What is Sacred to you? Sarah Ditum answers 

Elizabeth   

Hello and welcome to The Sacred. My name is Elizabeth Oldfield, and this is a podcast about the deep values and driving the principles of the people shaping our common life. My guests come from a huge range of political, metaphysical and professional perspectives. I am delighted to be joined today by Sarah Ditum, who is a critic, columnist for The Times and The Sunday Times, and the author of Toxic: Women, Fame and the Naughties. Sarah, thanks so much for being here. 

Sarah Ditum   

Thank you so much for having me! 

Elizabeth   

I want to ask you just a like casual first question which is, what are your deep values? I frame them as sacred values, but you can reject the premise of that, if you like. What are the things that you have been trying to live by? 

Sarah Ditum   

I guess the things I think are really valuable and the things I’ve tried to stick by in my work are that it’s important to be honest, it’s important to be careful of other people, and it’s important to be hopeful. I’m not sure whether that’s a very thorough answer. It sounds a bit glib and hippie–ish, but I think those are probably things that I aim for, at least. 

Navigating Gender Identity and Journalism 

Elizabeth   

No, it’s not glib at all. So my kind of working thesis is we don’t really know what these principles are. They’re kind of subconscious, until someone tries to transgress them, until we hit a situation where we feel that like ick thing of feeling compromised, or something’s chafing on me. Do any moments in your life arise in your memories where one or all of those principles have guided you? 

Sarah Ditum   

I guess probably the big one professionally was the first time I came up against gender identity theory. I was working as a journalist, and it wasn’t a topic I was writing about directly, but I wrote about women’s rights, and I wrote about reproductive issues. And this was in the early 2010s around 2011/2012 I would say. And there just started to be a growing pressure to use a kind of language about women’s bodies, about reproduction, that I felt was opaque and impeding to the cause of helping people understand what I was writing about. And it wasn’t ever as though I was subject to direct pressures from editors about this stuff. It wasn’t as if I was being told directly what to write. But when you work in an environment you know and understand what other people are thinking and what’s in the air. And it was when I came across that for the first time, and I thought, I can’t just go with this. I’m not against being kind and considerate towards trans people, but this particular set of beliefs that is being, incorporated into the work that I’m doing and the work I see other people doing. It’s not something that I can just kind of breeze along with. So that would probably be the biggest and most difficult one that I’ve come across. 

Elizabeth   

I’m always interested by how people’s just like fundamental temperament shapes their vocation and the choices that they make. How much was that, I really don’t want to have to push back on this, but I’m going to? And how much was are you someone for whom it’s quite energizing to have the sort of scrappy do energy that I think some journalists have? 

The Importance of Disagreement in Politics 

Sarah Ditum   

That’s a good way of putting it. I think a lot of journalists do have that tendency to be a bit truculent, a bit cussed. It’s a good thing to have, and you need people like that in society who are interested in, poking at the joins and seeing how things fit together, and seeing what maybe doesn’t work. So I would say that’s certainly a part of my personality. I don’t think of myself as particularly confrontational or a particularly difficult person, but I’m sure other people think that I am. I guess a long time ago now I read an academic paper I think it was called The Erotics Of Feminist Politics, I’d have to look up who it was by. I haven’t read it for ages. But one of the things that this paper was working towards was the idea that politics is about the coming together of disagreement. You can’t have politics if you don’t have disagreement, and that the experience of disagreeing should be productive and pleasurable, which is why the word ‘erotics’ is in the title, even though I’ve been quoting this paper for about 15 years, and every time I quote it, I’m like, it’s not actually about sex! And that’s always seemed to be a really important concept, the idea that to argue and debate about stuff isn’t necessarily negative. It’s actually quite important and positive and productive. All of my best relationships with my family, with my husband, with my friends, they are based on being able to disagree about stuff, and so I value that quite a lot. Actually, I don’t know whether that does make me a scrappy doo person, but it definitely makes me a person who isn’t afraid of disagreeing about stuff. 

Elizabeth   

I love that. I have an interest in the expanding the concept of the erotic in spirituality, because I think there is a really interesting thing, particularly in the medieval mystics, of the sense of connection with the divine. I don’t think my tradition is at all hostile to the erotic. It’s just it shows up in different ways and for me, it’s about connection. The connection is where the Eros is, and sometimes that’s sexual, but often it’s not. It’s about encounter. And so I’m going to go read that paper. 

