Israeli communes these days often let people keep their own money ans the older ideals are harder to make work.
On women today I just read this in Style magazine.
Thank goodness most normal British women with careers and no money or time or inclination for too much beauty stuff are not like this article in Style magazine:
" E verybody?s talking about the new HBO comedy drama Girls and how it?s going to blow our minds. Even though it doesn?t air here until October, this is the most eagerly anticipated TV show since Sex and the City, only it makes SATC look like Dallas. The series, focused on the lives of four twentysomething college graduates living in New York, is written and directed by and stars the 26-year-old Lena Dunham, who delights in skewering every humiliating detail of her imperfect life, from the lousy internships and anxious parents (still paying for the BlackBerry contracts) to the STDs, sex texts and the hours spent self-obsessing. If you want to talk about where young women are now, in 2012, and how we got here over the past decade, then this is where you should start.
The girls in Girls are not really girls, of course, they are young women stuck in pre-adult limbo, waiting for life to kick in, and they definitely aren?t shopping for Jimmy Choos or meeting up for cosmopolitans. ?Girls is not aspirational,? says the executive producer Jenni Konner. ?We are trying to show the truthful version of what young people are dealing with trying to find a place in the world, people who think they are entitled to the world that Sex and the City promised them, which no longer exists.?
If this sounds depressing, it?s actually the opposite. Girls feels like a refreshing shower after a long, sweaty party that left everyone feeling empty, dirty and a bit used. You can watch the show as a confessional slice of contemporary life, but you can also see it as a turning point, the moment when a generation stripped away the bullshit and took a long, hard look at what it really means to be a young woman now.
To get some perspective on where we are, you need to rewind 10 years to 2002. SATC still has two years to run, as does Friends. We are talking about a world where ordinary girls aspire to buying a new designer bag twice a year, a climate in which a generation brought up on the Spice Girls and SATC assumed that they would work hard, play hard and have money to blow on clubs and cars, holidays and flats. At the start of the decade, it was okay to be single and ambitious, okay to be unmarried and childless. We were the demographic who were experimenting with suiting ourselves, in our twinkly flats with the stripped floors and the wardrobe full of clothes. Our role models were Sienna Miller and Kate Moss, glamorous, sexy consumers with no responsibilities and no interest in settling down. If men were disappointing, we had Rampant Rabbits, we had our friends and we had time. If we had one niggling worry, it was that we hadn?t quite figured out when we would stop to have children, or who with, but (and you have to dig deep to remember how this felt) it was still cool to be single, thrilling to be part of a generation who had elected to delay conventional commitments so that they could have more of everything. As the decade wore on, I had friends who were single mothers, friends who were drunk every night, and friends who were closeted at home with three under-fives. It really felt that women were having it all ? not in the Shirley Conran sense, but in the sense of unlimited choice.
Cut to the present day: the world is in recession and the successors to the SATC generation are entitled, but confused (what happens if you can?t support your independence? What does that mean for relationships and children?). The economy is flatlining and the culture is sending out mixed messages to the female sex. Kate Middleton is the No1 role model of young women (silent, decorative, surrendered). The alternative is Rihanna (sexually liberated, supersuccessful, but seemingly emotionally dependent on a boyfriend who beat her). We have Kristen Stewart, one step from being stoned as an adulteress for having a fling with a married man, and, meanwhile, a groundswell of support for the punk protesters Pussy Riot.
Looking back, this has been a decade of extremes: there was the rapid ascent of Katie Price, aka Jordan, the woman who helped to cement the idea that it doesn?t matter what a woman does, so long as she gets paid. And then there was Lisbeth Salander, fighting back with her tattoo gun. There were Wags, selling the idea that if you can get a Premier League footballer to set you up with a bank account and a Cheshire mansion, who cares how he treats you or how much surgery it requires? And there was Adele, dazzling and damned if she was going to shed half a stone to please any man. In no particular order, we have worshipped Gaga and Sarah Lund, Angelina Jolie and the blank canvas that is Pippa Middleton. The message is still ?It?s your choice, your life?, but what you really notice in retrospect is how the extremes have encouraged perfectionism to creep into the picture, until perfectionism has become the overwhelming priority. It?s no longer enough to look good, you have to be cover-girl immaculate. It?s no longer enough to be a mother, you must be yummy and have a little internet business on the side. You?ll get points for your brilliant career, but only as long as you have lots of kids, a dog, a beautiful house and make sure you look hot in the office.
