The workshop at the SSP's Socialism 2007 "Are we all liberated now? Gender, sexuality and "raunch culture" was a thought provoking discussion.
In some ways it was depressing in its conclusions - that the objectification of women is undoubtedly making a huge come-back but at the same time empowering where it began to suggest ways of taking collective action.
Facilitated by Catriona Grant and Barbara Scott, a good chunk of the workshop time was spent in small groups looking at magazines showing lurid images of women and discussing how this made us felt. When we fed back into the bigger group there was a huge amount of consensus.
The attendance at the workshop was itself interesting. I didn't count but while I think men were in a minority, there were a sizeable number of men presRaunch Barbie - the imagery that shapes women's aspirations ent. I was impressed by the responsibility that those that spoke took for challenging other men's behaviour and attitudes.
It does seem to me that this has been a positive effect from the fall-out of the Sheridan split, that the SSP has taken a more profound debate on the lessons of feminism than anywhere else on the left in Britain.
Like many of those in the room these were magazines I don't usually look at, but it was not stuff that is stored on "the top shelf". I was shocked to see that magazines like OK (advertised routinely on TV and Cosmopolitan (which used to be sympathetic to at least some aspects of feminism) showed such depersonalised pictures of women.
We had some magazines produced for men and some for women and while you could generally tell the dif ference, the images in the women's magazines were not positive.
They didn't show women comfortable in their own bodies, never mind confident about sexuality. Indeed there was a frightening amount of material talking about diets and obesity, about women wanting to be models and the joys of plastic surgery. One transition that seemed to sum up the problem was that today the aspiration held out in front of young women is to become footballers' wives - rather than footballers. The idea that young women would define themselves as someone's wife is undoubtedly a frightening thought for any socialist feminist.
Even worse is they way that these gruesome images which send a very strong albeit implicit message that are targeted at very young children - with pole dancing kits aimed at primary school children!
But thinking about it, it is no surprise that when the women's liberation movement in Britain disintegrated after Thatcher's election victory, it should precisely be on these ideological questions where we have seen some of the biggest retreats. On issues like Equal Pay and abortion, we know there are still huge problems, but there are laws that up hold some of the gains that we won previously. But on these ideological questions which are also crucial parts of how women feel about themselves and their place in the world the clock is being turned back.
As a young feminist in the 1970s I remember the Playboy bunny image summing up what I hated about the way women's bodies and lives were demeaned. The rise of the women's movement meant the retreat of that sort of image. Now it's on pencil cases for kids, not to mention all over Eastenders! Women (and men) need to find ways of taking collective action about this -boycotting stores that sell this rubbish, putting forward positive images of women and showing that we will not be silenced.