Sarah Ditum  

Well, I will actually look up who wrote it so you can find PDF of it knocking around. I think that’s really interesting. Obviously, connection is, you know, does entail the idea of sexual connection, as well as other kinds of connection. There’s a great book by Andrea Dworkin in called Intercourse, which is quite a punny title, because it’s basically about how men have represented sex in fiction but the actual intercourse that’s taking place is her in intercourse with these books. It’s actually about this dialog that she’s having with them. It’s a fantastic, book, one of the most formative books I’ve ever read, actually. But I think it’s really interesting, because if you think about these ideas of the Divine, of connection, of pleasure, and spirituality, and sensuality, and you connect them to the time when Christian ideas are developing, it’s a time of pretty high risk, not just moral high risk or social high risk, but actual life and death high risk. If you have a pregnancy, there is not a good pregnancy, at a good time, you’re suddenly in a mortal situation. And I think it makes a lot of sense that these experiences that I think we tend to encounter in our lives now, mostly within a sort of secularized and sexualized realm. Actually, they don’t only belong to that, and these experiences and connection can be found in lots of much more diffused environments and through spirituality. 

Childhood Influences and Upbringing 

Elizabeth   

Yeah, okay, we’re going to come back to that when we talk about porn, because I have a theory about the sacralization of sex. But first, I want to hear about your story, where you’ve come from. Would you mind painting me a bit of a word picture of your of your childhood, maybe in your primary school years, where were you? And what was in the air, ideas wise, probably implicitly not explicitly? 

Sarah Ditum   

Oh gosh, so I grew up in the countryside. I had a very countryside upbringing, I now realize. Well, I have realized, as I’ve grown up. I remember going to university and talking about being the May queen and just being met with a wall of incomprehension, just like, what’s a May queen? And why would you be one? Actually, it’s quite important! So I grew up in a village in Rutland. My parents are not country people. My dad was a brewer at the time, and we’d moved there for the brewery that he was working at. My mum was a teacher, so she was not teaching until I was about 7 or 8 when she went back to work. But she’d always been really interested in Religious Studies, that was her main focus as a teacher. And because she worked in primary schools, the most rewarding places that she could go and work were not country CofE schools, it was an inner city school in Leicester with a mixed faith community, which was so interesting, and the colleagues of hers that I got to know and the children she taught, it was incredibly rewarding to know those people and encounter those versions of faith at that point in my life. In terms of my actual school, it was very, you know, hymns, Advent, the vicar coming in and the harvest festival was very important and mixed in with those kind of revived pagan traditions that I did not realize until I watched the Sir John Betjeman film Metro–Land about 10 years ago, I think that was made in the 1950s. There’s this whole bit in Metro–Land about the deliberate revival of rural traditions as a way of reinventing community in the post–war period. And I was like, it’s me! That’s my childhood! It was all a lie. 

Elizabeth   

Yeah, we thought these were ancient, unbroken lineages! 

Feminism and Personal Identity 

Sarah Ditum   

God. I was not the latest in an unbroken lineage of May queens. This is shocking! 

So there was that part of my upbringing. My parents are both atheist/agnostic. I think they’d probably say agnostic, but it’s you know, as near as makes no difference. And then my family background, on my mum’s side, was Salvation Army, so I had that connection of going to Army services. And that side of my family were in the whole uniform bit, all played brass instruments which is very full on, if you’re not used to it. And so those were the things that were kind of, you know, swirling around in my childhood. 

Elizabeth   

And were you raised a feminist? 

Sarah Ditum   

I was certainly raised around the expectation that what you probably think of as feminist values were the norm. I don’t think it was ever something that I was told I should be, or I must be. My parents never ever gave me any suggestion that I should be less than because, because I’m a girl. I remember this the other day, one of those real like, ‘oh, that’s who I was’ childhood memories. I was working my little workbook in class one at my school so I would have been five or six and being told to draw a picture of yourself doing the job you want to do as an adult. And I was quite a people–pleasing child. So I was like, what would my teacher be impressed by? And I thought a nurse, that’s a good job to I have. So I drew a picture of myself as a nurse. And then I thought, my mum won’t be pleased with that. So, on the facing page, I drew a picture of myself as a racing driver, which I don’t even like Formula One, but my mum does. So I guess to that extent, I was raised a feminist. 

