Feminism gone wild
By COLETTE BANCROFT
Published September 15, 2005
They're the faces of feminism in the 21st century: Girls Gone Wild flashers, porn star Jenna Jameson and the Sex and the City supershoppers.
If that sentence made your head explode, you're on the same page as Ariel Levy, author of Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. If it made perfect sense, you may find yourself in her pages.
In Female Chauvinist Pigs (Free Press, $25), Levy takes a sharp-eyed look at perceptions of feminism in two very different generations. She asks whether Brazilian waxes really are more empowering than unshaven legs, and, more important, whether the recent resurgence of sexual stereotypes means women are strong enough to transcend them - or are just giving up.
In a phone interview from her home in Manhattan, as she begins a round of radio and TV interviews and a five-city book tour, Levy says, "There's more to female empowerment than sexual freedom."
She is not some old-school scold. A columnist for New York magazine and Slate, she's a smart, witty observer of American culture and, at 30, "fluent in raunch."
Raised by parents who were student activists in the 1960s and educated at the zenith of political correctness in the '90s, Levy says she "pretty much took for granted that everything feminism said was true," including the idea that seeing women as sex objects is discriminatory and damaging.
But, as she writes in Female Chauvinist Pigs, in the last few years she noticed her female friends going to clubs to see female strippers, digging on Howard Stern and The Man Show, and explaining that it was all "liberating and rebellious."
The trend rubbed off on her. A graduate of Wesleyan University, where "You could pretty much be kicked out for saying "girl' instead of "woman,"' she found herself calling women "chicks" and wearing thongs.
"My best friend from college was really into this stuff," Levy says. "This is a really smart woman, someone I saw as an enlightened person, but she became completely fascinated with porn stars.
"It was so incredibly weird. In the last five years or so, there are just these fake boobs everywhere."
Levy started asking herself how a generation of women who fought for liberation and equality in the '60s and '70s was followed by a generation that thinks empowerment means buying into cartoonish sexual stereotypes.
The result is her first book. In Female Chauvinist Pigs , she spends a few days with a crew shooting a Girls Gone Wild video in Miami (where one 19-year-old masturbates for the camera and then points out that she's a virgin), interviews Playboy CEO Christie Hefner and X-rated filmmaker Candida Royalle, and attends a bawdy Manhattan party thrown by "hypersexual sorority" Cake.
She analyzes Sex and the City and the writing of cultural critic Camille Paglia. She delves into the lesbian "boi" subculture, in which young women adopt not only an exaggerated male appearance and mannerisms but also "male" promiscuity. She rails about the dubious effectiveness of abstinence education. She considers powerful female executives like HBO's Sheila Nevins who make documentaries about sex workers. She interviews middle school girls who perform oral sex on boys they barely know.
She talks to a woman who is one of the executive producers of The Man Show : "There's a side to boydom that's fun," Jen Heftler declared. "They get to fart, they get to be loud - and I think now we're saying we can fart and curse and go to strip clubs and smoke cigars just as easily and just as well."
Levy wonders why women would want to.
Partly it's just the rebellion of the daughters of the baby boomers: "No one wants to be like her mother," she says in the interview.
Levy also sees raunch culture as rooted in the history of feminism. "People my age think of the '60s as one big happy soup" of social change, she says, but there were many rifts between and within feminism and the antiwar and civil rights movements, among others.
That was particularly true of feminism and sexual liberation: "Feminism became fractured over how to represent sex and how to have sex," she says. Although the feminism of the '60s and '70s initially had a strong component of sexual liberation, antipornography activists came to occupy one extreme, "sex-positive feminists" the other.
"Feminism didn't resolve everything," Levy says. "Trying to gain your freedom from the people you want to sleep with is complicated."
Raunch culture doesn't just signify that feminism is far from winning all its battles. It's also an expression of the failure of sexual liberation.
