Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture - Hardcover

Levy, Ariel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743249895 ISBN 13: 9780743249898

Publisher: Free Press, 2005

Synopsis

A contributing editor at New York magazine examines how segments of the nation's female population are promoting chauvinism by behaving in sexually compromising ways, citing such examples as spring-break breast-baring and an increased acceptance of pornography, in an account that evaluates how women may be contributing to misogynistic and stereotyped belief systems. 50,000 first printing.

About this title

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

About the Author

Ariel Levy is a contributing editor at New York magazine.

Edition details

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0743249895
• ISBN 13: 9780743249898
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240