FOR WOMEN (AND MEN!) WHO DARE TO CALL THEMSELVES FEMINISTS
female chauvinism
Avoiding work this morning I came across this excerpt from the introduction book "Female Chauvinist Pigs" by Ariel Levy. I sure can relate to what she writes (sans the thong thing. I just can't go there).
Lately I have been thinking that despite the ubiquitous presence of sex, sex, sex that we are just as oppressed and repressed as we ever have been. Perhaps this is because we have, as therapist Lenore Tiefer posits in "Sex Is Not A Natural Act & Other Essays" that we have assimilated male sexuality (and it's pathologies).
I've also been thinking lately about how many unreported rapes there are (see other discussion on this site) and what a disturbingly large number of us have lived through this crippling experience - much higher, I believe, than the acknowledged 1 in 10. It seems to me that any discussion of sexuality and sexual representation that does not take this dirty little secret into account is flawed.
But I digress. Here's what Levy has to say:
I first noticed it several years ago. I would turn on the television and find strippers in pasties explaining how best to lap dance a man to orgasm. I would flip the channel and see babes in tight, tiny uniforms bouncing up and down on trampolines. Britney Spears was becoming increasingly popular and increasingly unclothed, and her undulating body ultimately became so familiar to me I felt like we used to go out.
Charlie's Angels, the film remake of the quintessential jiggle show, opened at number one in 2000 and made $125 million in theaters nationally, reinvigorating the interest of men and women alike in leggy crime fighting. Its stars, who kept talking about "strong women" and "empowerment," were dressed in alternating soft-porn styles -- as massage parlor geishas, dominatrixes, yodeling Heidis in alpine bustiers. (The summer sequel in 2003 -- in which the Angels' perilous mission required them to perform stripteases -- pulled in another $100 million domestically.) In my own industry, magazines, a porny new genre called the Lad Mag, which included titles like Maxim, FHM, and Stuff, was hitting the stands and becoming a huge success by delivering what Playboy had only occasionally managed to capture: greased celebrities in little scraps of fabric humping the floor.
This didn't end when I switched off the radio or the television or closed the magazines. I'd walk down the street and see teens and young women -- and the occasional wild fifty-year-old -- wearing jeans cut so low they exposed what came to be known as butt cleavage paired with miniature tops that showed off breast implants and pierced navels alike. Sometimes, in case the overall message of the outfit was too subtle, the shirts would be emblazoned with the Playboy bunny or say Porn Star across the chest.
Some odd things were happening in my social life, too. People I knew (female people) liked going to strip clubs (female strippers). It was sexy and fun, they explained; it was liberating and rebellious. My best friend from college, who used to go to Take Back the Night marches on campus, had become captivated by porn stars. She would point them out to me in music videos and watch their (topless) interviews on Howard Stern. As for me, I wasn't going to strip clubs or buying Hustler T-shirts, but I was starting to show signs of impact all the same. It had only been a few years since I'd graduated from Wesleyan University, a place where you could pretty much get expelled for saying "girl" instead of "woman," but somewhere along the line I'd started saying "chick." And, like most chicks I knew, I'd taken to wearing thongs.
What was going on? My mother, a shiatsu masseuse who attended weekly women's consciousness-raising groups for twenty-four years, didn't own makeup. My father, whom she met as a student radical at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the sixties was a consultant for Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and NOW. Only thirty years (my lifetime) ago, our mothers were "burning their bras" and picketing Playboy, and suddenly we were getting implants and wearing the bunny logo as supposed symbols of our liberation. How had the culture shifted so drastically in such a short period of time?
What was almost more surprising than the change itself were the responses I got when I started interviewing the men and -- often -- women who edit magazines like Maxim and make programs like The Man Show and Girls Gone Wild. This new raunch culture didn't mark the death of feminism, they told me; it was evidence that the feminist project had already been achieved. We'd earned the right to look at Playboy; we were empowered enough to get Brazilian bikini waxes. Women had come so far, I learned, we no longer needed to worry about objectification or misogyny. Instead, it was time for us to join the frat party of pop culture, where men had been enjoying themselves all along. If Male Chauvinist Pigs were men who regarded women as pieces of meat, we would outdo them and be Female Chauvinist Pigs: women who make sex objects of other women and of ourselves.
