Today's young women seem to be outdoing the male chauvinist pigs of yesteryear, applauding the 'pornification' of other women, and themselves. This is a world where simulating sex for baying crowds of men on shows like Girls Gone Wild and going to lapdancing clubs - as patrons - is seen as a short cut to cool. Ariel Levy says the joke's on the women if they think this is progress. She tears apart the myth of this new brand of 'empowered woman' and refuses a culture-wide obligation for women to act and look like porn stars. This terrifically witty and wickedly intelligent book makes the case that the rise of raunch does not represent how far women have come - it proves only how far women have left to go.

Reviews

Female Chauvinist Pigs (FCPs), according to New York magazine columnist Levy, come in two species: the woman "open to a certain sort of attention" and her foul-mouthed female fan, willing and able to objectify "like a man." Though the reductive thesis imposes obvious limits, Levy nonetheless fortifies this original work with the boggling evidence of raunch culture's ubiquity. Defending their work variously as liberating, ironic, and humorous, influential triumvirate Christie Hefner (Playboy), Sheila Nevins (HBO), and Jennifer Heftler (former producer of Comedy Central's The Man Show) appear unreflective as they call the (compromising) hot shots. Community anecdotes also abound as lesbians (butch and boi) disparage their femme girlfriends or the straight dupes of the "Girls Gone Wild" juggernaut flash for a branded hat. Levy suggests that the motivation behind all this pole dancing and pose striking is fear of an uptight planet; she blames antiporn feminists like the late Andrea Dworkin and Elizabeth MacKinnon for this development. Her insights into preteens' confusion between feeling sexual attraction and simply desiring attention reinforce her argument for rehabilitation of comprehensive sex-ed programs. Levy's witty style entertains even as the facts disturb. Recommended for all public libraries. [See "Fall Editors' Picks," LJ 9/1/05.-Ed.]-Elizabeth Kennedy, Oakland, CA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

What does "sexy" mean today? Levy, smartly expanding on reporting for an article in New York magazine, argues that the term is defined by a pervasive "raunch culture" wherein women "make sex objects of other women and of ourselves." The voracious search for what's sexy, she writes, has reincarnated a day when Playboy Bunnies (and airbrushed and surgically altered nudity) epitomized female beauty. It has elevated porn above sexual pleasure. Most insidiously, it has usurped the keywords of the women's movement ("liberation," "empowerment") to serve as "buzzwords" for a female sexuality that denies passion (in all its forms) and embraces consumerism. To understand how this happened, Levy examines the women's movement, identifying the "residue" of divisive, unresolved issues about women's relationship to men and sex. The resulting raunch feminism, she writes, is "a garbled attempt at continuing the work of the women's movement" and asks, "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?" Levy's insightful reporting and analysis chill the hype of what's hot. It will create many "aha!" moments for readers who have been wondering how porn got to be pop and why "feminism" is such a dirty word. (Sept. 13) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.