The American Spectator

p> strong> em> Female Chauvinist Pigs: br> Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture /em> br> By Ariel Levy br> (Free Press, 224 Pages, $25) /strong> /p>

Once men like me were the enemy. Today we are the ideal. Well, not exactly. The drunken frat guy is the ideal. As are juggly strippers. As far as feminists are concerned, I still am the enemy.

That’s pretty much what I got out of Ariel Levy’s new study of raunch culture, Female Chauvinist Pigs, that the new feminism is simply the old objectification of women repackaged in a sleazy wrapper. Midway through Ms. Levy’s treatise we hear this from one successful New York City arts administrator: “I feel conflicted being a woman, and I think I make up for it by trying to join the ranks of men. I don’t think I have a lot of feminine qualities.” “Making up for it” entails hanging out at strip clubs and flipping through the latest issue of Playboy. Anything to be one of the guys, and not one of the despised “girly-girls.”

Reading Levy’s chronicle of the exploits of America’s coeds and yuppie nymphettes, one almost longs for the days of Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, when saggy-breasted, uptight feminists picketed the Miss America pageant and set their brassieres aflame. Misses Steinem and Friedan were frightening, but they and their demands (equal treatment, legalized birth control for singles, and legalized abortion) were at least comprehensible. Today’s curious breed of feminist doesn’t so much hate men as hate themselves.

The second wave of feminists, tenured and firmly ensconced in academia and publishing, were more philosophical. The Dworkins and Brownmillers would not rest until they had achieved the complete emasculation and neutralization of men. Their unreadable screeds hysterically proclaimed that all men were rapists, that all sex was rape. A backlash was inevitable.

Judge for yourself. In 1992, a Gallup poll found that 33 percent of American women considered themselves feminists. Less than a decade later, that number had plummeted to 25 percent, and the plunge continues. Today feminism — at least feminism in a form recognizable to its founding sisters — has all but vanished, save for a few rusty remnants tucked away in the dusty corners of women’s studies departments of large universities. Meanwhile feminism’s so-called third wave seems hell-bent on undoing all of the gains of the past thirty years of the women’s movement.