Elizabeth   

And early on, already thinking about your audiences! 

Sarah Ditum   

Ha, yeah! Got to keep the people happy all the time. 

Elizabeth   

Forgive me, I might be projecting, but my understanding is that it’s been a real thread through your life and work. When was it [feminism] something that you felt like, actually, I have some ownership of this? That this is going to be important in my life? 

Sarah Ditum  

I guess I’ve always been interested and drawn to feminist ideas, and I’m certainly very attracted to women who were, if not feminists, then women who’d chosen to live difficult and interesting lives. You know, I got really interested in Sylvia Plath and Dorothy Parker when I was a teenager. I got obsessed with George Eliot when I was at university, and nearly did a doctorate on her, which didn’t work out, for reasons we can come back to. So these women who were choosing to live lives that were against the values other people might expect of them were really interesting to me. And I was also always kind of obsessed with Margaret Thatcher! I wrote some of my sixth form history coursework on her, actually, and just seeing her kind of try and solve the problem of being a woman in public life was incredibly interesting to me. Even when I was a kid and watching the news, I just found it fascinating. Who was this person? And how was she constructing this version of herself? And I think by the time I was a student, I certainly felt a bit skeptical and alienated from feminism in some ways. A lot of that came down to the fact that I was basically being a cool girl. And some of it came down to the fact that it was a, you know, ‘post–feminist’ era, and feminism itself was not very strong in the 90s to the early noughties. But I would have identified myself as a feminist underground that, you know, I believe in equal pay for equal work. I believe in maternity rights. I believe in abortion rights. These are really important things to me.  

But really my understanding of what feminism is, as an intellectual tradition, grew enormously after I had this kind of confrontation with trans politics. And I was trying to work out, why does this sit so ill with me? What is intellectually wrong with this position, which kind of initiated a massive, intellectual project of reading feminism, often reading feminist works for the first time, because even though I encountered feminist theory at university, it was quite a narrow strand. Actually, you will be amazed to hear that the kind of feminism humanities academics are interested in is not actually that engaged with the blood and guts of the female experience. Yeah, there’s a lot of Judith Butler and not a lot of anything else, which is unfortunate, because I really don’t like Judith Butler. And honestly, that was one of the most exciting intellectual experiences of my life, reading these thinkers, reading these works, coming to understand feminism, not just as a sort of fluffy identity that you can attach to yourself, but as a political tradition that you can engage in, that you can be part of formulating, that you can agree or disagree with various parts of, and that is alive. You know, it’s not a Fawcett Society t–shirt, it is a set of thinkers who have specific ways of understanding the world, which engage with other traditions, like socialism, Christianity, liberalism, all of these things. And that was fascinating to me. Number one, because it just is fascinating. But number two, because I thought, bloody hell actually, the fact that I have never grasped feminism in this way before was basically sexism. The fact that I didn’t understand feminism up until my 30s, after a lifetime move, feeling attached to the label of feminist is probably one of the most clinching instances of why feminism should exist in my life. 

The Upskirt Decade: Media and Women 

Elizabeth   

Okay, so tell me a little bit more about that time when you were at university, because I know that these kind of gossip blogs and the cultural analyses that you did later was very formative in that time.  

Sarah Ditum  

Well, the big thing that actually happened when I was at university, and the reason that I’d never finished writing my doctorate, was that I got pregnant and decided to have a baby when I was 20. I was talking to a friend about this a while ago who has a podcast who was interviewing me for his podcast, and he said, “That was quite a radical thing to do!” And I thought, was it? 

Elizabeth   

Did it not feel like that at the time? 

Sarah Ditum  

At the time, it certainly wasn’t what I’d ever expected I would do in that situation. I thought I was terribly grown up, and I’d had these conversations with my boyfriend, who’s now my husband, about what we would do if I got pregnant. We were like, oh definitely have an abortion. That’s the only sensible thing to do when you’re at university. And we both had big life plans and stuff we wanted to do. And then I did get pregnant, and I told my parents, and my mum said, “Well, whatever you decide to do, we’ll support you.” And I thought about that for about 24 hours, and I thought, well, actually I know I want to have children, and I want to have children with the man I’m with and who I’m still with, so incredibly I wasn’t wrong, and I want to have this baby. 

