O Femina! O Mores!(Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture)(Book review)

Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, by Ariel Levy (Free Press, 240 pp., $25)

I USED hot-pink post-it notes to mark the pages of this book; it seemed appropriate, since they matched so perfectly the book's hot-pink cover. The cover, in turn, is highly appropriate for the book's contents. Its author, New York magazine contributing editor Ariel Levy, has spent several years looking at today's young women--how they dress and behave, what they watch and whom they admire--and she is very, very perplexed.

It's not just that when she turns on the TV, she finds strippers in pasties giving advice on " how best to lap dance a man to orgasm"; or that when she walks down the street, she sees young women in jeans that expose their "butt-cleavage" topped with minuscule T-shirts emblazoned with Playboy-bunny logos. Of even more concern to Levy was her discovery that "people I know (female people) liked going to strip clubs (female strippers). It was sexy and fun, they explained. It was liberating and rebellious. My best friend at college, who used to go to Take Back the Night marches on campus, had become captivated by porn stars."

Yikes! Yes, the daughters of mothers who burned their bras and picketed Playboy and staged a sit-in at Ladies' Home Journal to force the magazine to promote feminism have decided that they are now empowered enough to get Brazilian bikini waxes, adopt Pamela Anderson's dress sense, and indulge--wholeheartedly--in the frat party of popular culture.

Understandably, Levy has trouble making this all add up. What happened to second-wave pornography-hating feminism, in this post-feminist pornography-proliferating world? To find out, she explores the many byways of "raunch culture," including the making of Girls' Gone Wild videos, in which young women on spring break appear eager to flash for the camera. These particular videos are now a huge business, allegedly worth $100 million dollars to Joe Francis, its creator. She also attends an evening organized by CAKE, "a hyper-sexed sorority" that deftly mixes political action--they arranged for a bus to take women to Washington for the April 2004 pro-abortion march--with sex-toy parties.

Part of Levy's thesis is that young women today basically want to act about sex the way young men always have. Some of the women want to take this idea to its literal extreme. Levy spends a very long, distasteful chapter--which, like a number of other chapters, began its life as a New York magazine article-describing lesbians who are trying to turn themselves, through testosterone shots and double mastectomies, into young men.

The author does a very good takedown job on the women who are profiting from raunch culture. Notable among them are Christie Hefner, who has spent years defending her father's dozy Playboy, and trying to revive it; and the much-lauded Sheila Nevins, head of documentaries at HBO, known for her risky, cutting-edge taste. Levy describes how Nevins, who has won numerous honors, rips apart a woman who dares to question why she is producing G-String Divas, a late night soft-core docu-soap. "Everyone has to bump and grind for what they want," Nevins, the Jewish Woman of Inspiration award-winner, replies with a snarl; she goes on to defend the strippers who star in her program by saying, "Their bodies are their instruments, and if I had a body like that I would play it like a Stradivarius." Nevins is using here a typical Female Chauvinist Pig strategy: Make anyone who questions or disagrees with you seem prudish and uncool.