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Female Chauvinist Pigs?
serious crayons:
Since I just posted a nice piece by Ariel Levy in the BetterMost People forum, I was reminded of her book, which I read parts of online and thought was pretty fascinating. It's called Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, and it's about Girls Gone Wild and other examples of women doing things that ... well, the reviews on Amazon probably describe it better:
--- Quote ---Amazon.com Review
Ariel Levy’s debut book is a bold, piercing examination of how twenty-first century American society perceives sex and women. Writing vividly, she brings her readers to places she visited to make her assessment; the elevator of Playboy Enterprises with women auditioning to be Playmates in the fiftieth anniversary edition, a Florida beach where sunbathers urge a woman to take off her bathing suit for the camera crew of Girls Gone Wild, a San Francisco Italian restaurant where a lesbian worries she’s not dressed up enough for her date, a CAKE party in New York, with women grinding each other’s pelvises in time to pulsating dance rhythms, and outside a juice bar in Oakland where a beautiful high school student shares disappointment at her experiences with sex.
Levy cleverly leads us to explore the role models women aspire to emulate. We are not pursuing the confident, self-determined, powerful, free ideal the women’s liberation movement would have dreamed for its daughters. Instead, our icons are porn stars and strippers and prostitutes. Paris Hilton and Jenna Jameson flaunt their successes in the pornography industry, and in doing so seem to earn our adulation.
Levy relates our embracing of this raunchy culture to unresolved tensions thirty years ago between the sexual revolution and the women’s liberation movement, and amongst feminists; joy at discovering the delights of our clitoris conflicting with disgust at pornography’s objectification of women. She creates a convincing argument by analyzing a diverse spectrum of material; presents a fascinating palette of interviews with revolutionary women’s libbers, nouvelle raunchy feminists, and everyday women and men. Detailed facts and recurring names are sometimes cumbersome, albeit worth ploughing through for the ‘a-ha moments’.
The reality that we model ourselves on images whose "individuality is erased" is harsh, yet Levy’s work is imbued with hope – hope that women can celebrate their uniqueness instead of their ‘hotness’, explore their sexuality as delight rather than consume sex as currency, and succeed professionally because of their brilliant minds and personalities, not because of their brilliant bodies.--Megan Jones Ady
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. What does sexy mean today? Levy, smartly expanding on reporting for an article in New York magazine, argues that the term is defined by a pervasive raunch culture wherein women make sex objects of other women and of ourselves. The voracious search for what's sexy, she writes, has reincarnated a day when Playboy Bunnies (and airbrushed and surgically altered nudity) epitomized female beauty. It has elevated porn above sexual pleasure. Most insidiously, it has usurped the keywords of the women's movement (liberation, empowerment) to serve as buzzwords for a female sexuality that denies passion (in all its forms) and embraces consumerism. To understand how this happened, Levy examines the women's movement, identifying the residue of divisive, unresolved issues about women's relationship to men and sex. The resulting raunch feminism, she writes, is a garbled attempt at continuing the work of the women's movement and asks, how is resurrecting every stereotype of female sexuality that feminism endeavored to banish good for women? Why is laboring to look like Pamela Anderson empowering? Levy's insightful reporting and analysis chill the hype of what's hot. It will create many aha! moments for readers who have been wondering how porn got to be pop and why feminism is such a dirty word. (Sept. 13)
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http://www.amazon.com/Female-Chauvinist-Pigs-Raunch-Culture/dp/0743249895
Levy wrote a powerful series about Girls Gone Wild in Slate, which I will post here if anyone is interested. GGW and its ilk have come up in conversations from time to time here, too, often as an analogy to the more out-there apparel and behavior seen at some gay-pride events. Regarding raunch culture, does it reflect poorly on women in general? What causes it? Does it set feminism back? Is it exploitative? Or is it simply women celebrating their sexuality? How do you feel about it?
mariez:
Thanks for the heads up on the book! I'm going to the library on my way home from work this evening and I'll check that out. The subject matter, and the questions you've raised, are perplexing to me and I'm anxious to read more about what she has to say.
