Ariel Levy
FEMALE CHAUVINIST PIGS
Women and the rise of raunch culture
256pp. Simon and Schuster. £17.99 (US $25).
0 743 24989 5
Nostalgia comes in many, equally misleading, guises. There are those who look back wistfully to a time when it was safe to wander the streets after dark, despite evidence that our cities are considerably safer than they were in the nineteenth century and (for better or worse) more thoroughly policed than they ever have been. Similarly, there are others who respond to the Barbie doll image and apparently limited aspirations of contemporary young women with a lament for the 1960s and 70s, when the mothers of these pretty creatures burned their bras and were proud to call themselves feminists. In fact, of course, it was a small minority of (mostly) urban, privileged, well-educated women whose lives were touched by feminism. The vast majority of women, even if they were the beneficiaries of the social reforms won by their feminist sisters, continued bra-bound and made-up as ever.
Ariel Levy has been taken in by exactly this second form of nostalgia, and exploits it in Female Chauvinist Pigs – a brisk essay, partly sewn together from her articles in New York magazine and elsewhere – in which she deplores the fashion among the younger generation for breast implants, thongs and scanty crop-tops, their “laddish” enthusiasm for pornography and striptease, as well as the “simplistic, plastic stereotypes of female sexuality” that pervade modern culture. What happened, she wonders, to the great days of women in dungarees?
As the generally favourable reception of this book in the United States shows, nostalgia is a very strong card to play. But it is also a cheap trick, which in this case offers as misleading an image of contemporary culture as it does of the so-called “feminist” past. New York may be different of course; but I do not get the impression (despite Levy’s claims) that women in Britian are practising lap dancing in huge numbers, or that they are flocking to strip clubs. True, thongs are one of the more puzzling fashions in female underwear (though they are probably no more uncomfortable that the corsets worn by previous generations); but many of us will not actually know anyone who has had a breast implant, still less surgically trimmed labia. Part of Levy’s problem is that she has a very poor eye for fantasy (looking at Pamela Anderson is not the same as wanting to look like her) and for irony. When women choose a shampoo called “Dumb Blonde”, for example, it is much more likely to be a wry gesture of subversion than a clear indication that that is how they see themselves.
Levy also has a decidedly weak grasp of historical comparison and change. In one chapter, entitled “Pigs in Training”, she turns her censorious eye on to teen culture. Teen blogs reveal girls watching their weight obsessively, pondering on the minutiae of oral sex and deciding how most conveniently to lose their virginity. It certainly does not make pleasant reading for the over-20s. The shared mythology of the “rainbow party” (at which a group of girls wearing different coloured lipsticks treat a single lucky boy to oral sex all evening, with a predictable “rainbow” effect) is enough to alarm most parents, whether it has any basis in reality or not. Nonetheless, for all Levy’s disapproval, the focus of these adolescent concerns (sex, bodies and clothes) and their sometimes lurid expression seem to match up fairly closely to what I remember of middle-class youth culture in Shrewsbury in c1970. The real difference is that, since the advent of the internet, adolescents can share their youthful fantasies with the whole planet – and the older generation can now discover for the first time what their children are talking about to each other. It is not so much teenagers’ preoccupations that have changed as our ability to eavesdrop on them.
Even where Levy manages to home in on a truly nasty feature of modern sexual culture, her blame often seems misplaced. Her first chapter features the late night American television programme (with accompanying DVDs, videos and other merchandise): Girls Gone Wild. This programme treats its adult audience to real-life film of very drunk American college girls, baring their breasts on camera, masturbating and acting out lesbian sex. Levy’s description of the filming of this show is certainly unsettling: the (female) producer and (male) cameramen cynically egging the girls on, and bribing them with nothing more than a free T-shirt or hat. But it is not clear that the young women are much to blame here, despite Levy’s implication of their complicity. Students regularly do very silly things when they have consumed a lot of alcohol, and always have; and it probably says little about college girls’ commitment, or otherwise, to feminism.
The real villain is the man who makes money out of filming them in that state. Levy notes that the founder of GGW, Joe Francis, has faced a series of charges for racketeering and other crimes connected with the show (he settled out of court with one girl who had the wit, when she had sobered up, to ask for a fee). She may not have known at the time of writing of a curious twist in the story. For Francis was himself the victim of a violent robbery, whose perpetrator has just been found guilty in the Los Angeles courts. But it was not just a robbery. In the course of the break-in, the criminal forced Francis to lie half naked on his bed, with a sex toy, and to repeat to the video camera “I’m from Boys Gone Wild”. In deploring the crime, the Los Angeles newspapers could not resist expressing slight satisfaction that Francis had got a taste of his own medicine. Even in raunchy LA, there is more distaste for this kind of raunchiness than Ariel Levy likes to admit.
