Female Chauvinist Pigs:
Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture
By Ariel Levy
(Free Press, 224 Pages, $25)
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.
All of this is seen as an obvious setback for women with beauty
and brains. The highest ideal of the third wave of
feminism, writes Maureen Dowd in her new book Are Men
Necessary?, is “acknowledging one’s inner slut.” Its insignia
is the oxymoronic “empowering miniskirt” and the stripper pole
(available for $140 on Ebay). Even triple X-rated essayist Susie
Bright is disgusted with the anti-intellectualism of the
post-fembots. “The media image of women today is pathetic,” writes
Bright, “it’s Barbie on Steroids. ‘I Am Bimbo, Hear Me Roar!
Tee-hee!’” Finally, in a fit of post-feminist pique, Levy writes:
“We get to go to college and play sports and become secretary of
state. But to look around, you’d think all any of us want to do is
rip off our clothes and shake it.”
This is what makes understanding these young women particularly
frustrating. Like their mothers, new feminists affect a profound
philosophy behind their outrageous antics, only to shrug it off
with “it’s all in fun,” and “it doesn’t mean anything.” To these
women, a lack of seriousness and purpose is liberating.
Levy too is stumped. “How is resurrecting every stereotype of
female sexuality that feminism endeavored to banish good for
women?” she asks. “Why is laboring to look like Pamela Anderson
empowering?”
The gals Levy depicts have decided that being liberated means
acting like drunken frat boys on a binge. Most disturbingly, these
are not just Jerry Springer trailer brides, but middle class,
educated women celebrating porn stars, strippers, and “liberated”
exhibitionists like the ubiquitous Ms. Paris Hilton. Besides porn
stars, their role models include the most obnoxious of men. “Women
in America don’t want to be excluded from anything anymore,” writes
Levy, “not the board meeting or the cigar that follows it or,
lately, even the trip to the strip club that follows that. What we
want is to be where it’s at, and currently that’s a pretty trashy
place.”
THE SUBJECT OF LEVY’S BOOK may be “stripper chic,” or the
“porno-ization of American culture,” but that is just one
manifestation of the larger raunch culture that is debasing
American society. In other words, it is not just young women that
have gotten raunchier, but television, films, music, clothing,
decor, discourse, the language, sports, advertising, pretty much
everything. Levy tosses out several theories to explain stripper
chic, including generational rebellion theory. Levy points out that
two of the most prominent spokeswomen for stripper chic are the
daughters of second wave feminists.
No doubt part of it is generational rebellion. But as with all
such binges there comes the unpleasant morning after. When the
hangover wears off the gals try to legitimize their raunchy
behavior with half-baked theories suggesting that stripping is “as
valuable to elevating womankind as gaining an education or
supporting rape victims.” They also do so with nonsense comparing
raunch to women’s self-reinvention as autonomous beings taking
charge of their own lives, and how stripping and porn are
“empowering” because they’re redefining gender conventions. The
more esoteric and nonsensical the theory the better they feel.
My sister, who graduated high school in the mid-seventies, once
told me that in her day if a girl got out of line — meaning if she
were promiscuous or dressed like a slattern — the other girls in
her class would confront her, shame her, and demand that she stop
giving their school and their class a bad reputation. Three decades
later the opposite holds: young women are pressured to — in Levy’s
words— “adopt an image of sexual willingness and to prove it.”
If power is what these women are after (as Levy suggests) they
are deluding themselves. Women gain power the same way men do:
dedication to hard work, higher education, perhaps a bit of
ruthlessness, and sometimes through connections. Not by fake
humping a stripper pole.
By book’s end Levy appears as conflicted as her new feminists.
She is all about choice — the choice whether to act liken a
drunken frat boy or a chic young contributing editor to New
York magazine. But her “it’s all good” pose is a sham. Try as
she may to remain PC, Levy cannot hide the fact that she despises
and is embarrassed by her slutty sisters. It comes through in page
after page. By being so nonjudgmental and pro-choice Levy shows the
same lack of moral clarity as the young women she describes. It is
not “all good.”