Marie
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: mariez on November 12, 2008, 02:12:20 pm ---Thanks for the heads up on the book! I'm going to the library on my way home from work this evening and I'll check that out. The subject matter, and the questions you've raised, are perplexing to me and I'm anxious to read more about what she has to say.
Marie
--- End quote ---
I'm glad you found it interesting, Marie. If you haven't seen it already, here's a thread with a piece by the author, which will give you a taste of her writing (albeit on a very different topic):
http://bettermost.net/forum/index.php/topic,30126.msg436473.html#msg436473
And here's the first of a fascinating/horrifying three-part piece she wrote for Slate about Girls Gone Wild:
http://www.slate.com/id/2097485/entry/2097496/
delalluvia:
--- Quote from: serious crayons on November 10, 2008, 09:08:58 pm ---Since I just posted a nice piece by Ariel Levy in the BetterMost People forum, I was reminded of her book, which I read parts of online and thought was pretty fascinating. It's called Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, and it's about Girls Gone Wild and other examples of women doing things that ... well, the reviews on Amazon probably describe it better:
http://www.amazon.com/Female-Chauvinist-Pigs-Raunch-Culture/dp/0743249895
Levy wrote a powerful series about Girls Gone Wild in Slate, which I will post here if anyone is interested. GGW and its ilk have come up in conversations from time to time here, too, often as an analogy to the more out-there apparel and behavior seen at some gay-pride events. Regarding raunch culture, does it reflect poorly on women in general? What causes it? Does it set feminism back? Is it exploitative? Or is it simply women celebrating their sexuality? How do you feel about it?
--- End quote ---
True equality means the ability of women to act just as cheap and raunchy or just as high and mighty and everything inbetween just as men do without it reflecting badly on the whole gender.
For every Paris Hilton there is a Natalie Portman.
[shrug]
You have to take the good with the bad.
milomorris:
--- Quote from: delalluvia on November 19, 2008, 01:25:15 am ---True equality means the ability of women to act just as cheap and raunchy or just as high and mighty and everything inbetween just as men do without it reflecting badly on the whole gender.
--- End quote ---
I agree. But you have to give that time (generations) to develop and change. We all know what the traditional woman looks like, and to a large extent we have had to get folks to understand that there is much more that women have to offer. I think some significant progress has been made culturally in this area. Now we have the GGW type of woman introducing us to a new angle as we continue to try to figure women out.
The extent to which GGW reflects poorly on all women is going vary from person to person. Personally, I can't tell just by looking at a woman if she is a slut or not. Moreover, I mostly don't care. But what worries me is what young men think of women as a result of this raunch culture?? Does it re-set thier expectations of the young women that come into their lives? read below for more thoughts on this.
--- Quote from: delalluvia on November 19, 2008, 01:25:15 am ---For every Paris Hilton there is a Natalie Portman.
--- End quote ---
That's very true. I don't see women flaunting sex en masse the way the Paris Hilton's of the world do.
--- Quote from: delalluvia on November 19, 2008, 01:25:15 am ---You have to take the good with the bad.
--- End quote ---
That's where I disagree. We don't have to take the bad. We should be working to mitigate it. Part of the bad is a culture where teenage boys and girls have decided that oral sex isn't really sex. Part of the bad is girls who have gotten the message that all boys want from them is sex. Part of the bad is female school teachers who rape their male students. Part of the bad is illegitimacy. My youngest niece ended up pregnant at 16 by a boy landed in jail well before the baby was born, and saw nothing wrong with any of it. Her examples--according to my sister--were her friends at school. Most of them had already been pregnant, and some kept the babies. My niece was the last one in her circle of friends who remained chaste. But that kind of peer pressure finally weakened her. She needed to fit in, so she had sex. When she discovered she was pregnant, she fit right in with the rest of the girls.
I don't see how the bad justifies the good.
Milo
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