Why we’re quitting the sexy A-Levels pictures business

A-Level results day in the British press traditionally means two things: choruses of moaning about grade inflation and dumbing-down, and wall-to-wall pictures of attractive blonde girls jumping in the air. These are seemingly the only kind of picture most papers illustrate these stories with, because apparently non-attractive girls and all boys don’t take exams.

For the past few years, a small group of us have run a very silly blog called Sexy A-Levels, collating and mocking these pictures according to the level of their adherence to the formula. (The Platonic ideal being the following elements, in this order: 1) Blonde 2) Twins 3) Going to Oxbridge 4) Leaping for joy 5) Holding aloft their results 6) In low-cut tops). Anyway, over the past few years the blog started to become quite popular, and sort of A Thing on Twitter. People started asking us what plans we had this year. And so naturally we decided to stop doing it.

In the time we’ve been running it, we couldn’t help noticing that most media outlets remained totally unchanged in their skeevy coverage. Also, as the blog got passed around the journos of Twitter, some of the papers have started being knowing and arch in their skeeviness. “Look!” they seemed to be saying, “We’re being ironically appalling. Aren’t we adorable?” The impression is that this is now regarded as a great, nudge-nudge British tradition up there with the rude seaside postcard – something, as Steven Baxter says in the New Statesman, “comfortable, familiar, a nice old pair of slippers”.

Naturally, our failure to overturn the entrenched patriarchal edifice of the entire corporate media via the medium of a joke Tumblr is profoundly disheartening to us, in ways we cannot fully express through GIFs alone.

The reason for the continuing hegemony of bouncing blondes is that, like a lot of vaguely unsettling things that lurk around the fringes of tradition, this thing has become a feedback loop. It isn’t simply something that newspapers do in isolation. They’re fed by news agencies, who only submit the kind of pictures they think news publishers want; the photographers only take pictures they think their agencies are looking for; and, as Chris Cook noted in the FT last year, many schools pick and choose their most “beyootiful girls” to pimp out to the hacks and snappers. (Which, for what it’s worth, definitely seems like the least just-a-harmless-bit-of-fun aspect of this whole shooting match.)

So it goes, right? Nobody is shocked, shocked by all this. It is totally How Stuff Works. But for us, it began to feel like giving it a name and making it all a big jolly media in-joke only ended up reinforcing that feedback loop – what originated as a piss-take started to feel like it had just become a pro bono branding exercise for the whole sweaty-palmed business.

This wasn’t helped by the fact that, from both sides, people didn’t always quite get that it was a joke (probably our fault, not theirs). People would send us emails and lose their tempers about it. And we kind of understood why. Because… well, they were kind of right. We don’t know if there’s such a thing as “glorifying through contempt”, but if there is, we might have just done it.

Also people were linking to the site saying things like “lovely knockers on here”, and oh god.

More importantly, we realised that we were now all quite old and had all become terribly important and busy people in the intervening years, and that spending our time collating pictures of eighteen year old girls for a joke that even we were struggle to justify was perhaps, in the words of the great man, no way to run a ballroom.

Essentially, we had a collective mid-life crisis of conscience and started over-thinking stuff in an outstandingly po-faced way.

The site was never much more than dicking about; a relic of the time when virtually every passing thought merited setting up a single-serving Tumblr to record it (it is still totally that time by the way). But at the heart of this one-joke website was the tiniest, serious core of fundamental truth: this weird institutional turn-on that Fleet Street feel for a particular type of soft, young female flesh is something we all pay a subtle psychic toll for. Now you’d be right to point out the psychic toll we pay is vastly smaller than that which we pay for all the other sexist rubbish in the world, and also there’s ACTUAL WARS, but that’s not really the point. It still felt all enabley.

So we called it quits. The idea’s out there, anyway – the hashtag #sexyalevels will most likely live on longer than the blog was ever going to. And maybe, just maybe, a picture editor somewhere will feel a slightly bigger twinge of shame when picking their favourites from the incoming firehose of jumping girls pictures (no they won’t).

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• http://www.amazon.co.uk/Nick-Urzdown/e/B0066SSXPO/?_encoding=UTF8&camp=1634&creative=6738&linkCode=ur2&tag=uncnic-21 Nick Urzdown

  The reason why nobody prints shots of dog rough ‘uns and blokes is that most fellows are not all that interested in either group.

• http://oatc.livejournal.com/ oatc

  This may have been providing great encouragement for girls to get A-levels…

  Don’t worry though, if the press pick up on women in sport after the Olympic success, there will be a deluge of pervy pictures to illustrate the sports reports. Women can’t win really… I was fascinated that even PinkNews chose a picture largely featuring, and centred upon a woman footballer’s breasts to illustrate a story on LGBT sport.

• http://oatc.livejournal.com/ oatc

  Did a racist hijack your account? Flagged anyway.

• http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1484526433 facebook-1484526433

  Yeah, you sound really sexy. Pic please.

• Sonnambulista

  Market forces shall ever be with us. We always believe no-one does irony like the Brits, but maybe us Brits and you fellas, and some gals, did just enjoy them. I have never been offended by page 3 girls, pretty girls over the rest of us or any of this ’stuff’. Like Katie Price, Kim K and all the others I just pigeon hole it under ‘not interested’ and move on. The Feminist movement must despair at me. Frankly Scarlet etc.

• harry hart

  When did A-level results become a front page media item? I don’t remember reading anything about them when I got mine in 1964. In fact I’m not sure girls were allowed to take them in those days, and certainly not attractive ones.

• http://twitter.com/TheLastWordOn The Last Word

  If you area a woman and don’t give a damn about feminism, then you might as well don a burka. It’s very, very important to look at the root of social phenomena rather than dismiss page 3 girls as ‘this stuff’. It’s not about feeling ‘offended’, but about understanding how ‘this stuff’ fits into broader trends in society. Objectification of some women harms all women in the end.

• http://profile.yahoo.com/OLBQYDVLI2SP3WEDKISREV2BN4/ Jim

  You may be quitting the sexy A-Levels business, but I hope you won’t be quitting the blogging business. So many delicious turns of phrase here, but “collective mid-life crisis of conscience” is worthy of special mention. And anyone who can quote Claude Rains in written text, and make it work, deserves all the good things that life can bring them.