Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture
Ariel Levy
Language: English
Pages: 236
ISBN: 0743284283
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A classic work on gender culture exploring how the women’s movement has evolved to Girls Gone Wild in a new, self-imposed chauvinism. In the tradition of Susan Faludi’s Backlash and Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, New York Magazine writer Ariel Levy studies the effects of modern feminism on women today.
Meet the Female Chauvinist Pig—the new brand of “empowered woman” who wears the Playboy bunny as a talisman, bares all for Girls Gone Wild, pursues casual sex as if it were a sport, and embraces “raunch culture” wherever she finds it. If male chauvinist pigs of years past thought of women as pieces of meat, Female Chauvinist Pigs of today are doing them one better, making sex objects of other women—and of themselves. They think they’re being brave, they think they’re being funny, but in Female Chauvinist Pigs, Ariel Levy asks if the joke is on them.
In her quest to uncover why this is happening, Levy interviews college women who flash for the cameras on spring break and teens raised on Paris Hilton and breast implants. She examines a culture in which every music video seems to feature a stripper on a pole, the memoirs of porn stars are climbing the bestseller lists, Olympic athletes parade their Brazilian bikini waxes in the pages of Playboy, and thongs are marketed to prepubescent girls. Levy meets the high-powered women who create raunch culture—the new oinking women warriors of the corporate and entertainment worlds who eagerly defend their efforts to be “one of the guys.” And she traces the history of this trend back to conflicts between the women’s movement and the sexual revolution long left unresolved.
Levy pulls apart the myth of the Female Chauvinist Pig and argues that what has come to pass for liberating rebellion is actually a kind of limiting conformity. Irresistibly witty and wickedly intelligent, Female Chauvinist Pigs makes the case that the rise of raunch does not represent how far women have come, it only proves how far they have left to go.
magically imbued with its agenda. It doesn’t work that way. “Raunchy” and “liberated” are not synonyms. It is worth asking ourselves if this bawdy world of boobs and gams we have resurrected reflects how far we’ve come, or how far we have left to go. One Raunch Culture Late on a balmy Friday night in March 2004, a crew from Girls Gone Wild sat on the porch of the Chesterfield Hotel on Collins Avenue in Miami, preparing for the night of filming ahead of them. An SUV passed by and two
before she became famous. (It didn’t work out.) Because of his efforts to promote progressive legislative change and because of the freewheeling approach to sex, nudity, and non-monogamy he advanced through his magazine, his clubs, and his life, Hefner is considered by many to be the hero of the sexual revolution. Hefner attracted the radical cultural elite to his magazine. Contributors included Lenny Bruce, Jack Kerouac, and Alex Haley, whose Playboy interview with Malcolm X paved the way for
man Tom has served since his birth, is too ashamed to say good-bye to Tom after he literally sells him down the river, thus separating Tom from his wife, children, and home, and condemning him to a bleak and lethally brutal future. Yet Tom’s wistful parting words as he is carted off to the auction block are, “Give my love to Mas’r George.” Stowe wanted Tom to serve as a heartbreaking and representative example of the “soft, impressible nature of his kindly race, ever yearning toward the simple
opinion polls: According to Gallup polls in which people were asked “Would you favor or oppose a constitutional amendment that would define marriage as being between a man and a woman, thus barring marriages between gay or lesbian couples?” the percentage of respondents who answered in favor was 50 percent in July 2003, 53 percent in February 2004, and 50 percent in March 2004. In the November 2004 election, ballot measures banning same-sex marriage and/or civil unions passed overwhelmingly in
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