I read Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture by Ariel Levy after it was briefly mentioned in Chuck Palahniuk's book SNUFF. Levy has written a really compelling book that is worth having a look at. I checked out several of the online reviews and I wasn't impressed. I think a lot of the reviewers - in their summaries and criticisms - missed the point.

Female Chauvinist Pigs are women who make sex objects of other women. This is the new (anti-)feminism: The Man Show, Maxim, and Girls Gone Wild. Levy is curious why women are participating so avidly in these cultural phenomena. In the course of her inquires Levy was told that "This new raunch culture didn't mark the death of feminism . . . it was evidence that the feminist project had already been achieved" (3). She writes, "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" (4). Notice the subtle thesis here: raunch culture is about exclusion, not female empowerment.

Through a series of interviews and a survey of feminist writings and social commentaries, Levy aims to explain why raunch culture has become mainstream, something she claims appears to be little more than a "fantasy world dreamed up by teenage boys" (17). How exactly, she asks, has stripping come to symbolize sexual liberation? Part of this is commercial, the creation of a single image that becomes shorthand for sexiness as a whole (30). Another part is competitive and status-driven: Sex and the City, for example. But there are other issues: the confusion of a desire for attention or recognition with sexual desire (162). In one chapter on sex and sexuality in high school Levy concludes that many female teenagers "weren't so much experimenting with sex as experimenting with celebrity" (146). The idea here is that the adoption of a particular kind of sexual persona is the means to achieve recognition and attention.

What Levy doesn't address is the functioning of masculinity in all this. This isn't so much a criticism (since she isn't writing about masculinity) as a rejoinder. I think Levy has provided compelling evidence and would suggest that her study could also be linked to a more sustained analysis of masculinity as narcissism. Misogyny is an expression of masculine narcissism, a subjective position that engages in rivalry with other men and uses women as objects or as extensions of the self. It is difficult to diagnose because it is so pervasive and systematic and deep-seated.

It is obvious after reading Levy's work that many women are terrified of being identifies as humourless. In numerous interviews Levy encounters the same desire: a desire to be perceived as being fun and sexy. This translates as wanting to participate in and wanting to be seen as wanting to participate in raunch culture. Today, if I can put it this way, to say that a woman isn't "fun" because she might not laugh at a sexist joke or enjoy the raunch displays and enactments of reified female sexuality is an exact expression of the new misogyny that pretends to be feminist and sex-positive but an unmitigated extension of fraternal norms and practices.