ABSTRACT
The above excerpt from a popular women’s magazine first led me to think about particular ‘common sense’ assumptions concerning young women, and their position in un/employment.1 The piece seemed to crystallise some of my ideas about the complex links between young women’s positions in waged work and ‘leisure’. Tina Payne was employed (through her mother) as a child model to sell various products, and was herself sold (likened by her agent to a tube of toothpaste) as a female child in an adult (i.e. sexually ‘mature’) woman’s body. She was sold posing naked, in an advert, which aimed to be ‘controversial’ through the use of images more commonly associated with pornography.