And so, I was in my second year of university when that happened. I took a year out between my second year and my third year, and then went back, finished my degree, did a Masters, got funding for a doctorate, and decided at that point with my partner that because we were both planning to be academics at that point, and we’d seen our peers go into academia. We’d seen what kind of lives early career academics live. I remember my Masters thesis supervisor was living in Sheffield and teaching there, and her husband was in Southampton, and they wanted to start a family and you literally can’t, if that’s the position that your career has put you in. And so we kind of decided there’s maternity leave potentially built into this funding we’ve got. So we’ll have a second kid now and then we don’t have to wait until our mid 30s and have a 15–year gap between our children! That turned out to be the thing that was biting off more than I could chew, or certainly, because I’d moved from Sheffield to Oxford to do my doctorate, certainly the supervisor I had considered it to be biting off more than I could chew. And she stopped supervising me after I said I was pregnant. Yeah he called me ‘child bride’. It was bad. It was really bad. And he asked if my husband was the parent of both my children. 

Elizabeth 

Lord! So I always do this when I’m prepping for a guest, I make a working hypothesis. And when I asked when the identity of feminism became real for you, I think I was projecting because for me it was when I had children. I was like, oh this is what it means! This is the big, glaring thing! How did becoming a mum, relatively young for your education level, change you? 

Sarah Ditum   

I mean, almost certainly loads. I mean in terms of feminism, it certainly hardened me against the kind of feminism that I was being exposed to in academia at the time. And it was actually incredible to, years later, start reading people like Mary Daly, for example, who is really interested in the sort of blood and guts of the female experience. I wasn’t getting this in my post–structuralism seminars, this wasn’t happening at all! It made things harder. It certainly was a decision that meant, at least at that point in my life, I was playing life on the hardest setting that I could have chosen. It meant that I had experiences and encounters that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. 

So it meant that we spent two years living in a really run down, impoverished part of Sheffield, because that was where we could afford to get a flat. And I certainly think that knocked some of the smugger edges off of my kind of smug middle–class liberalism, because it did mean encountering people who were genuinely having very tough, very difficult lives. This is still a source of pain to me now I tell this story because we were moving down south, we were moving somewhere smaller, and we’ve been given loads of furniture when we got together, because everyone wanted things to be as nice as possible for us, but one of the things we’ve been given was a set of very nice, slightly faded John Lewis sofas, but they were three seaters, so they weren’t going to fit in our new place so we’d had to leave them outside to be tipped. And I went back up to do something I can’t remember what. And while I was there, I popped to the old flat, and I went to call on our neighbors who’d had kids at about the same age as us, and he worked in the factory, and she didn’t work, and I lost touch with them after that. Anyway, I went in and there was all my bloody furniture, my sofas, and there was my break, my IKEA table that they’d fixed, and I just thought, oh, like my hard life is still several notches up from how hard these people are having to work to get by. And that kind of thing was instructive, I would say. 

The Intersection of Privacy and Gender 

Elizabeth  

Tell me, what is the Upskirt Decade? 

Sarah Ditum  

Oh, okay, so the Upskirt Decade is not a decade, first of all, which is a bad name. But it starts around 1998 it ends around 2013 and it’s the name that I used in my book Toxic for this era of really intense, really invasive celebrity that was very much focused on young women. Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, women who became the fodder of gossip blogs and who were presented as, you know, these, these trashy sluts who are no better than they ought to. And the reason I found the idea of the upskirt photo, which is basically, shamefully and awfully like the signal media product of this time is because upskirt photos were often published on websites and in magazines. And they were supposed to show how dreadful and awful and attention seeking these women, in fact, were. And actually, the way that these photos were taken, and what you couldn’t see within the photos, is that they would be taken by a paparazzo who would be literally lying in the gutter, aiming a camera up a woman’s skirt, trying to get this picture. And that, to me, kind of exemplified the whole decade, right. It’s this period where the media does awful things to women and then encourages the public to blame the women for the things that are being done to them. And the reasons that the upskirt picture was possible in that period was number one because digital technology had moved on so that you have these fast light cameras that you can, in fact, get down in the gutter and take pictures with, in that way. You’ve also got instant distribution of these of these pictures, meaning that you have a very rapacious market for paparazzi images. And they can then be distributed via blogs and websites which, because the legal environment had in no way caught up to the privacy concerns that the internet created, were really unconstrained in terms of what they were publishing and what. And stuff that we would now correctly call ‘revenge porn’, was being published on pretty mainstream outlets. Places that paid their taxes an had actual employment packages for staff, were publishing these pictures.  

