Girls gone wild

In "Female Chauvinist Pigs," Ariel Levy asks why so many young women today have embraced a raunchy, porn-drenched sexuality

By Christine Smallwood

Oct 5, 2005 | A quick glance at the T-shirts ought to be enough of a clue that all is not well in American mass culture. Girls no more than 14 saunter down the street with their low-riders jammed down below their thongs and, snugly fitted over their brand-new breasts, piquant words of wisdom: "Everyone loves a Jewish girl." "What boyfriend?" "Save a Horse: Ride a Cowboy." A picture of a rooster above the word "Tease."

In another life, wearing a garment advertising the favor you wish to do the cowboys of the world might be degrading or, at the very least, embarrassing. In another life -- say, in a radical feminist compound of the future where no men exist and we rely on frozen sperm for breeding -- it might be ironic. In this one, it is simply the thing to do.

Enter New York magazine writer and editor Ariel Levy. Her new book, "Female Chauvinist Pigs," examines the rise of this American "raunch culture," that amalgamation of pornography and porn signifiers -- the single entendre T-shirt, implants, excessive waxing, cardio pole-dancing classes, Playboy bunny keychains, Howard Stern and Robin Quivers, "Girls Gone Wild," "The Man Show" and its ever-present "Juggies" -- that has popped up all over television, music videos, fashion, advertising and publishing.

Levy traces the ascendancy of this peculiarly porn-tastic culture to the ashes of the feminist movement, which famously split 30 years ago into "sex-positive" and anti-porn camps. People like Candida Royalle fled, frustrated that an emphasis on the politics of sex had done away with its pleasures (Royalle went on to direct adult films for women), while the likes of Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon became anti-porn crusaders. Both sides believed they were radically sex-positive/pro-sex, but saw the conditions for sexual liberation in radically different ways. Levy defines "raunch feminism" as the legacy of the unresolved contradictions between the two sides, as well as the continuation of rebellion against uptight movement mothers. Only instead of supplementing political lobbying or social work with sexual liberation, these days we believe that the work ends with sex. As Erica Jong, whose "Fear of Flying" advocated the enjoyment of consequence-free sex for women, says to Levy, "Sexual freedom can be a smoke screen for how far we haven't come."

The picture that Levy paints is more than a little grim: raunch culture, which is essentially misogynist, callow, simplistic and ubiquitous, breeds women-hating-women who angle for power with men and propagate more raunch under the deceitful guise of feminist empowerment. Thus women are burdened with the usual demands to be sexy, come hither, and look like you want it -- only now, "because we have determined that all empowered women must be overtly and publicly sexual, and because the only sign of sexuality we seem to be able to recognize is a direct allusion to red-light entertainment, we have laced the sleazy energy and aesthetic of a topless club or a Penthouse shoot throughout our entire culture." In this way, the dominance of raunch has superseded all other sexualized behaviors, creating lesbian bois who fuck and chuck one-night stands and straight girls who test their dates' mettle by bringing them to strip clubs.

Levy goes further. "In this new formulation of raunch feminism, stripping is as valuable to elevating womankind as gaining an education or supporting rape victims," she writes. "Throwing a party where women grind against each other in their underwear while fully clothed men watch them is suddenly part of the same project as marching on Washington for reproductive rights." This unlikely feat is possible because in 2005, there's no consensus on what feminism, or a feminist, is -- there are S/M feminists, radical lesbian feminists, NOW and Planned Parenthood feminists, even some pro-lifers who call themselves feminists. While the big-tent approach to feminism has created space for everyone, it has also allowed for conservatism, exploitation and commercialism to pollute women's hard-won gains.

The biggest lie of pornography's ascendant place in American culture is the notion that it has somehow made us all more free. Levy looks for the "new feminism" in raunch culture -- for the proof of freedom and power -- but all she finds is the "old objectification." What's unusual in her telling, though, is that women today have only themselves to blame. They produce HBO's "G-String Divas" and work for "Girls Gone Wild"; they gobble up porn diva Jenna Jameson's book; and if they don't audition for Playboy's 50th anniversary casting call, they read the magazine, which is run by a woman, too.

Playboy empress Christie Hefner, Hugh's daughter, sees no contradiction between her stable of bunnies and the two women's organizations -- Emily's List, a fundraising tool for pro-choice candidates, and the Committee of 200, a mentoring and scholarship group -- she founded. She identifies the increased female readership of Playboy as a sign that "the post-sexual revolution, post-women's movement generation that is now out there in their late twenties and early thirties ... has just a more grown-up, comfortable, natural attitude about sex and sexiness that is more in line with where guys were a couple generations before." (Because of course admiring someone wearing a tail who's serving you cocktails is natural, not to mention grown-up.)

For some women -- those who are turned on by other women, for example -- the license to consume Playboy is unquestionably an advance; for others, though, you might wonder what they get out of page after page of identical bodies with identically parted lips. For instead of celebrating the diversity not only of shapes, but of desires, Playboy and its kin have commodified female sexuality into a series of recognizable poses that have been reproduced and repeated until they are now the very definition, the only definition, of sexiness. Hefner argues that female Olympians posed in Playboy as a way to tell the world that they "don't think that athleticism in women is at odds with being sexy." Interesting then, that to prove their sexiness, these athletes posed as soft, sedate pin-ups, not in action on the court.

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