girl wearing a 1970’s style jumpsuit telling us that we should buy it because it makes the wearer look ‘taller and slimmer’. Another in this series features the beautiful and naturally curvy TV presenter Holly Willoughby wearing a silver party dress. She confides with the camera/viewer that she loves the dress’s ruched waistband because it hides a ‘multitude of sins’. I nearly spat my coffee out when I saw that blatant example of exploitation of women’s negative body image. Now, I don’t want to go massively off-piste and discuss in-depth the feminist implications of these adverts, but I do want to highlight the negativity involved in advertising. I feel you can detach yourself from it to a certain extent by not being their ‘target customer’. I certainly don’t want to endorse that kind of message by buying their products and effectively funding the creation of those adverts. The time that ‘Very’ (.co.uk) assumes I spend, or would like me to spend, feeling insecure and rubbish about the size of my belly or my height, I would prefer to spend reading a funny book, looking for vintage sewing patterns on eBay, or stitching myself a new jacket. Sorry about that, ‘Very’.

Choice

One thing that is unarguably advantageous about buying new compared to second hand is choice and accessibility. Shopping for stuff today does give you a vast (some would say overwhelming) array of options. So how comes, having ascertained a want/need for a new pair of jeans for example, does the ensuing process of shopping for said item so often feel like going into battle? Shopping for new stuff despite of, if not because of, the amount of choice on offer to us is usually NOT an enjoyable experience. And let’s be honest, the idea that we have great choice of products available to us is pretty false when most of what a retailer has on offer is near-identical to the other retailers. I would argue that in some cases more variety can be found when looking for something second hand, because most retailers are afraid to invest in stocking products that don’t fit in to the prevailing current trends, be that sofas, shoes or TVs. There are also well-documented statistics which prove that people (AKA consumers) are less happy now than they were sixty years ago, despite this ‘utopia’ of products available to fulfil each wish and desire.

I would go as far as to argue that the choice of products we have available to us, and the process we go through to choose what to buy, provides a feeling of power. But it's a kind of false power when most of the places you can buy stuff are all owned by the same multinationals if you research far enough up the food chain. People often used to exercise power by involvement in local and national politics and issues, involvement in trade unions, community groups and other collectives. Involvement in those things has been marginalised, which is to our own societies detriment. What do we do with our time instead? Well, shop mostly.

Availability and Ease

Agreed, when you want to buy a certain product, a kettle say, by going to a retailer that sells new kettles, you are guaranteed to walk away with one and can usually be sitting at home with a cup of tea within the hour. Believe me, I am well aware that you can’t so easily walk into a second hand shop with a shopping list and expect to have all that ticked off by the end of the day. But we managed to kit out most of our kitchen with second hand equipment (I know some people are going to find that a bit icky!) with a bit of patience. There is certainly a hunter-gathering-related instinctive thrill to be got from a successful second hand shopping trip which is infinitely more of a buzz than I would achieve having walked out of Topshop or Urban Outiftters having made a purchase. When there is so much stuff freely available RIGHT NOW, there is always the feeling that ‘maybe I should have gone to a couple more shops to have found something a bit more suitable’. By comparison, a charity shop purchase makes you feel 'WIN!!!!!!'.

The Thrill of The New

What is ‘new’ and ‘fresh’ and ‘untouched’ anyhow? I’ve already discussed the fact that most of the garments, and any other products you can buy, have each been created by hundreds of pairs of hands. Yours is not the only pair of hands to have been on that thing. The idea that your ‘box-fresh’ item has been zapped into existence by a single machine just for you is so very far from the truth. That item came into being months, possibly even a year or more before you saw it. It has most likely been transported from half-way round the world via a series of cargo ships, trucks and warehouses, but having been caked in plastic to retain or create that ‘new’ smell we all so enjoy. And then when it is in the store, how many hands have picked it up, felt it, tried it and put it back down before you selected it? In particular, garments and shoes have probably been manhandled and dumped on the dressing room floor, and had sweaty bodies and feet squeezed into them multiple times before you decide to buy them. If that item had been previously purchased, used, washed and cared for (and often just purchased, put in the cupboard, then taken straight to the charity shop) then classed ‘second hand’, does that make it so completely different from a ‘new’ item? In my opinion, no.

