The Professional Darts Corporation has decided that walk-on girls are bad and, effective immediately, they’ve cancelled the whole idea. Darts players will just have to walk onto the stage in their big shirts all on their own. “We regularly review all aspects of our events and this move has been made following feedback from our host broadcasters,” said a PDC spokesperson. The Women’s Sport Trust applauded the move. “Motor Racing, Boxing and Cycling... your move,” they said.



It sounds good: the mute girls standing there in pretty dresses are a relic from our sexist past that should be deleted from our lives, like powerful movie producers wanking into pot plants, like actresses trading bleak sex for roles. But maybe not. In an interview with BBC Radio 5 Live soon after the announcement, PDC walk-on girl and model Charlotte Wood said that the darts made up 60% of her income. “I have chosen to do this job. I go to work. I put on a nice dress. I escort darts players to the stage. I smile and that is it.” She doesn’t see what the problem is. It’s an easy gig. She chose to do it.

It’s not inherently anti-feminist to choose to do a job that uses your body and your looks. Some of the most outspoken feminists I know stripped in bars because the money was better than working behind one. They used the cash they earned with their body to fund their art, their degree, to pay the rent for whatever cheap dive they were living in so they could buy time to do the thing they wanted to do. They exploited a system set up to exploit them. They chose to.

Semi-naked models parade on catwalks in front of fashion week crowds every year

Removing a choice, enforcing a lack of one as a PR move: how is that good, and how is that feminist? It’s patronising and controlling to take away the option for the sake of the PDC looking virtuous in the eyes of their broadcasters. The need to abolish this kind of work also seems like classist snobbery about girls and darts in general. It could be argued that working class women, regardless of their personal politics, are losing out on a source of income they rely on just to satisfy another class of women’s idea of feminism and the context in which they believe the female body should be viewed. Twitter rejoiced when ZOO magazine closed, but no one said anything about nude black and white spreads in glossier magazines. Semi-naked models parade on catwalks in front of fashion week crowds, to a huge hive of male photographers, every year. Barely covered nipples in that context is risqué — it’s art — just like the semi-naked women in Vogue. Contextually these images are entirely different, but they’re all paid gigs to models.

Pointlessly escorting some large dad onto a stage may be kind of gross, but so many of the jobs we have when we’re young and hot are worse. Having a job where you’re not explicitly objectified does not protect you from being objectified. From my own file of minor grievances: I had my apron strings yanked while taking food orders from a table of middle-aged businessmen in a nice restaurant in Mayfair. I had my arse slapped when I stepped out from behind the bar to collect the empty pints. I had a man literally breathe down my neck as I searched the DVD overstock for the sad cheap porno he requested and claimed he couldn’t find, but was right there on top of the pile. And I got paid far less for it than the walk-on girl.

At least for her there’s a barrier: her job is televised. It’s not a President’s Club situation, it’s not a private room filled with rich men who think they own the girls like they own everything else. I’ve been to countless boxing matches and — though stories will always vary from decade to decade and room to room — in my experience in those halls filled with physically overpowering men, those ring-girls are given a wide berth. At most, they’re helped through the ropes by giant security guards. They are distant, untouchable attractions.

There is never a feminist consensus on these things because women are people, complete with all our invisible clashing hierarchies of context and personal prejudices. Which is why we’ll continue to argue about where the lines are, to blunt our knives on benign bullshit like walk-on girls at a darts show. But loathe though I am to side with the kind of dudes who sign this petition to reinstate the girls and type “it’s PC gone mad” in the comments box, I think, in the world of feminism, this is an own goal.

@hayleycampbell

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