Elizabeth   

I can’t remember which broadsheet it was but you mentioned that they wrote a very detailed, essentially, review of the Paris Hilton sex tape. Was that right? 

Sarah Ditum   

Yeah, New York Magazine, which is now very liberal, very progressive, in terms of everything that entails. When the Paris Hilton sex tape, which she did not consent to being released. She actually, fought its release in every possible way, but it was leaked onto the internet and New York Magazine live blogged themselves, basically having a watch party of it, which is… 

Elizabeth  

So gross! 

Sarah Ditum   

It’s so gross and it’s so hard to reconcile now. This is basically people who are sitting around a computer watching porn at the office, and you’re a bit like, was that okay? But actually it was. It was relatively normalized, and there was not a very strong sense of this division between how we should manage the collapse of the division between public and private that the internet had created. Because if you watched someone sitting at the desk next to you reading a pornography magazine, I think you would have felt few questions about saying, well, that’s not okay. You take your copy of Hustler away from the office. You don’t do that. That’s for your living room, that’s not for here. But the internet meant these worlds suddenly collided, and the boundaries between these worlds collapsed. And because privacy is a really gendered concept, one of the things I realized while I was writing Toxic, is just how much privacy law was is built around this idea of the default male and the ways in which privacy affects women differently were not accounted for at all. So there was a case of upskirting against I think it was a16–year–old girl who was a victim of this upskirting. It happened in a branch of Target in America. And she was wearing the skirt and the guy who did it was stopped by the store security. He confessed what he’d done. He said he’d seen a documentary about upskirting, decided to go and try it himself. Oh my God! He goes to court, and eventually, kind of proceeds through the court system, and it is finally thrown out by an appeal judge. And the appeal judge’s conclusion was that this girl was in a public space, and because it was in a public space, she could not have had a reasonable expectation of privacy. And it’s the idea, the reasonable expectation of privacy, this idea that if you’re in public, it doesn’t extend to inside your clothes, because you’re in public. Transparently, that is not something that’s going to affect men in the same way, right? Because men don’t wear skirts, and men are not subject to this kind of intrusion in the same way, because it is a kind of sexualized aggression that men perform against women. It doesn’t happen in the other direction. And privacy law, not just in America, not just in this specific state, but globally, was totally inadequate to contend with this situation. And women were really hung out to dry for a very long time, until the law caught up. 

Cultural Norms and the Sexualisation of Women 

Elizabeth  

I imagine lots of people have said this to you, but it was a strange thing reading a work about this, because I was in my late teens, university and early working life in this period, and it made me realize how much I took as normal. Like Playboy Bunny t–shirts and, yeah upskirting was a thing that I was obviously like aware of and not especially outraged by, and managed to tune out quite a lot of it, but was very aware of this formative cultural story about women being either too fat or too slutty or too old or just wrong in some way. 

Sarah Ditum   

It came up in my book, Britney Spears quoted, allegedly calling herself a ‘fat pig’ in papers. This is in 2008, if you look at pictures of Brittany in 2008 just smoking, just like there’s no spare Britney. There’s a Chris Rock routine that he did after Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction. And the punchline of this is that she’s 34 and nobody wants to see a 34–year–old titty. 34! That’s no age. So, as you say, too fat, too old. And there was a terrible lack of care and consideration for young women as well. So one of the most awful things I came across, and it was the last piece of research I did. And I remember kind of finding this and sort of slamming my laptop shut and being like, I’m done. I don’t want to think about this world anymore! The website Fleshbot, which was part of the Gawker Empire, which was very influential, very significant, network of blogs, included Jezebel as well, and was set up by the English journalist Nick Denton. Fleshbot was the porn/sex industry outlet, and Fleshbot was leaked a picture that they purported to be Vanessa Hudgens, the star of High School Musical. They didn’t have any identification on this. If it was Vanessa Hudgens, she was definitely underage, definitely under 18. And what Fleshbot did with this picture of, as far as they were concerned, a completely anonymous teenage girl, was publish it on their website. And it doesn’t exist on the internet anymore. I was able to track down the page using the Wayback machine, so that was kind of how I substantiated it. But it was a time when it was not considered career ending to publish a picture that was definitely of a young girl, definitely not taken or distributed with her consent and turn that into salacious entertainment. 

