Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture

By Ariel Levy
Free Press, September 2005
240 pages
Translation: Zachary Shuster Harmsworth

http://www.femalechauvinistpigs.com/book.html

http://www.simonsays.com/content/content.cfm?sid=33&pid=510941

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.

About the author:

Ariel Levy is a contributing editor at New York magazine. This is her first book.
Photograph by David Klagsburn

Quotes and reviews:

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. What does "sexy" mean today? Levy, smartly expanding on reporting for an article in New York magazine, argues that the term is defined by a pervasive "raunch culture" wherein women "make sex objects of other women and of ourselves." The voracious search for what’s sexy, she writes, has reincarnated a day when Playboy Bunnies (and airbrushed and surgically altered nudity) epitomized female beauty. It has elevated porn above sexual pleasure. Most insidiously, it has usurped the keywords of the women’s movement ("liberation," "empowerment") to serve as "buzzwords" for a female sexuality that denies passion (in all its forms) and embraces consumerism. To understand how this happened, Levy examines the women’s movement, identifying the "residue" of divisive, unresolved issues about women’s relationship to men and sex. The resulting raunch feminism, she writes, is "a garbled attempt at continuing the work of the women’s movement" and asks, "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?" Levy’s insightful reporting and analysis chill the hype of what’s hot. It will create many "aha!" moments for readers who have been wondering how porn got to be pop and why "feminism" is such a dirty word. (Sept. 13)
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"Ariel Levy has given us an important, lively, shocking investigative report about how and why--in an age of HIV/AID S and religious fundamentalism--U.S. commercialism has mainstreamed pornography, popularized raunch images (and practices), and revived female "bimbo" roles. This is a call to arms for women and girls who are being sold pseudo empowerment, phony liberation, and fake rebellion--instead of the real thing: freedom. A must-read for young women--and everyone else."
--Robin Morgan

"With Female Chauvinist Pigs, Ariel Levy becomes feminism’s newest and most provocative voice, brilliantly laying bare the contradictions and evasions and self-deceptions that pass for empowerment."
-Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink and The Tipping Point

"New York magazine writer Ariel Levy strips the Girls Gone Wild culture of its cuteness in her provocative Female Chauvinist Pigs, arguing that post-feminist poster girls such as the Playboy Bunnies offer only faux empowerment."
-Vanity Fair

"Female Chauvinist Pigs is smart, alarming, and extremely funny. With nuance and humor, Levy has written both a convincing expose of sex and desire in contemporary America and an important cultural history. I’m giving a copy to my mother. And my sons."
-Cathleen Schine, author of The Love Letter and She Is Me

"A piercing look at how women are sabotaging their own attempts to be seen as equals by going about the quest the wrong way, Levy’s engrossing book should be required reading for young women."
-Booklist, *starred review

"Levy’s insightful reporting and analysis chill the hype of what’s hot. It will create many "aha!" moments for readers who have been wondering how porn got to be pop and why "feminism" is such a dirty word."
-Publishers Weekly, *starred review

"An assertive blast, filled with punchy language and vivid images."
-Kirkus

"As everyone knows - we people generally, Americans in particular - let sex drive us mad. Female Chauvinist Pigs is a heroic (and smart and entertaining and disturbing) stab at looking very sanely at one rampant form the insanity is taking these days. Ariel Levy understands that while we may defend to death every woman’s right to look and act like a whore, it doesn’t mean we’re prigs if we find it unfortunate."
-Kurt Andersen, author of Turn of the Century

"Ariel Levy has given us an important, lively, shocking investigative report about how and why - in an age of HIV/AIDS and religious fundamentalism - US commercialism has mainstreamed pornography, popularized raunch images (and practices), and revived female "bimbo" roles. This is a call to arms for women and girls who are being sold pseudo empowerment, phony liberation, and fake rebellion - instead of the real thing: freedom. A must-read for young women - and everyone else."
-Robin Morgan, author and activist