Dan’s Blog

I recently finished reading Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy, and I was impressed enough that I wrote a review of it, which I posted on Amazon.com. And now I’m posting it here:

Female Chauvinist Pigs is really about two things: sexual pleasure and freedom. Specifically, Levy wants to know why “post-feminist” freedom and sexuality — epitomized by Girls Gone Wild, Playboy bunnies, and the glorification of porn stars and strippers — looks so much like its opposite: a pre-feminist world in which women try their damnedess to please their partners (or crowds, or video cameras) without a strong sense of their own sexual desires.

There are two different identities that Levy describes: first, that of the “empowered” sex object, personified in the idea of the sex worker (porn stars, strippers) as the ultimate women; and second, the woman who is actually one of the guys, personified successful corporate women who, like Judith Reagan, seem to talk about the the size of their penises a lot, while professing a general distrust of women, especially “girly-girls”, who are generally referred to as “pussies”.

The two identities generally overlap (combining into the “Female Chauvinist Pig”), and even people in the first group seem to hate “girly-girls”. But people solidly in the former group seem to be drunk, unhappy, and prone to eating disorders, whereas people in the latter group are more likely to be successful and tend not to make out with other women in bars. But a lot of women seem to spend time in both categories, and sometimes you get a Paris Hilton, who perfectly embodies both sides of the coin.

The book really focuses on the peusdo-stripper aspect of the identity, which makes its way down to girls who are younger and younger (think middle school), and older and older (think thirty-something lawyer). The problem with this identity, for Levy, is that strippers and porn stars are inappopriate sexual role models, not because they are too sexual, but because they are paid to pretend that they enjoy something that they wouldn’t be doing otherwise.

And in interview after interview, Levy finds sexually libertine females of all ages who don’t seem to enjoy sex at all, in no small part because they don’t seem to really know what it is that they would want from a partner (other than attention), or what they would want sexually (other than to please someone else). For Levy, it would seem, the ultimate sin is having sex and not enjoying it. And it’s a sin that has its roots in a culture that teaches women to be sexy and men to be sexual.

Some reviews have said that Levy doesn’t offer solutions; I don’t think that that’s true. Levy brings in a brief history of feminism from the 1950s to the 1980s to argue that freedom (through equality) and honest female pleasure were really what feminists were after, and the breakdown of feminism around issues like pornography and the universality of lesbianism has left modern women less able to understand the idea that women share a fate.

Levy argues over and over that if women, as a whole, are thought of negatively, then the mere fact of being female will continue to be a taint on all females, even those who most solidly identify with masculinity. So the beginnings of a solution are fairly obvious; women should understand that their fates are linked, and people should generally work to destigmatize womanhood.

Barring that, individuals should look at their own sexuality and sexual behavior and ask themselves if they’re really getting what it is that they want, and if not, they should pursue a different strategy for sexual fulfillment.

Female Chauvinist Pigs at Amazon.com