Reviews with content warning for Sexual content - Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture

Reviews tagging 'Sexual content'

Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture by Ariel Levy

3 reviews

libbyd1812's review

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informative reflective fast-paced

4.25

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dominic_t's review against another edition

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challenging fast-paced

Wow, I hated this book, and I have a lot to say about it. Zero stars.

At the very center of this book is a kernel of theory that I agree with: sexual freedom is not the key to liberation. We have not achieved gender equality in the US, and wearing sexy clothes won’t bring us any closer to that goal. But unlike Levy, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with most of the aspects of “raunch culture” that she discusses. I don’t think these things are either pro-feminist or anti-feminist, and I don’t like how she tries to sort everything into those two categories.

There were several things I hated about the overall narrative of the book. Her tone is this horrible mix of self-righteousness and vitriol that makes the book rather unpleasant to read. She complaints over and over about how women are too sexualized in this raunch culture, and then she repeatedly describes cis women, non-binary people, and trans men in very degrading and creepy ways. Strippers, porn stars, gender nonconforming people, and any woman who dares to dress in skimpy clothing is subject to her objectifying prose. “A blonde woman with improbably large breasts” (p. 73), “a woman in a trucker hat with greasy gray hair and a long, gray Fu Manchu beard” (p. 135), and “a dancer, chunky and lipsticked” (p. 137) are a few of the people who get weird and patronizing descriptions in the book. She also resorts to listing a bunch of wildly different things and claiming that they are all part of the same “raunch culture.” Her list includes truly horrible things (Girls Gone Wild harassing women to strip) and very mild things (Elton John performing in Vegas in front of a set piece of inflated breasts), and she maintains the same outraged tone throughout. It’s hard to take her seriously when she treats all these things as if they are equally harmful. I also disagree with her assertion that all of these things are related; I don’t think that Elton John’s set pieces and Girls Gone Wild have anything in common other than the involvement of women’s breasts, and I don’t think that overlap means anything.

She spends the latter half of the book talking about raunch culture in specific communities. Was she respectful of the people and communities she discussed? No. Was it informative? Also no. Her bias colors every interaction she has. I found several instances where she misrepresented basic facts, so I really don’t trust her narrative of the people she interviewed and the events she witnessed. Her chapter “From Womyn to Bois” is horrifically queerphobic and transphobic. She describes the political lesbianism in the 70s as “resisting the heteropatriarchy…and sex seemed kind of secondary” (p. 120) and then negatively contrasts that to the present day communities she observed who place a great deal of emphasis on sexual roles. She treats the lesbians, sapphics, and trans people like vulgar zoo animals for wanting to have sex and talking about it. She says, “Within the scene, “lesbian” is almost an empty term and “identifying” requires considerably more specificity and reduction” (p. 121) before naming specific identities as examples. She acts as though queer people acknowledging and naming their desires are dirty and gross while praising political lesbian feminists for prioritizing their activism. Here’s the thing: most political lesbians weren’t actually attracted to women. They were making a statement by swearing off men. The fact that she holds up these straight women as the ideal lesbians is bizarre and misguided enough, but she also misrepresents sapphic history by acting like contemporary sapphics are the misguided children of the political lesbian movement. Political lesbians are more related to feminist history than they are to queer history. Believe it or not, there were lesbians in the 70s who actually liked fucking women and weren’t exclusively involved with the political lesbians and lesbian feminism. Many of them were involved in the women’s lib movement, but they were also involved in the homophile and gay liberation movements. There were also multiple communities of lesbians who weren’t involved with each other at all; lesbian communities were often segregated by race and class. This idea of a single lesbian past is a myth that she is weaponizing to demonize sapphic attraction.

And like the political lesbians, Levy is super transphobic. She talks a lot about the label “boi,” which can describe either a gender identity or a gender presentation. She spends the whole chapter describing bois in really patronizing terms and acting as though identifying as a boi is an act of misogyny. She talks about the existence of bois who are disrespectful to the femmes they date and seems to think that this proves something about the boi identity. Those bois suck, but the existence of douchebag bois doesn’t prove anything about the community as a whole.

