MY FIRST reaction to news that a new website was encouraging teenage girls to create the "hottest, coolest, most famous bimbo in the whole world" by buying her designer clothes, feeding her diet pills and arranging plastic surgery, was to lol (that's "laugh out loud", for internet novices).
Then, when I discovered my hilarity was considered unsisterly and the correct response to said site was to come over all angst-ridden and morally outraged, I was genuinely perplexed. How could a game that deals with society's obsession with image and
celebrity stoke up such controversy, when the launch of Halo 3 – in which young boys assume the role of a cybernetically-enhanced supersoldier – caused barely a ripple of concern?
It is fatuous, surely, to complain about your teenage daughters being exposed to the shallow values of a virtual airhead, when those values are being endorsed by real live ones on TV shows and the pages of celebrity magazines every week. What danger can some cardboard cut-out glamour puss pose, when Paris Hilton is prone to purr "one of my heroes is Barbie. She may not do anything, but she always looks great doing it", and Posh Spice walks round with her hip bone sticking out of the top of her jeans?
In any case, isn't Miss Bimbo meant to be satirical? A game which states "after you break up with your boyfriend, you went on an eating binge, now it's time to diet" isn't meant to be taken any more seriously than the hapless Bridget Jones. And young people are capable of grasping satire: they understand that when Homer Simpson quips "weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals... except the weasel", his attitude is being ridiculed rather than held up as an example; and they realise that the very act of creating a two-dimensional bimbo whose identity is inextricably bound up with her body shape is a clever comment on the superficiality of WAG culture. Leastways, they should. But there seems to be increasing evidence that they don't.
With a survey last week showing a 150% increase in the number of British teenagers having breast surgery last year, it seems even bright young girls now place as much emphasis on their looks as on fulfilling careers. With 1% of the population estimated to suffer from anorexia, physical and emotional well-being frequently takes second place to image. More insidious, because it's harder to pin down in bald statistics, is the increasing incidence of girls revelling in their own objectification – by posing topless in chatrooms for boys they haven't met or by posting footage of themselves having sex on YouTube.
And it's no wonder they are confused about what they ought to aspire to. Every day, they are bombarded by conflicting messages about what it means to be a happy and successful woman in the 21st century. Having a high-flying career is still a positive (particularly if it's in TV, apparently); but botox, a personal trainer and fabulous shoes are probably more accurate yardsticks of success.
A generation ago, when I was young, it was all so much simpler. If you were an intelligent, go-getting girl your identity was almost entirely bound up in what you did rather than what you looked like. Of course, it was nice to put on make-up; to dress up and be found attractive by members of the opposite sex, but it didn't define you. You may occasionally have cast an envious glance in the direction of rake-thin models and splashed out on a copy of Jackie, but you knew only vain and silly girls would let a spot on their nose hold them back from whatever it was they were supposed to be doing.
Post-feminism was supposed to liberate women, to allow them to make the most of their physical assets without sacrificing their credentials. But somehow it all backfired. Today, it's not just supermodels and celebrities who are judged on their appearance, it's everyone in the public eye, from sportswomen to politicians.
What are young girls to make of the fact that men's magazines draw up lists of the 10 "hottest" tennis stars (rather than the 10 most talented) and that Hillary Clinton's chances of being elected are better if people like what she's wearing or how she has styled her hair? Or that the ultimate symbols of a successful metropolitan lifestyle – the Sex In The City gang – spend more time talking about men and shoes than they do about art and literature? Why on earth would young girls aspire to be nuclear scientists when newsreaders and supermodels are accorded a far greater status?
Against this backdrop, the thought of teenage girls hunched over a computer screen considering which bit of their "bimbo" to put under the surgeon's knife doesn't seem quite so funny after all. Although to suggest this site will cause users to have plastic surgery or develop eating disorders is a nonsense, it may confirm pre-existing notions of what it means to be successful and popular to a proportion of girls already seduced by media images. But more importantly, it just seems like a crashing bore; a waste of time that could be spent on more challenging, horizon-expanding pursuits.
Calls for the Miss Bimbo site to be closed down shouldn't be given airtime – why on earth should it be targeted when TV programmes such as American Princess are allowed to keep sapping young girls' visions of what they can achieve? At least the website demonstrates a glimmer of a sense of humour.
It is the responsibility of parents to decide what should or should not be played online. Just as it is up to them to provide their daughters with more positive models of womanhood to aspire to.
The full article contains 981 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