"People are always saying, "Oh, our culture is so oversexualized.' No, it's not. We're so uptight it's unbelievable," Levy says.
Instead of the freewheeling "everyone is beautiful" sexual openness of the '60s, the culture is once again pervaded by exaggerated sexual stereotypes, a time-honored way of not dealing with the sexual natures of real people.
One sign of that, Levy writes in her book, is the reborn popularity of strippers: "We have to ask ourselves why we are so focused on silent girly-girls in G-strings faking lust. ... We are still so uneasy with the vicissitudes of sex we need to surround ourselves with caricatures of female hotness to safely conjure up the concept "sexy."'
She finds it curious that strippers, along with centerfolds and porn actors like Jameson, have returned as icons of female sexuality. "These aren't the people getting the most pleasure from sex," she says. "They're the people getting the most money to pretend."
Jameson's autobiography, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, spent six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Despite its self-help-style title, Levy says, the book is a "harrowing account of sexual trauma" in which Jameson describes being gang-raped and left for dead as a teen and, as a sex worker, using her body as a weapon and being unable to watch her own films.
"And you're going to teach me how to make love?" Levy says. "It doesn't sound like much fun."
The same is true of watching porn, she writes: "No matter how much porn you watch ... you still won't know how these things feel.
"I don't see why we should regard porn as a way to enjoy "sexuality in all its explicitness' any more than we would consider looking at a chart of the food pyramid to be a feast."
Cookie-cutter images of hot girls pervade the culture for children as well as for adults. One of the female porn fans Levy interviews said she was drawn to such women because they are "like live Barbie dolls. I look at Pam Anderson and I'm like, I played with you as a child!"
Yet 86 percent of public school districts that offer sex education require the promotion of abstinence, and 35 percent require that only abstinence be taught.
"What teens have to work with, then, are two wildly divergent messages," Levy writes. "They live in a candyland of sex ... every magazine stand is a gumdrop castle of breasts, every reality show is a bootylicious Tootsie Roll tree. ... But at school, the line given to the majority of them about sex is just say no."
As a result, Levy found, many of the teens and young women she talked to saw their sexuality as a performance for others, not a way to satisfy themselves. Whether they were having sex or not, they felt enormous pressure to act sexy. And, thanks to raunch culture, acting sexy has become the ultimate expression of consumerism.
"Making sexiness into something simple, quantifiable makes it easier to explain and to market," Levy writes. "If you remove the human factor from sex and make it about stuff - big, fake boobs, bleached blond hair, long nails, poles, thongs - then you can sell it. Suddenly, sex requires shopping; you need plastic surgery, peroxide, a manicure, a mall."
For some of the women Levy interviewed, sex is consumerism in another way. Like Samantha on Sex and the City, who prides herself in her "male" attitude toward sex, one of them talks about hoping to "notch her belt" with 100 men, even though she doesn't much enjoy it.
Another says, "I have a lot of male friends. I feel conflicted about being a woman, and I think I make up for it by trying to join the ranks of men."
Many of her subjects, though, say their attitudes are ironic and hip.
"The Female Chauvinist Pig ... is post-feminist. She is funny. She gets it. She doesn't mind cartoonish stereotypes of female sexuality and she doesn't mind a cartoonishly macho response to them," Levy writes. "Why worry about disgusting or degrading when you could be giving - or getting - a lap dance yourself? Why try to beat them when you can join them?"
For adult women who grew up with the influence of feminism, maybe. But, Levy writes, "None of this can possibly be "ironic' for teens because it's their whole truth - there's no backdrop of idealism to temper these messages."
She talks about one high school girl she interviewed who asked her whether girls obsessed over being sexy when she was in school.
Of course, she told the kid, girls wanted to look pretty and have boys like them. "But you never wanted to look like a slut."
The teenager was utterly perplexed. "Then how did you ever get a guy?"
Colette Bancroft can be reached at (727) 893-8435 or bancroft@sptimes.com