Ariel Levy
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture
The Free Press, 2006
256 pages $14
Review by HELEN REDMOND
NANCY PELOSI is the first woman elected to be speaker of the House of Representatives. Big deal for women, right? It’s just one more sign that women in the United States have achieved equality and all those little girls in velvet dresses that surrounded Pelosi can do and become anything they want. Women’s oppression is a relic of the past because we have become “empowered” and “liberated.” We are in a “postfeminist age.”
If you believe that you would be wrong. Ariel Levy’s book Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture investigates a number of cultural phenomena that reveal not how far women have come, but rather how much farther we have left to go to achieve real equality. She examines both the conflicts in the women’s liberation movement of the sixties and the work of radical feminists Susan Brownmiller and Andrea Dworkin.
Levy takes the reader on the road with the Girls Gone Wild film crew, talks to porn star Jenna Jameson—author of the bestseller How to Make Love Like a Porn Star—interviews Christi Hefner, CEO of Playboy Enterprises, and questions young women about their sexual attitudes.
At the core of raunch culture is the objectification of women, sex as a commodity, and alienated sexuality. But those who create, consume, participate, and profit from raunch culture would have us believe just the opposite. They insist, sometimes indignantly, that strippers and porn stars, the magazines Playboy and Maxim, and TV shows The Girls Next Door and Sex and The City are empowering. They are examples of women in charge of their sexuality.
Huh? As Levy asks in her introduction:
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? An how is imitating a stripper or a porn star—a woman whose job is to imitate sexual arousal—going to render us sexually liberated?
Levy is at her acerbic best when she takes apart the notions that exposing more and more flesh, appearing in a Girls Gone Wild video, or wearing thong underwear (designed for strippers to get around obscenity laws), is proof that women are liberated.
The female body has never been under such extreme scrutiny. A punishing beauty and weight standard has been established that doesn’t exist in nature—pert, symmetrical features atop an anorectically thin body with large breasts (pejoratively called “tits on sticks”). Hollywood and television, the advertising, music, and fashion industries, all promote these images of women. The national restaurant chain Hooters lures its customers with the promise of being served by young, perky, large-breasted women in revealing t-shirts and skimpy shorts. Can you image a restaurant chain called “Dicks” with soft-core images of men’s penises in tight shorts used to attract customers?
Levy correctly identifies these trends for what they are—the opposite of sexual liberation for women. But her explanation for these trends is wrong. She posits a number of contradictory and confusing ideas and alleges, “[Raunch culture] is not a situation that is foisted upon women.” And the proof is her interviews with a small group of women in positions of power who willingly produce, portray, and profit from the objectification of women’s bodies—they are Female Chauvinist Pigs.
It’s important to note—the author does not—that they are a select few; mostly middle and upper class women who have broken through the glass ceiling. Levy goes on to say, “But even though this new world of beer and babes feels foreign to sixties revolutionaries, it is actually also a repercussion of the very forces they put in motion—they are the ones who started this.”
“They” would be radical feminists Susan Brownmiller and Andrea Dworkin. In the late seventies, the women’s liberation movement, which was in decline, accepted the theory of patriarchy and focused almost exclusively on the issue of violence against women. This was important because there was little awareness of the prevalence of domestic violence and rape.
But the explanation offered by Dworkin and Brownmiller was not only wrong, but wrong in the extreme. Dworkin insisted all intercourse was rape, and as Brownmiller famously put it, “Rape is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.” Moreover, pornography was linked to violence against women: “Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice.”
The only solution was lesbian separatism. Levy believes “raunch feminism” is a result of and reaction to radical feminisms’ theories about porn and female sexuality. But these ideas were never central to the women’s liberation movement and their influence on the vast majority of women was marginal or rejected.
Marxists have a different explanation. Under capitalism, sex is a commodity that can be bought and sold. It has become abstracted from human relationships which lead to alienated and contradictory expressions of sexuality. A women’s sexuality has become the means by which she is supposed to attract a partner. Women get caught in a double bind of being expected to look a certain way (i.e., like the women on Baywatch) without then being treated like a sex object. And as a result of the inequality between men and women and the persistence of sexist ideas, men try to “get” sex from women. It is “sex as sport,” divorced from real emotion and connection between two people.
In addition, it is the decades-long, relentless right-wing backlash against the gains of the women’s movement that is to blame for the rise of raunch culture and the continued oppression of women. Working-class women have borne the brunt of these attacks. Women still earn only 76 cents to a man’s dollar; 30 percent of female-headed households live in poverty; private, full-time child care costs between $4,000 and $10,000 per year; access to abortion has been severely restricted; and Clinton’s welfare reform left millions of women and children without a social safety net.
You can bet there won’t be a reality TV show to expose these inequalities.
