So, I just finished reading Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs that I picked up from the library. After the heavy theoretical readings of a fourth year women's studies class that I finished last month it was an easy, breezy read. This I thought was fantastic, because the book is easily accessible to anyone who doesn't have training in women's/equity/area studies or related disciplines, but anyone interested in the topic.
Levy questions the validity of the idea that women's participating in the current trend of raunch culture (Girls Gone Wild; women buying "lad mags" like Playboy; women attending strip clubs with female strippers etc. - basically anything that involves women buying into the popular established masculinist view of women and their sexuality) means that women have finally achieved equality with men and may experience and enjoy their own sexuality the same way that men do. To do this she examines the history of the women's movement, pinpointing specifically the time in the second wave when some women chose this path to sexual liberation, and others continued the struggle to have a differently experienced way of female sexuality recognized as valid and equal to the popular notion of men's sexuality. Levy clearly places herself in latter camp, questioning why, if women's sexual liberation has truly arrived, we are seeing the perpetuation of the conservative culture first implemented during the Reagan era (she mentions specifically the United States but I would argue that this is happening more widely in North America. A topic for a later post!) and which continues in this day and age of the popularity of George W. Bush, Fred Phelps, and the dearly departed Jerry Falwell.
How are Female Chauvinist Pigs damaging the women's movement instead of contributing to it? (Personally, I don't see what's so sexually liberating about making out with your best girlfriend for the first time ever, stinking drunk at a foam party with half your clothes off while some horny, slimy frat boys you never met before in your life gawk greedily). By not only buying into the notion that women's sexuality is not only similar to but divergent to men's (and here I'm not even opening up the question of how narrow and problematic the experience of male sexuality is according to FCPs and the males that love them) and at the same time, rejecting the advances made by feminists during the past 100+ years that women experience sexuality in ways that are not necessarily conflicting, but rather different, than do men.
The long section that Levy devotes to discussing the pervasiveness of raunch culture acceptance among American girls of high school age shows how far the problem has progressed - girls are reaching puberty and are trained to look and behave in a certain way which will attract men. The revolution towards our way of thinking cannot start once we are out of high school or in college, it has to start from the "ground up".
I remember as an adolescent girl (albeit one with a "latent" feminist tendency) spending hours agonizing over why the boy I liked didn't like me - were my boobs big enough? Did I show them off enough? Did I wear enough makeup? How could I better show off my body to get him to notice me? This came so naturally that I never or rarely questioned why I felt that I had to change myself so much just to win a boy's affection.
How familiar is this story, and more importantly, how many women change this way of thinking at some point? We can't obliterate all the aspects of raunch culture (note how pervasive it is in, say, American Apparel's work environment and advertising strategies), but in addition to the tired old adage of "teaching our children differently" we can refuse to buy products from brands that use Female Chauvinism in their marketing, we can spread the word about how damaging these images are to all women (like a few months ago when I got several notifications in my inbox about the horrific American Apparel ads).
More thoughts to come later.
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2 comments:
It's a fine line - some women partake in "celebrating" their sexuality by going to strip clubs, enjoying their sex lives, and claim to not be offended by male chauvinism because they're comfortable in their skins and sexuality. How much of this is really "celebrating", and how much of it is them unconsciously overcompensating for feeling a lack of equality, thereby perpetuating this FCP idea?
Good question Dani. It's so easy to be seduced by things like "Girls Gone Wild" or women's attendance at female strip clubs because on the surface, it does seem that women have achieved equality. I don't think it's entirely because women partaking in this behavior haven't thoroughly considered the implications behind their actions. Forces such as the media's portrayal of women's sexuality, gender roles/boundaries that we are brought up with in Western culture are much more culpable, in my opinion.
I'm not so far away from my own adolescent insecurity about the size of my breasts or my figure and so I can clearly remember when these forces, coupled with my personal prediliction for self-criticism, anxiety and inferiority complex led to myself behaving in ways that would be embarrassing to me now. I still deal with it, in fact. This is probably the the case for a number of women, as the balance of power is such that it's impossible to escape the forces that shape a woman's experience of her sexuality.
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