Cultural Poisoning and Media Influence 

Elizabeth   

For profit? 

Sarah Ditum   

For profit, yes. 

Elizabeth   

Yeah. And you’re right about Aaliyah, I’ve never said her name out loud! She was underage and was clearly the victim of sexual abuse by a famous R&B star and this was sort of common knowledge. The thing I really felt, and you’ve talked about cultural poisoning, and I think a lot about cultural stories and the formative power of the media and the stories that we consume to set our norms, our moral norms: what is a human being? What is a good life? What is inappropriate or appropriate. Could you say a bit more about that idea? Because, as you’ve written, my general feeling is, how did we let this happen? Like, how did everyone go ‘Of course, it’s normal for us to be just weaponizing misogyny for profit and watching women’s mental health crumble before our eyes.’ Various other women you wrote about committed suicide. Like, what was going on? 

Nihilism and the Impact of 9/11 on Culture 

Sarah Ditum   

The noughties, in particular, were a period of institutionalized cruelty, and I think there was a real sense of nihilism in the air. One of the things I was kind of baffled by at first when I started working on the book, was that obviously 9/11 happens in this period, but it doesn’t seem to do anything. There isn’t like any way in which it feels like 9/11 sort of shaped or changed the culture. Obviously, there are things like, there are films which are very directly about it. There are things like the Battlestar Galactica miniseries, which is obviously kind of an analog for America under attack in this way. So it’s not as if the worlds of entertainment and media, which is the only world I’m interested in, was completely impervious to 9/11. But this is something that’s so catastrophic that meant the Anglosphere (which is mainly what I write about because I don’t speak any other languages) was dragged into various wars, essentially as a result of this, throughout this period and yet it didn’t seem to have left much of a mark on the culture. 

And I came away thinking that actually the consequence of 9/11 was this feeling of nihilism that hangs over the decade, this feeling that nothing matters, everything is chaotic and brutal, and that everything is meaningless, because you take on the kind of whole meaning of what happened. I don’t know whether I kind of conveyed this enough in the book, but I think it’s really important to understand 9/11 happens to Manhattan, and media culture spills out of Manhattan. So the people who lived under a cloud of human remains, were the people who were making media in lots of cases. Of course you come away feeling cynical and like reluctant to engage with the reality of human feeling and responsibility! Certainly, if you’d been adjacent to that, I think it couldn’t not leave a mark. There’s an incredible quote from Tina Fey, who was the head writer on Saturday Night Live a huge cultural engine, where she just talks in this New York profile about how she was having recurring nightmares about fighting terrorists hand to hand after 9/11. And I just think that’s there in the background, and it creates this feeling of nihilism, this feeling that everything is permissible because nothing matters, and in any period of libertinism, or like perceived moral riot, is always going to land hardest on women. 

Elizabeth   

That’s interesting, ‘Any period of libertinism is always going to land hardest on women.’ I’d like to come back to that, but I want to ask about how the cultural stories have changed. It’s sort of easier, with a bit of distance, to see the terrible story that my generation of women were raised with, what would you say is the story that’s being told now? You use this great phrase “Celebrity women and these media portals are kind of divination that in the entrails of the reputations of those women, we hunt for clues about what a woman ought to be.” So what’s the story that’s being told now about what a woman ought to be 15 years on? 

Changing Narratives: Celebrity Women Today 

Sarah Ditum   

I probably won’t know that definitively for another 15 years! I think women who are in the position of celebrities now, it doesn’t mean they were always able to exercise this, but they have access to more control over their lives and images, in some ways. So I mean, Charlie XCX is a brilliant example of this, the way that she has run the brat campaign and the way that she sings about, talks about her private life, that is part of her art, but she’s only presenting as much of it as she wants to or she feels comfortable with. I think that’s really interesting.  