When I asked female viewers and readers what they got out of raunch culture, I heard similar things about empowering miniskirts and feminist strippers, and so on, but I also heard something else. They wanted to be "one of the guys"; they hoped to be experienced "like a man." Going to strip clubs or talking about porn stars was a way of showing themselves and the men around them that they weren't "prissy little women" or "girly-girls." Besides, they told me, it was all in fun, all tongue-in-cheek, and for me to regard this bacchanal as problematic would be old-school and uncool.
I tried to get with the program, but I could never make the argument add up in my head. How is resurrecting every stereotype of female sexuality that feminism endeavored to banish good for women? Why is laboring to look like Pamela Anderson empowering? And how is imitating a stripper or a porn star -- a woman whose job is to imitate arousal in the first place -- going to render us sexually liberated?
Despite the rising power of Evangelical Christianity and the political right in the United States, this trend has only grown more extreme and more pervasive in the years that have passed since I first became aware of it. A tawdry, tarty, cartoonlike version of female sexuality has become so ubiquitous, it no longer seems particular. What we once regarded as a kind of sexual expression we now view as sexuality. As former adult film star Traci Lords put it to a reporter a few days before her memoir hit the best-seller list in 2003, "When I was in porn, it was like a back-alley thing. Now it's everywhere." Spectacles of naked ladies have moved from seedy side streets to center stage, where everyone -- men and women -- can watch them in broad daylight. Playboy and its ilk are being "embraced by young women in a curious way in a postfeminist world," to borrow the words of Hugh Hefner.
But just because we are post doesn't automatically mean we are feminists. There is a widespread assumption that simply because my generation of women has the good fortune to live in a world touched by the feminist movement, that means everything we do is magically imbued with its agenda. It doesn't work that way. "Raunchy" and "liberated" are not synonyms. It is worth asking ourselves if this bawdy world of boobs and gams we have resurrected reflects how far we've come, or how far we have left to go.
Lately I have been thinking that despite the ubiquitous presence of sex, sex, sex that we are just as oppressed and repressed as we ever have been. Perhaps this is because we have, as therapist Lenore Tiefer posits in "Sex Is Not A Natural Act & Other Essays" that we have assimilated male sexuality (and it's pathologies).
I've also been thinking lately about how many unreported rapes there are (see other discussion on this site) and what a disturbingly large number of us have lived through this crippling experience - much higher, I believe, than the acknowledged 1 in 10. It seems to me that any discussion of sexuality and sexual representation that does not take this dirty little secret into account is flawed.
But I digress. Here's what Levy has to say:
I first noticed it several years ago. I would turn on the television and find strippers in pasties explaining how best to lap dance a man to orgasm. I would flip the channel and see babes in tight, tiny uniforms bouncing up and down on trampolines. Britney Spears was becoming increasingly popular and increasingly unclothed, and her undulating body ultimately became so familiar to me I felt like we used to go out.
Charlie's Angels, the film remake of the quintessential jiggle show, opened at number one in 2000 and made $125 million in theaters nationally, reinvigorating the interest of men and women alike in leggy crime fighting. Its stars, who kept talking about "strong women" and "empowerment," were dressed in alternating soft-porn styles -- as massage parlor geishas, dominatrixes, yodeling Heidis in alpine bustiers. (The summer sequel in 2003 -- in which the Angels' perilous mission required them to perform stripteases -- pulled in another $100 million domestically.) In my own industry, magazines, a porny new genre called the Lad Mag, which included titles like Maxim, FHM, and Stuff, was hitting the stands and becoming a huge success by delivering what Playboy had only occasionally managed to capture: greased celebrities in little scraps of fabric humping the floor.
This didn't end when I switched off the radio or the television or closed the magazines. I'd walk down the street and see teens and young women -- and the occasional wild fifty-year-old -- wearing jeans cut so low they exposed what came to be known as butt cleavage paired with miniature tops that showed off breast implants and pierced navels alike. Sometimes, in case the overall message of the outfit was too subtle, the shirts would be emblazoned with the Playboy bunny or say Porn Star across the chest.
