There’s something causing a bit of a stink over in Cambridge and it isn’t the River Cam. The Tab, Cambridge University’s first online tabloid, which launched over the summer, includes a feature called ‘Tab Totty’ featuring, well, Cambridge totty stripped down to their smalls. It’s fair to say that the online red-top attracted a fair amount of attention, with both the CUSU Women’s Officer and the Guardian queuing up to condemn it as sexist.
The three male founders of the website hit back, saying that anyone who accused the site of being sexist had clearly not read the publication. They expressed resentment at the fact that they were being pigeonholed as right wing exponents of patriarchy. Anyone with half a scathing eye on media spin and the general public will surely feel some sympathy with Taymoor Atighetchi, Jack Rivlin and George Marangos Gilks. Certainly, the past year has seen an explosion of second-hand complainers. Whether over articles they hadn’t read or prank phone calls they didn’t actually listen to.
The boys, however, have dismissed objections to the inclusion of the page-three style photo-shoots came from “a small group taking a very strong feminist line.” This, surely, has to be where our sympathy runs out.
The most regrettable thing about the Tab Totty debacle is how divisive it’s been amongst those who would call themselves feminist. There are many, including the founders of the Tab, who insist that sexually provocative pictures of women are not sexist, and that in this day and age it is a sign of feminist achievement that women can celebrate their beauty as well as their brains.
Heidi, a 21-year-old student who posed for a Tab Totty shoot after the furore hit global headlines, justified the endeavour saying: “I’d like to see myself as someone with brainpower and boobs, a pairing which I feel Cambridge culture strives to deny” Her comments were accompanied by photos of her in tight shorts and a bra-top.
There is an attitude that expending feminist energies fretting over the existence of page-three is silly when there are much more marked inequalities; women are underepresented in parliament and the boardroom, many are paid less than their male counterparts. Indeed, Heidi registers her dissatisfaction with all of these in the Tab Totty feature.
Yet therein lies the rub, Heidi and the founders of the Tab are refusing to connect the dots on the polka-spot bikini, as it were. We live in a society where women aren’t adequately paid or represented. We also live in a society where women are objectified and not taken seriously. To claim a link between the two does not mean you are taking a ‘hard feminist line’ as the Tab founders suggest (in that denigatory way that almost certainly implies you are a dungaree-sporting, militant who subsists only on a diet of vegan self-righteousness) rather only that you recognise that our society is unequal and will remain unequal until we find a way to terminate unhelpful discourses as to what women should and shouldn’t be. Undergraduate page-threes only serve to fetishise an image of an ultimate modern woman: brains and nicely rounded b-cups. This is selective feminism. Women who look like Cheryl Cole and articulate themselves like Stephen Fry can have our respect. But what about the rest? What about female undergraduates who look like they live under a boulder (or even just look like the boulder itself)? Well, they wouldn’t sell newspapers now would they?
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