If you look at the way someone like Chappell Roan, who I don’t know how or whether she’s ultimately going to be able to reconcile herself to what being a celebrity means. But she has been really explicit about the stuff she’s not happy or comfortable with in terms of celebrity. She has said, she doesn’t want people coming up and touching her. She wants people to recognize that when she’s having downtime, she’s having downtime, and she will not be engaging with fans. And the really interesting thing is that the response to that was almost universally positive, and the response from her fandom was very much like, well, we don’t want those fans who act like this, we’re going to like oust them from our group because they’re behaving in a way that we consider inappropriate and unacceptable. And that’s a huge change, this recognition that even if you’re famous, you are, in fact, entitled to say that you’ve got boundaries and you’ve got times when you’re not publicly available. That was not something that was available to female celebrities in the noughties at all. You were deemed to be available all of the time. And because you didn’t have the option of controlling and curating your own profile via social media, if your job was being famous, then you were going to have to engage with the press in some way. You were going to have to court the paparazzi to some extent, which put you in this really invidious position. You know, sometimes you would want to be photographed and sometimes you would not but the industry had no interest in helping you control those boundaries and set any limits around when you’re available to it. That’s a huge change.  

There’s a whole set of language that we now have for talking about forms of abuse that didn’t exist when they would have been useful to the women I was writing about. So ‘revenge porn’, I think that starts to come into use around 2007, way too late for women like Pamela Anderson or Paris Hilton, who has already been completely revenge porned and completely shamed for that. Language of ‘fat shaming’, ‘body shaming’, which is complicated in some regards, but very useful for pushing back against the circle of shame culture. If you remember Heat Magazine and their red circle of shame around body hair, cellulite, lumps and bumps, anything that was, you know, imperfect about a woman. That’s an incredibly helpful thing to have access to. ‘Grooming’ as a concept, which is now undergoing a whole mission creep, in terms of the way people use grooming. But that only starts to come into general use, again, in the 2000s and it changes the way we think about people who are in the situation that Aaliyah was in, for example. And it means that you suddenly have a language that isn’t seeing girls as you know as ‘Lolitas’ or ‘Temptresses’, even though that’s even though Lolita in Lolita isn’t a ‘Lolita’. But that is a whole other thing! It means you have this framework that people can apply to these situations and say, “This old man has been cultivating this girl for sex, that’s grooming.” And the word ‘grooming’ designates this whole realm of moral wrongdoing. It is transformative to have a vocabulary to describe those harms, and it’s only been developed over the last decade or so. And the other thing that’s changed really significantly, there’s a great article in the magazine Reason about this that I revisited this week, we are way more intolerant of power differential relationships, but specifically age gap relationships. This idea of the sort of sexualized teenage girl strikes people as really icky now, people are not comfortable with it. You know the idea of Britney Spears, actual teenager, in sexy school uniform, I am not sure you would get that through a record label anymore. I don’t think people would be drawn to that at all.  

Obviously set against that. You’ve got the fact that the internet has generated a whole vast and repugnant body of actual pedophilia. You’ve got the fact that social media encourages young girls, sometimes their families, to sexualize themselves for engagement/profit. So it’s not as if that issue has been vanquished, but within mainstream public life and within general morality, we are so much more intolerant of the idea that you can have a relationship between, not just an underage girl and a man of the age of majority, but even relationships between adults, people, can be very disapproving of relationships between people in their early 20s and a 40–something–year–old man, I think would get quite a lot of uproar. And that’s really interesting to me, and I think when you look back at this period I write about, and when you look at the sexualization of young girls, it’s really important to remember that it was normalized in a lot of ways. We did not have the same sort of moral safeguards around age gaps that have become prevalent in the last decade or so. 

The Normalisation of Sexualisation and Pornography 

Elizabeth 

So looking back at this decade, it just seems to me to be like porn norms suddenly enacted in mainstream culture, right? Young girls, pigtails, crotches. And I write about porn, and I have had the experience of realizing that actually having been raised in this decade as a kind of educated feminist, politically confused person, coming to a very strong sense of wanting to name how much porn has a role in this cultural poisoning, right? That it’s like a lab leak happened when, when porn was not on the shelves anymore, it was not constrained anymore, and its worldview suddenly colored everything. I’d love you to reflect on it, because my instinct is that political liberalism has remained sort of broadly where you place yourself? Is that fair?  

