Introduction
I first noticed it several years ago. I would
turn on the television and find strippers in
pasties explaining how best to lap dance a man
to orgasm. I would flip the channel and see
babes in tight, tiny uniforms bouncing up and
down on trampolines. Britney Spears was becoming
increasingly popular and increasingly unclothed,
and her undulating body ultimately became so
familiar to me I felt like we used to go out.
Charlie’s Angels, the film remake of the
quintessential jiggle show, opened at number one
in 2000 and made $125 million in theaters
nationally, reinvigorating the interest of men
and women alike in leggy crime fighting. Its
stars, who kept talking about “strong women” and
“empowerment,” were dressed in alternating
soft-porn styles – as massage parlor geishas,
dominatrixes, yodeling Heidis in alpine
bustiers. (The summer sequel in 2003 – in which
the Angels’ perilous mission required them to
perform stripteases – pulled in another $100
million domestically.) In my own industry,
magazines, a porny new genre called the Lad Mag,
which included titles like Maxim, FHM, and
Stuff, was hitting the stands and becoming a
huge success by delivering what Playboy had only
occasionally managed to capture: greased
celebrities in little scraps of fabric humping
the floor.
This didn’t end when I switched off the radio or
the television or closed the magazines. I’d walk
down the street and see teens and young women – and
the occasional wild fifty-year-old –
wearing jeans cut so low they exposed what came
to be known as butt cleavage paired with
miniature tops that showed off breast implants
and pierced navels alike. Sometimes, in case the
overall message of the outfit was too subtle,
the shirts would be emblazoned with the Playboy
bunny or say Porn Star across the chest.
Some odd things were happening in my social
life, too. People I knew (female people) liked
going to strip clubs (female strippers). It was
sexy and fun, they explained; it was liberating
and rebellious. My best friend from college, who
used to go to Take Back the Night marches on
campus, had become captivated by porn stars. She
would point them out to me in music videos and
watch their (topless) interviews on Howard
Stern. As for me, I wasn’t going to strip clubs
or buying Hustler T-shirts, but I was starting
to show signs of impact all the same. It had
only been a few years since I’d graduated from
Wesleyan University, a place where you could
pretty much get expelled for saying “girl”
instead of “woman,” but somewhere along the line
I’d started saying “chick.” And, like most
chicks I knew, I’d taken to wearing thongs.
What was going on? My mother, a shiatsu masseuse
who attended weekly women’s
consciousness-raising groups for twenty-four
years, didn’t own makeup. My father, whom she
met as a student radical at the University of
Wisconsin, Madison, in the sixties was a
consultant for Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and
NOW. Only thirty years (my lifetime) ago, our
mothers were “burning their bras” and picketing
Playboy, and suddenly we were getting implants
and wearing the bunny logo as supposed symbols
of our liberation. How had the culture shifted
so drastically in such a short period of time?
What was almost more surprising than the change
itself were the responses I got when I started
interviewing the men and – often – women who
edit magazines like Maxim and make programs like
The Man Show and Girls Gone Wild. This new
raunch culture didn’t mark the death of
feminism, they told me; it was evidence that the
feminist project had already been achieved. We’d
earned the right to look at Playboy; we were
empowered enough to get Brazilian bikini waxes.
Women had come so far, I learned, we no longer
needed to worry about objectification or
misogyny. Instead, it was time for us to join
the frat party of pop culture, where men had
been enjoying themselves all along. If Male
Chauvinist Pigs were men who regarded women as
pieces of meat, we would outdo them and be
Female Chauvinist Pigs: women who make sex
objects of other women and of ourselves.
When I asked female viewers and readers what
they got out of raunch culture, I heard similar
things about empowering miniskirts and feminist
strippers, and so on, but I also heard something
else. They wanted to be “one of the guys”; they
hoped to be experienced “like a man.” Going to
strip clubs or talking about porn stars was a
way of showing themselves and the men around
them that they weren’t “prissy little women” or
“girly-girls.” Besides, they told me, it was all
in fun, all tongue-in-cheek, and for me to
regard this bacchanal as problematic would be
old-school and uncool.
I tried to get with the program, but I could
never make the argument add up in my head. 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? And how is imitating
a stripper or a porn star – a woman whose job
is to imitate arousal in the first place – going
to render us sexually liberated?
Despite the rising power of Evangelical
Christianity and the political right in the
United States, this trend has only grown more
extreme and more pervasive in the years that
have passed since I first became aware of it. A
tawdry, tarty, cartoonlike version of female
sexuality has become so ubiquitous, it no longer
seems particular. What we once regarded as a
kind of sexual expression we now view as
sexuality. As former adult film star Traci Lords
put it to a reporter a few days before her
memoir hit the best-seller list in 2003, “When I
was in porn, it was like a back-alley thing. Now
it’s everywhere.” Spectacles of naked ladies
have moved from seedy side streets to center
stage, where everyone – men and women – can
watch them in broad daylight. Playboy and its
ilk are being “embraced by young women in a
curious way in a postfeminist world,” to borrow
the words of Hugh Hefner.
But just because we are post doesn’t
automatically mean we are feminists. There is a
widespread assumption that simply because my
generation of women has the good fortune to live
in a world touched by the feminist movement,
that means everything we do is 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.
(Continues…)
Free Press
Copyright © 2005
Ariel Levy
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-7432-4989-5
Excerpted from Female Chauvinist Pigs
by Ariel Levy
Copyright © 2005 by Ariel Levy.
Excerpted by permission.
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