Some odd things were happening in my social life, too. People I knew (female people) liked going to strip clubs (female strippers). It was sexy and fun, they explained; it was liberating and rebellious. My best friend from college, who used to go to Take Back the Night marches on campus, had become captivated by porn stars. She would point them out to me in music videos and watch their (topless) interviews on Howard Stern. As for me, I wasn't going to strip clubs or buying Hustler T-shirts, but I was starting to show signs of impact all the same. It had only been a few years since I'd graduated from Wesleyan University, a place where you could pretty much get expelled for saying "girl" instead of "woman," but somewhere along the line I'd started saying "chick." And, like most chicks I knew, I'd taken to wearing thongs.
What was going on? My mother, a shiatsu masseuse who attended weekly women's consciousness-raising groups for twenty-four years, didn't own makeup. My father, whom she met as a student radical at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the sixties was a consultant for Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and NOW. Only thirty years (my lifetime) ago, our mothers were "burning their bras" and picketing Playboy, and suddenly we were getting implants and wearing the bunny logo as supposed symbols of our liberation. How had the culture shifted so drastically in such a short period of time?
What was almost more surprising than the change itself were the responses I got when I started interviewing the men and -- often -- women who edit magazines like Maxim and make programs like The Man Show and Girls Gone Wild. This new raunch culture didn't mark the death of feminism, they told me; it was evidence that the feminist project had already been achieved. We'd earned the right to look at Playboy; we were empowered enough to get Brazilian bikini waxes. Women had come so far, I learned, we no longer needed to worry about objectification or misogyny. Instead, it was time for us to join the frat party of pop culture, where men had been enjoying themselves all along. If Male Chauvinist Pigs were men who regarded women as pieces of meat, we would outdo them and be Female Chauvinist Pigs: women who make sex objects of other women and of ourselves.
When I asked female viewers and readers what they got out of raunch culture, I heard similar things about empowering miniskirts and feminist strippers, and so on, but I also heard something else. They wanted to be "one of the guys"; they hoped to be experienced "like a man." Going to strip clubs or talking about porn stars was a way of showing themselves and the men around them that they weren't "prissy little women" or "girly-girls." Besides, they told me, it was all in fun, all tongue-in-cheek, and for me to regard this bacchanal as problematic would be old-school and uncool.
I tried to get with the program, but I could never make the argument add up in my head. How is resurrecting every stereotype of female sexuality that feminism endeavored to banish good for women? Why is laboring to look like Pamela Anderson empowering? And how is imitating a stripper or a porn star -- a woman whose job is to imitate arousal in the first place -- going to render us sexually liberated?
Despite the rising power of Evangelical Christianity and the political right in the United States, this trend has only grown more extreme and more pervasive in the years that have passed since I first became aware of it. A tawdry, tarty, cartoonlike version of female sexuality has become so ubiquitous, it no longer seems particular. What we once regarded as a kind of sexual expression we now view as sexuality. As former adult film star Traci Lords put it to a reporter a few days before her memoir hit the best-seller list in 2003, "When I was in porn, it was like a back-alley thing. Now it's everywhere." Spectacles of naked ladies have moved from seedy side streets to center stage, where everyone -- men and women -- can watch them in broad daylight. Playboy and its ilk are being "embraced by young women in a curious way in a postfeminist world," to borrow the words of Hugh Hefner.
But just because we are post doesn't automatically mean we are feminists. There is a widespread assumption that simply because my generation of women has the good fortune to live in a world touched by the feminist movement, that means everything we do is magically imbued with its agenda. It doesn't work that way. "Raunchy" and "liberated" are not synonyms. It is worth asking ourselves if this bawdy world of boobs and gams we have resurrected reflects how far we've come, or how far we have left to go.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Jacqueline Hynes on -
'One of the boys' you know what that says to me? We've given up and given in. It says that we couldn't beat em (the misogyny, chauvinism, oppression of women) so we might as well join them, as if wearing the clothes men want us to wear and enduring the brazilian because we can choose it, makes us free. Can't we see that it's still for them at that we've been brainwashed or have personally lied to ourselves because the fight is just too hard? I have to fight my tears this morning because I have an important interview but I am crying on the inside and I hope the rest of your do as well. Don't let them destroy us and by them I mean the societal trajectory we're on that are crushing us women and is creating a woman for the man, the new man and certainly not a man that any of my male friends would approve of.
