Female Chauvinist Pigs

By Kara Jesella, Nerve.com. Posted October 3, 2005.

Something is going on with this country when the only way to tell the hipster girls dry-humping one another on lastnightsparty.com from the sorority girls parading around in wet T-shirts at MTV's Spring Break is by counting their tattoos (hint: the first group has more). In Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (Free Press), thirty-year-old Ariel Levy posits that as pornography has permeated American society, a new and pervasive genre of woman has arisen: the Female Chauvinist Pig.

Anxious to be perceived as hot, and reluctant to feel left out of what Levy calls "the frat party of pop culture," FCPs eagerly make sex objects out of other women and themselves, claiming that watching Drew Barrymore whirl around a pole in the Charlie's Angels sequel and posing for Playboy is "empowering." Levy thinks they're kidding themselves, mistaking sexual power for real power and, worse, believing that mimicking the sexuality of strippers, Playmates, and porn stars -- women who are paid to simulate real women's sexuality -- is power in the first place. "'Raunchy' and 'liberated' are not synonyms," she says.

True. But they aren't necessarily opposites. As I was reading FCP, I kept remembering a scene from my youth. It was 1992 and I was in my kitchen, flipping through my dad's copy of Newsweek, when a picture stopped me cold. The girls in it were my age, but they looked a lot cooler than I did with their bleached blonde hair, arms crossed over their chests, and the word "Slut" scrawled in Sharpie across the defiantly unaerobicized stomachs protruding from their half-shirts. They were riot grrrls, "a sassy new breed of feminist for the MTV age." For the magazine's suburbanite subscribers -- who most likely couldn't fathom why a teenager would use her body as a billboard for high school's nastiest insult -- the article quoted one of the movement's zines: "SLUT. Yeah, I'm a slut. My body belongs to me. I sleep with who I want . . . I'm not your property." It was both no means no and yes means yes. To a seventeen-year-old girl, this was mind-blowing.

Levy is an ardent student of feminist history, eagerly chronicling how, in the 1970s, women's liberation and the sexual revolution overlapped, then diverged, before devolving into the sex wars of the 1980s that split the activists into two camps: "pro-sex" and "anti-porn." But besides a smackdown of purportedly pro-woman CAKE parties -- which "seek to redefine the current boundaries [of] female sexuality" via pole dancers; scantily-clad, pillow-fighting models; and the drooling guys who attend them -- Levy skips right over the riot grrrls and the rest of the feminists who began coming of age in the 1990s, the women who call themselves the third wave, who aren't just consumers of raunch culture, but helped create and define it.

It's a shame that Levy chooses to focus exclusively on young women who have nothing more on their minds than going wild, no political agenda other than getting ahead or liberating their own libidos. Because there are plenty of women who take a more socially conscious approach to smut. There are the women who, unhappy with a lack of girl-friendly porn, started Sweet Action, a glossy that showcases full-frontal rocker boys. There are the former editors of dearly departed teen magazine Sassy (which regularly and seriously used the word "patriarchy") who ran a monthly, guy-focused "Cute Band Alert" feature because "everyone needs someone to objectify."

But third-wave women did more than turn the tables on men; they questioned the very foundations of sexuality. Levy worries that one of the biggest sexual issues confronting women is "the prioritizing of performance over pleasure." And I concur that there's a serious problem when teenage girls feel like they need to show up to school tarted up like Christina Aguilera on the cover of her Drrrty album. But that isn't the whole story. As any undergraduate worth her Women's Studies diploma knows, third wave she-roes like Judith Butler, author of Gender Trouble, and Madonna, star of Truth or Dare, have had a lot to say about how performance can be a part of pleasure. (One that guys may be cluing in to: An acquaintance recently told me about going to see friends of her daughter's play in a band. In the middle of the set, the two guys stopped performing -- in the acoustic sense, at least -- and began furiously making out. "It's almost like teenage boys have caught up to where teenage girls were ten years ago," the woman mused.)

Kara Jesella is a freelance writer in New York City. She is currently co-writing a book on Sassy magazine for Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

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