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Nina Power. One Dimensional Woman. Winchester: Zero Books, 2009.
Natasha Walter. Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism. London: Virago Press, 2010.
Reviewed by Luna Dolezal
The recently published One Dimensional Woman by Nina Power and Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism by Natasha Walter are timely books which explore the consequences of an unfortunate marriage between consumer capitalism and feminism, where feminist emancipation has, in recent years, been equated with having the 'freedom' to acquire certain goods and the 'choice' to engage in certain cultural and commercial practices. Following Ariel Levy's 2007 Female Chauvinist Pigs, which thematised a trend towards 'raunch culture' and an unfettered objectification of women in mainstream Western culture, both Nina Power and Natasha Walter put into question the assumption that through the alleged freedom to engage in hyper-sexualisation and hyper-femininity we are finally 'liberated'. They ask us if we are really to believe that women who own expensive designer clothes, undergo elective cosmetic surgery, take pole dancing exercise classes, enjoy porn, get Botox and Brazilians are 'empowered', and represent the supposed culmination of more than two hundred years of feminist struggles. They give insightful analyses of the current attitudes towards women, examining issues ranging across pornography, politics, consumerism, Sarah Palin, work, childhood, and scientific discourse, among others.
One Dimensional Woman and Living Dolls explore three central concerns: first, how the feminist rhetoric of empowerment, opportunity, and choice has been co-opted by many decidedly anti-feminist commercial groups who have a vested interest in objectifying and selling women's bodies; second, how women's subjective constitution and fulfilment is compromised by a constant and obsessive concern over body capital, that is, an obsessive concern with accruing the right type of body features - sexy, young, fashionable - in order to manifest a particular Sex-and-the-City sort of destiny; and third, how an essentialism around the categories 'woman' and 'girl' has invaded mainstream culture in recent times leading to an absurd determinism regarding sex differences. Through these discussions, among others, both books offer an important critique of 'consumer feminism' and current ideologies about women.
Nina Power's One Dimensional Woman is an energetic and angry book through which Power makes evident her contempt for 'today's positive, up-beat feminists' (1) which she argues have abandoned any serious or...
