80. Pattie Boyd, 'Shipping, Tumblr and Gail Dines - some thoughts

When I joined tumblr a couple of years ago I did so to follow a couple of George Harrison blogs (which I still love!). However I soon noticed blogs that were 'confession', 'fan fiction' and 'role play' blogs which posted sexually explicit material about the Beatles and their partners or imagined partners. I have written on my tumblr about why I feel these were problematic so I am not necessarily going over this specific issue again

There are two particular individuals who are particular individuals who are the main targets for this type of material- my favourite Beatle George and his first wife Pattie Boyd

The particular tumblr (beatlesgirlsconfessions) where some material was on has been deactivated. It was where people (mainly young women and teenage girls) made ‘confessions’ about the Beatles’ female partners. There were ‘confessions’ such as wanting to see Pattie and George in a highly explicit situations, regular leering comments about various parts of Pattie Boyd's body, a 'confession' leering of naked photos of Pattie by Eric Clapton,and regular requests to have Pattie write full and explicit accounts of her relationship with George. There were even confession about wanting to have sex with Pattie. Other confessions included wishing that Pattie would marry Ron Wood (just look at the recent years headlines around his behaviour to see what this is something you would not wish on any woman) and one where an alleged incident where Pattie was the subject of an unwanted pass by another famous musician was described as ‘cute’(or something along those lines). All  these confessions as far as I can make out were by teenage girls/young women This tumblr was administered by young women. These type of confessions were moved other to another tumblr which is still as far as I know active but that I cannot bring myself to look at.

There are also several forms of ‘shipper’ fiction on tumblr. I am not going to call it fan fiction as the individuals who write this material clearly have not taken in or read George’s comments about the effect of the constant media speculation about his personal life had on him. ‘Shipper fiction’ (As I will refer to it) is a development from ‘Slash fiction’ which imagined romantic/ homosexual relationships between two male fictional characters such as Spock and Captain Kirk, Frodo and Sam etc. However this expanded to include real people – I could write about how the Beatles have been victims of this genre. I have written about why this is disrespectful on Tumblr (but this is a separate concern to what I want to discuss in this post). However this ‘evolved’ into ‘Shipping’ also includes heterosexual partnerships- thus George Harrison and Pattie Boyd.

There are at least a couple (if not more) role play tumblrs which regularly put Pattie in explicit situations or saying sexually explicit things (impattieboyd for one). Again these are run by young women. They are completely unapologetic about what they are doing.

There are at least two 'Beatle girl' 'Femslash' tumblrs. These consist of stories imagining the Beatles female partners indulging in lesbian activity. Again the young women who write these materials are completely unapologetic about what they are doing.

There are at least two tumblrs which writes ‘shipper fiction’ which rejoices in imagining an adulterous relationship between George and Pattie during his happy second marriage to Olivia Arias, the wife who saved his life on at least one occasion and was responsible for helping him put his life back together in the mid 1970’s (pattieboysdiary and wonderfultonightuncensored). Ironically this plays into the exactly same misogynistic constituency that condemns Pattie Boyd for having a relationship with Eric Clapton during her marriage with George by casting Pattie as an ‘adulteress’- i.e. a woman who is having a sexual relationship with a man who is married to someone else.

So... There seems to be a constituency of teenage girls/young women who seem to be behaving in a matter akin to a bunch of leering 70’s rock stars which is deeply ironic as these young women are always criticizing the way certain 70’s rock stars behaved and the sexist behaviour Pattie faced. They also claim to be fans of Pattie and that they are defending her honour. They seem to believe they have a right to publically objectify and sexualise Pattie Boyd and her life story.

I help but feel that some of these young women are working through their sexual identities. However they are appropriating another woman’s life and another woman’s personal history to do this. They ways behaving towards a woman in a way that would be rightfully condemned if it were men were writing or saying the same things.

How on earth did this situation come about?