Since 2002, we have seen the explosion of what?s referred to as grooming, but should be called repression by beauty treatment ? the obsession with hair straightening, skin spraying and generally airbrushing yourself into an acceptable clone. Not being allowed to get older happened in this decade. Not being allowed to have any body hair. And, of course, we?ll always remember the Noughties for the culture of not eating, which has become even less taboo in the past few years. As Lily Allen says, from her home in the country and having happily put her skinny ?unhappiest? days behind her, ?I am always quite taken aback at how open girls are about not eating and not wanting to eat. Before, they at least hid their anorexia, now they wear it with pride.?
Back in 2006, Natasha Walter started writing Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, warning of a generation willingly conforming to an unrealistic ideal of beauty and sexual availability. Two years after publication, the book feels more relevant than ever. ?I think the situation is getting worse,? she says now. ?In mainstream culture, there is so much objectification and so much pressure for girls to feel they haven?t succeeded if they don?t measure up.? Of course, it?s all been a bit of a laugh ? the ball boobs, the Brazilians and the Botox, Cheryl Cole?s hair extensions, the Towie girls? fake everything, the sex texting and tweeting ? just girls exercising their freedom of choice. Yet there is no denying the slide into judging each other the way men used to judge Miss World contestants ? only now the ideal is rooted in porn.
The decade that began with a frank, weekly discussion of how to improve our sex lives in SATC has somehow ended up being all about what girls have to do for men raised on the extremes of internet porn. When Naomi Wolf talked to students while researching her new book, Vagina, one of their biggest health concerns was anal fissures. Emma Forrest, the author of Your Voice in My Head, regularly receives letters from girls who hate what they are expected to do in bed. She believes that internet porn has dramatically altered the way the sexes relate: ?It is incredible the different experience of girls growing up among boys who have access to 24-hour porn, compared with us, who had boys who struggled to find their dad?s Playboy.?
If you?re old enough to have dodged the porn legacy, chances are you haven?t escaped the geisha effect. I?m talking about the way women are expected to perform like men at work and then like geishas at home, in their Cath Kidston pinnies, with their decorative (four, ideally) children. As well as learning to walk in stripper shoes and counter the chafing of a thong, this was the decade when our domestic abilities were held up to scrutiny (better learn to make cupcakes, if you want to be a contender) and motherhood became a kind of sacred calling with its own militant activists. Remember the scorn poured on Lucy Worsley for her guilt-free comments about childlessness? It?s a testament to the hope we felt back in 2002, the confident expectation that life was about a whirlwind of jobs and boys and a lot of things besides marriage and breeding, that I and a few of my friends neglected our biological clocks and didn?t have children or got trapped in the cycle of IVF. But at least we didn?t feel we had failed at everything.
Little did we know that, a few years down the line, the price of unlimited choice would be unlimited pressure, that it would ramp up expectations so that women started to feel they were only as good as the one thing they weren?t doing well, or not doing at all. These have been funny years for feminism, as the sisterhood turns in on itself and demands perfection across the board: the perfect man, the perfect children, the perfect house, the perfect body, the perfect sexual technique. ?I?d say my generation is pretty f*ed up,? Allen says. ?They are always beating themselves up and trying to live up to this ideal, and you only have to look at the media to see why.?
Which brings us back to Girls. There is no perfection in Girls, no attempt to airbrush reality or pretend that you can have it all while looking like Gwyneth Paltrow. Perhaps most significantly, Lena Dunham is no beauty, with the kind of not-great body that you see everywhere in real life, but never naked on television. Ask Jenni Konner what has been the most controversial aspect of the show and, hilariously (because this is a show featuring anal sex and crack cocaine), she will tell you it is Lena?s frequent nudity: ?It is shocking to me how shocked people are by her showing her real body.? The girls in Girls are not fabulous, as they were in SATC, but they?re all looking for independence and intimacy, success and love. It?s the same story that it was 10 years ago, minus the unrealistic expectations.
Besides Girls, there have been other signs of a new appetite for real women and real achievements, as opposed to candy-coated fantasy. Over the summer, we all discovered that you can be a heptathlete and an Olay model, but that the former is a lot more exciting than the latter, and it?s been a genuine turning point. Jenni Murray, on Woman?s Hour, took umbrage at Victoria Pendleton describing the games as the ?Girly Olympics?, but on this occasion she was wrong. ?There has been a fear of powerful women,? said the sports writer Laura Williamson in defence of the girly word, ?and what these games have shown is that you can be whatever you want to be. You can put on a vest and shorts and box and do the heptathlon or put on mascara to walk the dog.? The power is in being true to who you are. It?s not about being superwoman. When the Spice Girls rocked up for the closing ceremony, more glamorous than in their heyday, it sealed the message with a wink. Girl power comes in many forms ? it?s Posh and it?s Pendleton and it?s Penny from next door who is coping with three kids since her husband legged it ? and now we just might be ready to grasp it. "