Like Her Tits, Keeley Hazell’s Book is Juicy, Playful, and Life-Sustaining
Keeley Hazell has a new book coming out. Everyone’s Seen My Tits: Stories and Reflections from an Unlikely Feminist is funny, insightful and well-written. It belongs on the shelf with Kathleen Hanna’s Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk, and Asa Akira’s Insatiable: Porn–A Love Story.
What is it about women who take their clothes off making such good journalists? Maybe unlike the j-school grads of Columbia and Berkeley, they’ve lived real life. It’s no surprise that Hazell has written scripts for the TV series Ted Lasso.
Tits opens with Hazell at 21 being interviewed in London’s Soho Hotel. It’s 2007, and Hazell has gone from living in Grove Park, a lower-class part of the city, to being a famous model. “Without my breasts,” she writes, “who knows where I would have ended up? I didn’t grow up going to five-star hotels, I can tell you that. I might have grown up in London, but my London and this London are very different. This world was foreign. It was posh. It screamed money. Where I grew up—southeast of the river—people locked their car doors when they stopped at a red light to ensure they weren’t stolen. I was lucky if my mum brought us a KFC family bucket for dinner. My people had meal tickets, not reservations. We didn’t do sit-down dinners—it was chicken shops, kebabs, and crime. People sold drugs, got into fights, drank.”
Hazell was discovered as a teen and became one of the “Page 3” girls, posing topless on the third page of England’s tabloids. She’s doing the interview years later because a former boyfriend leaked a sex tape to the media. She’s scrambling to repair her reputation. Part of the strategy was to record and release a pop song: “I’d just released my first single, ‘Voyeur,’ and a raunchy music video to go along with it. It makes me cringe greatly to write those words. I must confess, I have the musical talent of a slug and the singing voice of a drowning rabbit, and as for my dancing, well, I’ve often been asked by panicked friends if I’m okay. But I was severely desperate.” When asked by the interviewer about feminism, Hazell doesn’t even know the meaning of the word.
Curious, Hazell starts reading feminist authors. Suddenly she’s not just a stunner with great boobs, but a victim of the system. “I’m acutely aware that I am no different from the other girls I sat with on the wall in Grove Park,” she writes, “and yet, because I was born in a particular body at a specific time that society deemed my body and looks of value, I’ve led a very different life. Still, with its privilege came its limitations. Glamour modeling was just class oppression transmuted into sexual objectification. I just went from being a ‘chav’ to a ‘bimbo’ with money. And while money gave me freedom, access, and autonomy, it didn’t free me from judgment over the choices I made.”
The problem wasn’t capitalism, but culture. Some of the best parts of Tits describe the environment Hazell grew up in—the drinking, drug use, and physical violence. As is the case in Kathleen Hanna’s Rebel Girl and so many of these accounts, there’s an angry, abusive and drunk male figure at the center of the action. In Hazell’s case it’s her father Roy. Roy drinks too much, hits the kids, goes on rages. Still, it’s a signal of Hazell’s gifts as an observer that she sees complexity there: “My dad, Roy, embodies a peculiar mix of being both simple and complex. He’s charming and funny, but also aloof and uninterested. He has little to no understanding of my interests, yet he never forgets birthdays or Christmases. If I got stuck in Wales and needed a ride home, he’s the person I’d call. If I need to move, my car breaks down, or I need a punching bag hung from the ceiling, Dad’s the man I can rely on. Great with a screwdriver but not so great with words.”
Hazell even buys Roy a book co-written by Oprah so that he can try some therapy. “I explained [to him],” she writes, “as my therapists had explained to me, that unconsciously, humans are wired to re-create how they felt in their homes of origin, how you experienced love as a child can determine whom you seek as partners, so that could explain why ‘we’ve’ dated men that have abused us, because that’s what we witnessed growing up. That’s what was familiar. That’s what I was subconsciously trying to re-create so I could redo it in the hopes that this time I could get my needs met. (Shocker—I never did.)”
Yet again and again Hazell also sees a fuller picture: “What’s tricky growing up with a father like mine is that you can hate them for being abusive, you can fantasize about having a different father, but you can still really love them and enjoy spending time with them. It’s a complete mindfuck. Therapy to unpack. Spending time with Dad when it was just the two of us and his moods were stable was a blast; I can’t even deny it.”
After this kind of perspicacity, the attempt to blame her choices on capitalism doesn’t quite come off. “While I’ve refused to conform many times,” Hazell writes, “I’ve still had to survive under a patriarchal, capitalistic system that benefits some and not others. In a system that has been publicly shaming and oppressing women throughout history. In a system that is rigged.”
Please. Everyone’s Seen My Tits reveals a woman of impressive insight, power and self-awareness—too much, in fact, not to see the flaws in the leftist feminist arguments. Despite Hazell’s claims, capitalism doesn’t make anyone take their top off. Hazell also has a touching passage about how pornography destroys the self-esteem of women. Something culturally has happened in England, as well America, since the 1960s—broken marriages, the wide availability of drugs and pornography, increasing crime—that’s made poor but largely safe neighborhoods war zones. In a revealing passage, Hazell recounts buying a gym regulation punching bag and gloves to let out her frustrations and learn to fight.
“I was so furious. I grew up in a world of violence. A world of dominance. It was in the home and on the streets. I hated that. I hated that anyone could overpower me—that violence became a physical way to control, silence, and violate me. My desire to hit that punching bag wasn’t about exerting dominance. It was about resisting powerlessness. I wasn’t training to hurt anyone—I was training to not be physically hurt.”