Feminism Is a Failure, and Other Myths

Every few years, feminism gets kicked up to marquee status under the rubric of having failed, like a stain-remover that just didn't do what it promised.

The media story goes like this: since feminism didn't provide equality, happiness or the perfect date, women are fleeing the feminist "lifestyle" in droves, taking their husbands' names, kvetching about catching a man, or rushing to show their breasts in a Girl Gone Wild video.

You hear about feminism's futility from obvious antifeminists such as Ann Coulter, but you also hear it, more provocatively, from women who aren't raving misogynists, such as Maureen Dowd, whose book of ambivalent observations on the liberated single girl's life has launched some heated conversations. And most poignantly, you hear the feminism-is-a-failure mantra from New York Magazine writer Ariel Levy, in her new polemic, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, in which she argues that today's women have, in their thongs and stripper-wannabe antics, disappointed feminism.

Full disclosure: Levy refers to me in the book, and dismissively. Still, I was sympathetic, especially at first, to her and Dowd's feminist critiques. I can certainly relate to the fumblings of women as they negotiate their lives and relationships. Feminism has brought much coherence to my life, but in the complicated and often-awkward world of sex and desire, it has proved less useful. If pressed, I'd venture that at least half of my sexual experiences make me cringe when I think about them today. Taking top honors is the many times I made out with female friends in bars when I was in my early 20s, a rite of passage Levy much disdains throughout the book. I'm embarrassed about the kiss-around-the-circles, but if I didn't have those moments, I'm not sure I ever would have found my way to the real long-term relationship I have today. If all my sexual behavior had to be evolved and reciprocal and totally revolutionary before I had it, I'd never have had sex.

Still, Levy accurately points out the continued confusion around feminism and sex. Much as I fought it, though, there was a certain dissonance in my attempt to be a good, actualized feminist and my desire to still get the love and sexual attention I wanted. In college, I partied weekly at the same frats I would denounce in class as the center of date rape and misogyny.

Levy swings hardest at this conflict in her book, arguing that the daughters of feminism's second wave are eager to prove how beyond sexism they are, "making sex objects of other women -- and of themselves." These women, according to Levy, "think they are being brave... and funny" but Levy thinks "the joke is on them."

The book opens with a Girls Gone Wild video shoot, which is every bit as awful as you'd imagine. The formula for this reality video cash cow is to station a film crew at spring break locales where the alcohol is plentiful and the girls young, then egg the women on to show their breasts or thong-clad buns or to make out with female friends.

Levy then lists her compendium of raunch: female Olympic athletes posing nude for Playboy, the rise in breast implants and "vaginoplasty," and a spate of porn star memoirs including Jenna Jameson's How to Make Love Like a Porn Star. Levy argues that women embracing raunch means women accepting misogyny -- a premise that is powerful and, in a way, true. But in exposing the permeation of porn in responsible society, she squashes all public displays of female sexuality into the box marked "objectification."

Female-run "Cake" parties are written off as cheesy fake lesbian performances for men in suits. Female-to-male transexuals are portrayed as wildly emulating the most crass and immature high school guys. She finds some depressing examples -- teen girls using the Internet to post photos of themselves fellating a Swiffer. And while Dowd's assumption is that feminism just isn't sexy, Levy's message seems to be that sex and sexiness can't be used by women -- only against them.