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 , New ...
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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 , New York magazine writer 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 best-seller 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. In the tradition of Susan Faludi's Backlash and Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth , 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.
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I have been thinking over the past few years about the rise of what I call "post-post feminism": this new era of action among women where they become ostensibly one of the boys. Ariel Levy beat me to writing this book. She covers this culture, ranging from the rise of the sexualization of young girls to boi culture among lesbians. This book is thoughtful, well-crafted and well researched from someone in the age group that is predominantly written about. She follows the crew of "Girls Gone Wild" as they simultaneously film young women stripping for the camera and argue that it's good for women as a collective whole to do so. Without offering much of her own insight, Levy documents what she sees. I enjoy this- I was essentially given backstage passes to a performance I've always wondered about. It was a tough book to put down. I read it in about three nights, which is difficult not to do when Levy flows from the industry of labia augmentations to stripping-as-exercise classes to the quagmire that teenage girls are in of needing to be not only smart, hot and multi-talented but bad-ass, as well. It's a book that will get a lot of mileage out of it. I've already lent it to three people and have a waiting list going.
