Female Chauvinist Pigs

Female Chauvinist Pigs – Ariel Levy

My apologies, I am writing this two weeks after finishing the book, so it will be an abbreviated review.

The rise of raunch culture has produced a society in which women now objectify themselves and other women in the same way men do and call it feminism, but is it really feminism? While institutions like Playboy, Girls Gone Wild, and the porn industry have added new ideas and definitions of what it means to be sexy, they have also redefined and restricted what it means to be sexy. After decades of attempting to make women equal to men, women now attempt to be like men to achieve the highest status in society. Levy points out how this is not equality, constricts the spectrum of “sexy,” and does not qualify our society as “postfeminist.”

This book is excellent for discussion, and after reading it, I forced it onto some other PCVs in my group so they could read it and we could all discuss it. The discussion happened over a holiday weekend at the beach, and lasted for hours. We talked about everything from how social dictates for how men and women act impact your personal experience, how to buck the system, why women still feel the need for male approval and how that approval has shifted, and whether there was any solution to it all. This was our main problem with the book – it doesn’t present a solution to raunch culture. So Playboy, porn, and Girls Gone Wild claim to “liberate” women by offering a shockingly scanty way to reveal themselves, but what can we do to counter these trends? How can we remind everyone about the goals of the feminist movement? Is it possible to incorporate raunch culture into feminism, and how? What can we do about it? She doesn’t tell us. But she sure is thought-provoking.