I cannot help but feel that this is a result of our over-sexualised and p*rnified culture. You only have to look at how easy it is for young people to access hard core p*rnography online as Gail Dines discusses in her book ‘P*rnland’.  I  quote a relevant section from Gails' book

By inundating girls and women with the message that their most worthy attribute is their sexual hotness and crowding out other messages, pop culture is grooming them just like an individual perpetrator would. It is slowly chipping away at their self-esteem, stripping them of their sense of themselves as whole human beings, and providing them with an identity that emphasizes sex and de-emphasizes every other human attribute.

To illustrate  this, Gail uses the case of  how sexualised young female pop stars such as Miley Cyrus, Beyoncé Rhianna and female celebrities such as Anna Nicole Smith and Kim Kardashian are made t portray themselves in the media.  I have heard her talk about Miley Cyrus’ gradual rebranding from wholesome child star to ‘sex kitten’ and how this fits in with the pattern of young women having to be seen to be
xxxxable otherwise they become invisible.

Pattie Boyd fulfil this role in terms of being a woman who fits in with western standards of female attractiveness (blue eyes, blonde hair, tall slim figure). She worked for several years as a model so her physical appearance became in the eyes of the world her most important attribute. I feel this is the main reason she has become the focus of all these fantasies. I could go over what feminists have written and said on the issue of the misogyny of the beauty and fashion industries and the pressure on women to be physically attractive and ‘feminine’.

One aspect of p*rnography is to project sexual fantasies onto women without having to consider that they are human beings with hopes and feelings. I see much of what these young women as doing as a similar form of projection, even though they nominally respect the fact that Pattie Boyd is a person with a history and emotions. They find it difficult to have the fact they are appropriating her story pointed out. As an aside I also see a lot of latent racism in the resentment of Olivia Arias Harrison, George’s second wife. These young women find it difficult to understand that George was with Olivia for 27 years until his death and that he was clearly in love and content with her. I believe it challenges these young woman’s Eurocentric view of what constitutes beauty- they genuinely cannot handle that George had a much longer relationship with his working class Latina partner to an Upper-Middle class Blonde English Rose. It almost seems to be an affront to their world view and they say some incredibly rude things about Olivia (calling Olivia 'Ugly' and a 'Bxxxh'). They get very defensive/angry when the latent racism of the George/Pattie 'shipping' is pointed out claiming that that is just their taste to prefer Pattie. They fail to engage with the fact that we live in a society where there is not just institutionalised misogyny but racism.

If you want a prime example of how 'Erotic literature' written by women reflects how reactionary and sexually dysfunctional our society has become you need only look at the success of the '50 shades of Grey’ novels Theses novels, written by a woman, glorify the domestic abuse of the main character Anastasia Steele by Christian Grey.  Many feminist are heart broken by the success of these novels not just because they glorify male sexual sadism towards women but because ‘Christian Grey’ fits the classic profile of a domestic abuser in all other aspects of his behaviour towards Anastasia. Gail Dines proposes the end of the story in real life would be Anastasia running for her life with two traumatised children to a women’s shelter. Tellingly these novels began as a shipper fiction inspired the also highly popular 'Twilight novels’ (again written by a woman). Many feminists have pointed out Edward Cullen’s behaviour in these books also fits the classic profile of a domestic abuser (Aside here- I have seen a ‘shipper poster’ which casts George as Edward Cullen and Pattie as Bella Swan).

These young women are trying to work out the difference between love and sex. Much of what they write shows their confusion and conflates the two. They are trying to work out the role sex has in romantic love and has in and of itself.  In doing so, they end up focusing on sex. This in and of itself is not a product of p*rn, but the easy access to it has certainly informed this material and upped the ante.

We live in a society where in spite of seeming growing acceptance, lesbian culture and lesbian spaces are under more and more pressure from a variety of areas and it is still difficult to be out as a lesbian. ‘Femslash’ plays into this in a variety of ways. It plays into p*rnography’s hijacking of lesbian sexuality and making it purely about specific acts. Like p*rn, it uses lesbianism for titillation of the audience. Like p*rn, it completely divorces lesbianism from any social, cultural or political context. ‘Femslash’, like p*rn, also regularly has a man involved in the various ‘activities’ described. I do understand that some young women who write femslash may be exploring their sexuality. However, should we view women (who are usually heterosexual) writing explicit fantasies about other women different from men writing identical material?