J
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Permalink Reply by Missiz on -
Jackie I hope your interview goes great. You're brilliant and whatever you are being interviewed for, they'll be lucky to have you.
It's only by insisting that our own view of things is legitimate and not apologize for it will we change things. I myself am tired of censoring myself for fear of "being a drag" or "no fun".
This piece also resonated with my discomfort with the notion of the "power" of the sex object. Yeah, sure, you can manipulate a man who really wants to fuck you, but at the end of the day, this "power" is secondary, reflected, parasitic to it's real source.
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Permalink Reply by Rosemary House on -
I just left a note on Jacqueline's blog post but will reply here as well because I have been so bothered, saddened, angered by the very things you and Ariel Levy and J. are talking about. When we became 'liberated' from enforced modesty and social norms about 'nice' girls we were immediately imprisoned, or allowed others to be imprisoned by a truly extraordinary hyper-sexualization of girls and women. One particularly vile manifestation is the spectacle of young, nearly naked, drug-addled celebrities careening through a jungle of paparazzi and wretched excess in order to satisfy the beast they were created to feed.
The other day in the papers here in Toronto there was an article about schools banning kilts because the girls wear them indecently short and can't be stopped from doing so apparently. I admit I have been appalled to see 16 and 17 year girls on the street with kilts barely covering their asses, bare legs, knee socks - little girl outfits on fully formed young women. It's all very disturbing and hard to know how we have managed to go so wrong.
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Permalink Reply by Lois Brown on -
Oh the bright side, I taught my first class at Mun this semester and I can report that what is being described here is not always the case. None of the female students, the young women, were dressed in any other way than to make you think they were serious students, altho they all had style. I am putting this out there, because if I was their age and I was reading that this was the case with all young women, I would feel very much alone. I am also putting out there as a support for young women who do not follow this trend. I think it is unfortunate that the celebrity models for women in North American society are so sleezy. Modelling is one the most subversive and potent ways of teaching. Yet, we dismissed this technique in schools for a long, long time, (hand-in-hand the popularizing of the anti-hero). To my mind the best way to provide a counteraction to all this is to provide strong female modeling - which this site, Rosemary, does so well.
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Permalink Reply by Jacqueline Hynes on
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In response to Lois, for me, this dialogue is about those WHO DO fall victim to the influence of negative role models. And as Lois mentioned, I think it is important to note that a lot of women do overcome such influence and remain positive role models themselves. And that should be emphasized before commenting on the trend of sexualizing our young women.
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Permalink Reply by Missiz on
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I am relieved to hear that there is not so much of this trend apparent at MUN. It would be interesting to hear what some of these women have to say about raunch culture because it is so unavoidably pervasive.
I ordered the book and I have not been able to put it down. Do you ever have the feeling with a book that the author has written just for you, so you don't have to do all the research and work to make your argument and articulate your position? That's not very coherent, but what I mean is Ariel Levy has clearly stated a perspective that I have held for a long time and put words to something that has been bothering to the extent that it has been eating at me.
She makes so many clear and interesting points, one which is that Bimbo Chic is not exclusive to education and opportunity. It seems to boil down to a couple of things: An intense devaluation of all things feminine with the simultaneous edification of all things masculine and the very narrow definition of sexuality wherein if you don't think that learning to pole dance is empowering and super-fun, then you have completely missed the hipness boat, are anti-sex and and an out-of date prude.
This book is fantastic, witty and engagingly written. I want to buy copies for everyone I know.
If you are interested, here are the links for it on both Amazon and Chapters.
http://www.amazon.com/Female-Chauvinist-Pigs-Raunch-Culture/dp/0743...
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Female-Chauvinist-Pigs-Women-Ri...
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