Book Review!
It's been a while since I've done one of these.
Title: Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture
Author: Ariel Levy
Stars: 4/5
Review From Amazon: 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.
My Review: I loved this book. It made some really great points about how our culture views sexuality and how people like Paris Hilton have gotten so popular. The only problem I had with it was that Levy focused mostly on women who proved her point--the ones who didn't understand the concept of having sex for pleasure, the ones who went to strip clubs, bought playboy, the preteens who dressed in teeny tiny little outfits, and the women who worked behind the scenes at porn magazines or on Girls Gone Wild shoots. She interviewed a few feminists from the 60's and 70's who didn't like ranch culture, which was my favorite part of the book, but there are people out in the world who do have sex for pleasure and don't care for raunch. My middle school and high school certainly wasn't as skank filled as the ones she interviewed people from. Overall, though, I get what she was showing, that this is a huge problem, but I still would have liked to hear from a few people who didn't go out for raunch.
Favorite Part: The talk about 60's and 70's feminists.
Least Favorite Part: The chapter about teen sexuality (which only showed one side of the spectrum, the raunch side. Where was the teens who didn't like raunch culture? I know they're out there). And the chapter about the lesbian community and the "boi" mentality. The only thing I got from it is that every lesbian who identifies as a "boi" is an immature, misogynistic asshole, which I find sort of doubtful.