I find it highly telling that one of the main defenses for posting this material is ‘freedom of expression’/’Freedom of opinion’. The posters often highly defensive/aggressive when challenged about the fact they are posting highly sexually explicit material about actual individuals. Their attempt to defend their actions are very similar to the p*rn industry’s argument that making and viewing p*rnography is a free speech issue, and that p*rn is fantasy with has no harmful effects, be it to those who work in the industry (the diseases Dines lists as prevalent in the industry makes a nonsense of this), to the men who view it and to the wider society. However wider society is rightfully beginning to  become concerned about how easy it is to access p*rnography online and the effect is having on how young men view women and how young women view themselves and their sexuality

P*rn objectifies women and girls, reducing them to items to be serviced by men. These ‘shippers’ at their best ultimately reduce Pattie Boyd in to someone is only defined by relationships she had with the men she was married to. At their worse, they reduce her to an object of lust to be serviced. They take some of the most painful moments of her life and turn them into p*rnography. Is this the behaviour of fans? As a fan of almost three decades of George, I am appalled that he gets reduced to a stud who services Pattie. This echoes  something that Gail Dines says about anti-p*rn activists. They have enough love and respect for men to see them as human and more than their sex organs/drives.

Gail Dines in her book ‘P*rnland’ discusses how p*rnography has become ever more explicit and violent over the past few years. She shows that this is in direct response to p*rn users in effect becoming ‘Addicts’ who need greater and more extreme hits (like drug addicts) the more material they view. Indeed some men movingly describe how their addiction to p*rn has affected their lives in just the same way as a substance would. The p*rn industry is all too willing to feed this addiction. I see these young women as having a similar addiction in needing to project their sexual fantasies onto Pattie Boyd and George. I see it as deeply sad that the only model these young women can find to express their admiration for Pattie is in a hypersexualised manner.

Oddly enough these young women have conservative attitudes to divorce and adultery, as some young people do. They have issues accepting not just that Pattie and George’s relationship broke down but that the other three Beatles 1960’s relationships (I include Paul McCartney’s relationship with Jane Asher here) broke down. They also have conflicted attitudes to extra marital affairs. Some who defend Pattie’s extra-marital relationship with Eric Clapton get seriously affronted by Maureen Starkey (Ringo’s first wife) for her alleged relationship with George towards the end of their respective first marriages. I have seen a post by the young woman who runs Impattieboyd on beatlesgirlsconfessions saying that Pattie’s behaviour was fine while Maureen’s deserved censure. Thankfully some say that it was better for Pattie to leave her marriage to George when it became clear it could not be fixed.

One of the reasons I get so heartbroken by this material is that George Harrison spoke on several occasions about the effect that being ‘objectified’ as a Beatle/Ex Beatle had on him. He spoke in a 1978 interview (in irony of ironies ‘Men Only’ magazine, a p*rn magazine) about his frustration at the amount of focus his personal/love life received in the press and his desire to protect the privacy of his loved ones (i.e. Olivia and his new born son Dhani).

There is one silver lining to this story. Perhaps in considering Pattie Boyd’s story, these young women may actually consider issues around misogyny and domestic abuse. I hope as they grow older I hope that they develop healthy relationships and sexualities. However I cannot help but feel seriously concerned for the future of some of these young women. I may be angry about some of their attitudes but am trying to understand they are trapped in such a toxic culture for women and girls where it is difficult to take ownership of an authentic female sexuality.

As Gail Dines continues from the earlier quote in her book...
These are the same symptoms found in girls and women who have been sexually assaulted; in terms of effect then, we appear to be turning out a generation of girls who have been ‘assaulted’ by the very culture they live in. An there is no avoiding the culture. The very act of socialization in involves internalizing the cultural norms and attitudes. If the culture now is one big collective perpetrator, then we can assume that an ever-increasing number of girls and women are going to develop emotional, cognitive, and sexual problems as they are socialized into seeing themselves and mere sex objects, and not much else.”