Sarah Ditum   

Oh no, yeah. I am a liberal like, you know, John Stuart Mill, liberal. I’m very pro freedom of speech, freedom of expression.  

Elizabeth   

Talk to me about that. Because this is the thing I’m interested in, as someone who is a Christian is politically confused, but it’s not like it gives me permission, because people still think I’m, like, super judgy! But it gives me a preposition from which to sort of argue that treating people like objects is wrong because humans are made in the image of God, and porn almost always is treating people like objects so we should be cautious of it, because there is a soul danger. And by the way, it’s usually women that are harmed. Talk to me about how you land on porn, given that. 

Sarah Ditum   

Oh porn is awful. As an industry, porn is, I have come to believe, inherently and inevitably exploitative and expropriative of human value. So one of the things that happens during the naughties is obviously pornography moves online. And you go from this situation where it’s sold through magazines, DVDs, cassette tapes, whatever, to the tube sites like X Hub and PornHub. And, essentially, they just gut the industry. So in as much as there is a functioning porn industry, it is pulled to pieces by these hub sites, because these hub sites make their money from people (men) watching whatever content they’ve got. It doesn’t make any difference to them whether this content is infringing someone else’s copyright. So loads of copyrighted pornography is uploaded to these, it destroys the porn industry. Then the biggest tube site owner, MindGeek, starts buying up the studios. And there’s this period where people who are still trying to work within the ‘legitimate’ porn industry are making content, they’re owned by MindGeek. So when their content is uploaded against their copyright and pirated onto MindGeek they say, “We simply don’t care! We’re just going to keep ripping you off because we own you.” And I think that just kind of sums up the attitude of the pornography to humans and human value. It simply is an industry that treats people as things. So I remember, I think Jenna James was like the spokeswoman of the confident go–getting porn star when I was growing up. And then Jenna James wrote her autobiography, and actually it was all very sad and awful. And she’d been abused before the industry and abused after, and that was awful. And then after that, a woman called Sasha Gray became the kind of spokeswoman of the porn industry, and she specialized in, apologies to listeners, things like throat fucking, acts that were very like violent and disturbing to watch sometimes. And she did a lot of interviews about how she loved the industry, well, how she loved making money in the industry, and she was verself–determineded. And then she just dropped out the industry completely. She’s been basically absent from public life, so that was weird as well.  

And then in the in the 2010s, you had James Deen, and he was presented as this poster boy of pornography, and this like acceptable heartthrob comes out of BDSM porn. You know, girls love him, and they love putting GIFs of him on Tumblr. And then he is called out by multiple co–stars and women he’s been in relationships with and accused of sexual assault, which he denies. And you know, if you’ve kind of lived long enough to see all these various cycles of pornography normalization followed by the apparently inevitable collapse of that into something not congruent with the idea of normalization, I think at a certain point you just have to say, this is just what this business is like it attracts people who have limited prospects. It does not hold itself on the whole to high standards of care, copyright, intellectual property, business practices. And people are left hurt. I think one of the kind of myths of the stereotypical liberal attitude to sex, which I would argue is not actually a liberal attitude to sex, is that sex is something that people can engage in at no cost, and that sex is basically a meeting of two inert bodies and nothing happens to them as a result of it, which is a massive lie. It’s you being exposed to this experience. There’s an incredible line by the writer Leslie Jameson in an essay called The Empathy Exams, which is a brilliant essay, one of my favorite pieces of writing. But she talks about her desire to have sex with a lover as wanting to “court the terrible gravity of what our bodies could do.” And I remember reading that, and I was like, yep, that’s the thing. That’s what happens in sex. Like you are putting yourself on the line, and even if you do it as a job, even if you do it for money, your body’s still on the line. And the capacity for hurt, injury, loss is built into those encounters. You know, it’s why it’s a significant thing to do. It’s why it’s a meaningful thing that people care about. And if you’re doing it with people who don’t share that care, then then it becomes tantamount to violence. 

Elizabeth   

Sarah Ditum, there is so much more I wish we had time to talk about. But for today, thank you so much for speaking to me on The Sacred.  

Sarah Ditum  

Thank you!