What Would Angela McRobbie Say? Probably something like this:
“The young woman could also expect as a result of her enthusiasm for work and careers to gain some tangible sexual freedoms in the form of access to leisure culture, to a sex life which need not be tied to marriage and having children, and to a climate where the sexual double standard was to be lifted so that the young woman could heartily enjoy sexuality with impunity, indeed she could also now get drunk, and even behave badly within certain limits (as Bridget Jones tumbles out of taxis onto the street after a long night in the wine bar). As long as she did not become a single mother who would be reliant on welfare she could gain access to sexual pleasures which in the past had always been the privilege of men (hence the new female market for soft pornography and the growth of so-called porn chic). The new sexual contract tied women to enjoying the freedom to consume, having earned her own wage (and so triggering the enormous expansion of the female fashion-and-beauty business corporations) while also offering them the entirely nebulous idea of ‘consumer citizenship’. What was omitted was encouragement to a more active form of political participation.”
