Product Description
Meet the Female Chauvinist Pig -- the new brand of "empowered woman" who embraces "raunch culture" wherever she finds it. In her groundbreaking book, New York magazine writer Ariel Levy argues that, 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. 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.
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Amazon.com 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
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 What's Old News is New News Once More ( aerodesign1 )
Ho hum...
From Life 101:
- Some people in life are very attractive
- Some of the above people really enjoy sex
- Some of the above people are exhibitionists
- Some of the above people discover that can achieve a bit of fame and fortune practicing sex, so they cease the opportunity
- Some of the above people want even more - so they wave various banners: victim, liberation-equality, etc., and hope to achieve even more from their sexual (pre) occupation--deeds/misdeeds.
So we have this book, in many cases explaining obvious current social sexual mores/taboos/hang-ups and those that take advantage of/try-to-change/object-to/promote them.
I recommend this book as one of several supplements belonging in a junior high school sex-ed class.
...Next
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 Pop politics disguised as social scientific analysis. Bleah. ( macunaima )
I read "Female Chauvinist Pigs" with much anticipation and delight, but came away from it feeling that I had been watching an old-time snake-oil sales man (or woman, in this case) who had gussied up their hard-sell con as a chattaqua. Though I share some of Levy's concerns regarding the trivialization and sexualization of women, I am deeply suspicious of her unexamined prejudices. The worst of these is that sex can and should somehow be put in a nice little hygenic box where it is always and forever synonymous with satisfaction, desire, intimacy and love. Ironically enough, for a woman who accuses the sex-positive generation of young women to be "republicans in feminist clothing", Levy's views on human sexuality are as profoundly conservative in their own way as those of His Holiness, Herr Ratzinger.
One of the main things which bothers me about this book is it's political use of decontextualized scientific information. Lavy makes blanket comments about "abused" sex workers and the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder among them that are deeply problematical. PTSD is a little understood mental disorder which is hard to diagnose. Even among those groups which have been extensively tested for it (i.e. combat vets) there's a huge range of disagreement about its prevalence and degree of seriousness. Levy claims that 1/3rd of Vietnam vets have some post-traumatic stress disorder. That number is deeply controversial. She then goes on to claim that double this rate exists among sex workers. This proclamation, needless to say, should be even more controversial.
The simple fact of the matter is that very little reputable public health work has been done among sex workers on PTSD. The numbers involved in the few research pieces which exist (at least the ones I have seen to date) are not statistically significant and, in many cases, the authors of this work have a very obvious political axe to grind - sort of like the "scientists" who are involved with intelligent design theory. At most, we can say that certain hypotheses and questions have been opened by this work: they most CERTAINLY have not been proven, as Levy implies.
But laying all that aside for a moment, even if Levy is correct, there is no necessary causative correlation between "rauch culture", sex work and abuse of women. Sex work up until now has been a DEEPLY stigmatized profession. Many workers in it have suffered abuse PRECISELY BECAUSE they are sex workers and society says that these people are scum. Levy wants to re-image the sex worker, shifting the the labels from "scum" and "bitch whore" to "abused victim of society", but both categories are stigmatizing and deny sex workers their dignity and human and workers' rights, turning them into agency-less objectified dolls (in an ironic re-appropriation of porn as a consumption good): "Beaten Barbies", if you will.
There is absolutely NO LOGICAL REASON why sex work needs must mean sexual abuse. These two are so often connected in our deeply sex-negative culture precisely because we consider sex workers to be soiled or dirty, a view which Levy apparently shares, though she shifts moral responsability for this soiling off the backs of sex workers themselves and onto "society" and the "corporations" in general.
But using Levy's logic, one could also prove that homosexuality is a social evil.
For centuries, homosexuals were treated as criminals in North America and Europe. They were stigmatized outsiders. Because of this, their sexual activities had to occur in secret and in the hidden crevices and margins of "polite society". As such, homosexuals were frequently subject to violence, abuse, repression, etc. It's almost certain that if one could measure homosexuals for post-traumatic stress disorder in, say, 1954, one would discover that they would have a much higher rate than the population in general. But it would be wrong to then conclude that homosexuality somehow caused this PTSD: it was, in fact, the STIGMATIZATION of gayness which led homosexuals to become the preferred targets of violent predators, thus leading to higher rates of PTSD.
Until a wide-reaching, transcultural study of sex workers is conducted by scientific professionals who do not have a political axe to grind in the pornography wars, which incorporates sex workers' life-histories in a qualitative as well as qunatitative manner and which uses a similiar study of the non-sex worker population as a control, we cannot make the claims which Levy makes in this book. Now, I could be wrong: perhaps such a study already exists and if anyone knows of one, I'd like to hear about it. The ones Levy bases her analysis on, however, as far as I can see, are not such a study.
I dislike many aspects of raunch culture. But underlying Levy's analysis, I see some basic presumptions about sex and intimacy which are not explored, let alone challenged. These include the idea that sex needs must be an intimate, intensely fulfilling act which is inevitably expressive of love and deeply felt desire. Such a view of sex betrays certain morals and ethics which Levy shares with conservative Christians. This is quite ironic, given the fact that the woman is charging today's post-feminists with closet conservativism.
