RE-DEFINING GIRLINESS: SEPARATING THE ENJOYMENT OF SUBMISSION FROM PATRIACHAL INFANTALISATION OF WOMEN A CRITIQUE BY JAK SOROKA The UK has an obsession with hair removal adverts and anti-aging creams. For an aging population, we spend a lot of time thinking about staying younger. I am aware that there are parents, academics and feminists all over the world concerned with the sexualisation of children and the infantilisation of women. I see it on TV and in movies. I see the effects in the way the older women in my family talk about their bodies, scolding and scorning them for not being what they once were. Yet I also see a danger that out of attempts to reject this patriarchal removal of women’s agency arises the condemnation of girly-ness and dismissal of submission as a possible route to empowerment. These were the thoughts swimming in my head as I made my way to Camden People’s Theatre to see a show as part of their Calm Down Dear Festival of Feminism. The performance Baby Face, by artist Katy Dye, was to explore stereotypical images of female infantilisation and unpick the complexities within it. I was more than happy to see a performance that delved into this, and to now further delve into it for myself.
Dye splices the piece with sound clips of songs and adverts that demonstrate the societal fixation with innocence and girlhood. The more the performance continues, the creepier these 1950s/60s pop tunes sound. She covers herself in lotion, whilst performing a text made up of anti-aging advert lingo. I had not thought about the ways that these age-defying techniques might have come out of wanting women to not just look younger, but look like girls. And not just look like girls, but be like girls. That hair removal and younger looking-skin may actually be popular because we want our women younger. We literally want them to be girls. Near the beginning of the show Dye comically takes on the recogniseable schoolgirl porn scene, writhing on a notepad, asking us to help her “do” her homework, and eventually ending in frantic climax. Later, an audience member, a man who is picked on throughout, is given food and asked by Dye to feed her. The obedient audience member gingerly obliges, taking the pink plastic plate and spoon while Dye sits in undersized girl clothes and a ribbon.
I’m just 24, but when somebody says to me, ‘you look younger’, I take it as a compliment. ‘You Look Younger’ – oh – thanks! You’ve made my day! How young is still a compliment? 17, 16, 15? Baby Face Baby Face certainly presents a memorable array of images. Taking on the naughty schoolgirl porn scenario, the woman infantilised by her boyfriend, and a saucy high chair baby dance (yes, you read that correctly), Dye asks us to confront our responses and reactions to these provocations. As sex and youth is something of a taboo, I felt I was being offered something gritty to chew on in seeing a performer plunge head first into this area.
“My Heart Belongs uncomfortably.
To
Daddy”
plays,
we
shift
Of course, Dye is parodying tropes from the mainstream media and pornography to problematise the automatic and unexamined focus on girlhood as desirable. There are clear ways in which these tropes further patriarchal notions of women as docile and consumable, and construct passive ‘female sexuality’