Economy Vs. Ecology

The final issue I’m going to discuss today regarding ‘new’ Vs. ‘second hand’ can be also be framed ‘economy’ vs. ‘ecology’. The same reason that rabid consumerism was desirable in the immediate post-war period is still a prevalent one today: economics. Making, transporting, advertising and selling stuff creates jobs and therefore supports families. It also supports our governments and helps them achieve and maintain a position of international power which keeps poorer nations from developing to a position where their populations can support themselves, reach self-sufficiency and achieve a non-poverty standard of living, but that is a discussion for another day. Indeed everyone deserves to be able to support themselves and their families, but I find it a concern that the definition of that in the West seems to be ‘to a level where those workers are then able to freely purchase every item that is made, transported, advertised and sold’. I definitely don’t have a definitive answer, but I am aware that I cannot afford a lot of the new stuff many of my peers regularly consume, but then neither do I have to work the same excessive hours and worry about getting promotions like many of them do. I’ll come back to these topics in the future.

What I DO know, and what everyone who isn’t mental has acknowledged, is that this level of consumption we currently have in developed/Western/First-World nations is actively screwing up the planet. And the damage we are reaping won’t just effect us in the West, it’ll effect the entire globe including those who have almost no impact on the globe at all. Doesn’t seem fair does it? Not to mention all the children from every nation who has been, and will be, born into this mess. The public knows our consumerism is screwing the planet, the experts and scientists know this, the governments know this, the heads of corporations know this, but we cannot seem to make the leap: to jump off this economic merry-go-round to implement some of the measures that we know we need to to start seriously preventing and repairing some of the damage. Because profits will suffer, governments’ stability will suffer and indeed some first world families’ livelihoods will suffer. I don’t have the answers and even if I did I don’t know if too many people in positions of power would hear me or listen to me above their own agendas. But I will live my life the way I feel comfortable, and a lot of that is making do, making and modifying things and buying second hand.

'How To Be a Woman' by Caitlin Moran

I'm harbouring a substantial girl-crush at the moment. The focus of this crush is the British author and journalist Caitlin Moran (pronounced Catlin) whose recently published book, entitled 'How To Be a Woman', attracted a lot of media interest over the summer. The flippant synopsis of this book is that she 'rewrites The Female Eunuch from a bar stool and demands to know why pants are getting smaller'. Actually, it's a timely re-evaluation of feminism as it stands today for women who maybe haven't given Germaine Greer much thought since their teens. It highlights a whole wealth of modern day experiences that warrant investigation whilst being openly and revealingly autobiographical and intensely funny.

I've found that, since my age has a good solid 3 at the front of it, I've been thinking more and more about how women are expected to behave and function within our society and have been re-analysising my past and present experiences. I think that generally speaking, there is a loose assumption that feminism has 'won'; that today, women get an equal and fair shot and that anyone still harping on about the 'f' word is a bitter, sexually frustrated bint who can't be arsed to shave. But as Moran reveals, it can be argued that in some respects a lot of the ground women gained through previous waves of feminism has since been lost again, particularly since the 1990's.

For the record, I don't whole-heartedly agree with everything Moran writes, just as she disagreed with her idol Greer from time to time. But I do think that if you have any interest in how society works and basically calling bullshit on heaps of stuff that makes womens' lives more hassle and unpleasant that they need to be, then I'd recommend getting hold of a copy for some catharsis and a chuckle.

There is much more I'd like to say about this book, even though I'm currently only two thirds the way through. In particular, her section on fashion and clothing naturally caught my eye and I'd like to explore her comments further on this blog, but I'll do that another day. Right, I'm off to bed now for a read so Caitlin and I can have a giggle whilst getting pissy about some inequality.