Now, sex does indeed serve these purposes, but they are not the only purposes it serves. Even if we exclude what 99% of the population of the globe would probably consider to be "bad sex" (rape, peodphilia, snuff porn, kiddie porn, etc.), there's still a HUGE variety of sexual experience which people engage in on a daily basis and which has absolutely nothing to do with empowerment or intimacy, love or what have you. Levy implies that the increase in "raunch" in our culture needs must mean a decrease in intimacy and love. Unfortunately for her, this is romantic, ahistoric BS.
I would not want to live in a world where sex could not create intimacy, but I do not feel we are headed that way. The contemporary women that Levy describes do not necessarily have less love or intimacy in their lives than their great-grandmas did: they simply have more vacant, meaningless sex. Great Grandma was pressured by society to be a virgin until the day she married and to "stand by her man" until the day she died. Sexual fulfillment wasn't even on her radar screen as a possible goal. The feminism of the 1970s put the right of women to sex and sexual fullfilment in center stage, but guess what? Women are now learning what men have known for centuries: quantity does not mean quality.
That discovery by post-feminists such as Levy, however, does not necessarily mean that a diminution in sexual quantity needs must lead us forward (or back) to an increase in sexual quality. It didn't work for Great Grandma and I really doubt it would work for us.
All of us, men and women, seek a sexual utopia in which quantity and quality of sexual activity balance out. But even if we were to achieve this utopia, that does not mean that rauch would not have its place. And I, for one, think that while we are waiting for Prince(ss) Charming to come lift us out of the doldrums of the singles' bar scene, it is still nice to be able to occasionally wake up in someone else's arms, even if said person isn't our soul mate.
In the immortal words of the late sex-positive comedian, Bill Hicks: "I'm a difficult person to get along with. It would take a very special woman to love me. Or a lot of average ones. All I'm saying is, either way..."
One star for bringing up the topic. No more for the intentionally bad use of pop science to manipulate readers' opinions.
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 F-bombing great. ( poseypi1415 )
This is a brilliant book. Levy does an excellent job articulating a rather recent development in the life of young women (at least in America): women objectifying themselves and each other. A passionate demonstration of the ways in which female sexuality has been hijacked by our corporate culture. A must-read for young women and everyone who interacts with them (so everyone).
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 Looking for insight, Found it!
As a man, I was looking originally to find any insight into the female behavior I have seen in the mostly (but not exclusively) younger generation regarding sex. I definitely found what I was looking for in this book. Levy connects the dots to the feminist movements and gender role restriction/oppression and how some women continue by adopting the roles of men themselves. Great, fast read. I definitely recommend to all men.
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Eye Opening...the women behind raunch culture.
Like most people in America, I once believed the male sex drive was the soul reason for our society's raunch culture, but Ariel Levy's book, Female Chauvinist Pigs forced me to look past the stereotypes and see that women are as much to blame for the rampant lewdness in pop culture as are men. From Levy's interviews with the female producers behind Girls Gone Wild and Playboy to would be strippers and Penthouse posers it becomes evident that women are not only conforming to stereotypical sexuality--they are inventing it, marketing it, and selling it. And the price men and women are paying for this canned version of sexuality is far too high.
In the words of Paris Hilton "[girls these days] are sexy but not sexual." Levy's book reveals the hook-up culture as a place where women are detached from their own sexuality. Instead of experiencing sex intimately, women in the hook-up culture use it to boost their ego or get what they want. They aspire to be sexually, "like a man" pursuing what turns them on and leaving relationships when the desire wanes--or having no relationship at all. Robert Jensen explores this topic further in his book Getting Off: Pornography and End of Masculinity.
Levy's book is a rebuttal to what the women behind the sex industry have been saying about raunch culture, that it is empowering, liberating and healthy for women. Levy explores the origins of today's trashiness as a confused byproduct of the sexual and feminist revolutions. How did women go from burning their bras to taking stripping lessons and having poles built into their bedrooms? Why is it healthy for women to imitate strippers--women whose job it is to fake arousal? And how is a stripper--a women who is essentially mute and void of humanity--an empowering role model? Meanwhile, women are loosing real power in politics and the workplace. Levy's book proves the work of feminism has yet to be accomplished. Truly empowered and liberating sexuality leaves room for individuality, not the plastic version the sex industry tries to sell us.
I gave Levy's book four stars because it truly opened my eyes to the raunch culture that surrounds me, its origins and the people behind it. This knowledge has empowered me to do what I can to change it. Now I completely detest seeing young girls wearing the playboy bunny charm even more than before because I realize these young girls are buying into an industry that will ultimately rob them of their unique voices and sexuality. Levy's writing style is easy to read and sometimes overly simplistic. The book would have been stronger if it was more intellectual (Levy tended to repeat a lot of dialogue from her interviews and I think this was mostly unnecessary). Statistics, more first hand interviews and an official study would have made for five stars. Nevertheless, it is a quick read and its message is easily understood.
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