She does that transphobic thing where she awkwardly refuses to use pronouns for most trans men; it leads to really weird sounding prose, but she doesn’t let that stop her! The one exception is the “transsexual” man who “looked and sounded utterly and seamlessly male…a real boy, as Pinocchio would say” (p. 128). I think she liked him because he didn’t identify with the lesbian community and thought that bois and transmasculine lesbians were just participating in a trend. She talks about how bois and transmasculine lesbians believe in gender fluidity, and then says, “The confusing thing, of course, is why somebody would need serious surgery and testosterone to modify their gender if gender is supposed to be so fluid in the first place” (p. 127). This isn’t the gotcha that she thinks it is. The person she was interviewing (who she deadnamed, by the way) was stating that he didn’t believe in a strict gender binary and found the strict gender dichotomy limiting; those beliefs are not incompatible with medical transition. People undergo medical transition to change their bodies in ways that make them more comfortable. That’s it. It’s not a grand statement about the fluidity of gender. It’s a personal choice. But Levy spends the entire book criticizing people’s personal choices, so it’s not surprising that she doesn’t respect trans people’s medical decisions.

The very weirdest thing about the entire chapter is that Levy is bisexual, but she never identifies herself as a community member. Knowing that makes reading the chapter entirely surreal. The woman acts like she's never heard the term "femme" before, and she seems alarmed and astounded at the idea that women can be horny for each other.

Remember how I said she describes women and gender nonconforming people in really uncomfortable and gross ways? It gets even worse in her chapter about tween and teenage girls because she’s talking about minors. She calls one girl whose explicit videos were shared without her consent “The Swiffer sucker” (p. 146) after the sex act she performed in one of the videos. When describing one of the young women she interviewed, Levy referred to the teenager’s “newly sprung breast” (p. 142). She also describes a super inappropriate interaction she had with some young teenagers in a mall. The teenager she was interviewing referred to short skirts as “belts” to emphasize just how short they were. Directly after this, Levy writes, “As if on cue, a trio in tanks and belts came giggling out of the store Forever 21. Two of them said they were twelve, the third was thirteen. Everybody said they wore thongs” (p. 142). Um, excuse me? MA’AM, STEP AWAY FROM THE CHILDREN AND STOP TALKING ABOUT THEIR UNDERWEAR. It is super creepy for a grown woman to refer to these kids’ skirts as belts. It is weirdly judgemental of literal children. Also, why the fuck is she approaching children in the mall without their parents to interview them for her book? I find it hilarious how she frames this interaction to try to hide the worst of her gross behavior. According to this account, the kids offered their ages and then told her that they wear thongs. She conveniently avoids mentioning how underwear even came up in conversation. Are we supposed to assume that these kids normally announce that they wear thongs whenever they introduce themselves? It’s obvious that she asked them, which makes it even worse that she conducted this interview on the fly without asking their parents’ permission.

Her portrayals of teen and tween girls are absolutely horrifying. She veers between a patronizing view where some girls are victims of raunch culture and an accusatory view where other girls are miniature female chauvinist pigs who are benefitting from raunch culture. How exactly are they benefitting? According to Levy, they become celebrities when their explicit photos and videos are circulated without their permission! Remember the girl whose sexual video with a mop was shared without her consent? Levy says, “The dissemination of her amateur porn swiftly resulted in a major uptick in her level of popularity and celebrity” (p. 141). The girl was in 8th grade. I can’t even express the depth of my disgust that she’s calling the video “amateur porn.” And the assertion that the leaked video made her popular sounded really untrue to me. I was a young teen around the time that this was written, and I remember SEVERAL cases that made the national news where middle and high school aged girls had sexual photos and videos of them shared without their consent. In every single case, it resulted in massive bullying that ruined the girls’ lives. I remember at least one case that ended with the girl dying by suicide. I was skeptical enough to look up the incident online, and I very quickly found an article where she said that she had to move across the country and it ruined her life. It’s absolutely disgusting that she’s calling the victim of a crime disrespectful names like “the Swiffer sucker” and downplaying the severity of what happened to her by implying that the girl was fine with trading her privacy for infamy. How any of this nasty rhetoric about children made it through multiple rounds of editing to end up in the finished product is beyond me.

Throughout the whole book, sex workers are portrayed as raunch culture made flesh. She sees society’s fascination with sex workers as evidence of how mainstream raunch culture has become. Porn stars and strippers are referenced non-stop. She talks a lot about how Jenna Jameson’s book and documentaries about strippers are glamorizing sex work; the implication is that this glamorization is leading women astray. She talks about them with the same sneering tone that she uses for all other perceived raunch culture collaborators…until the chapter “Shopping for Sex” where they suddenly become the downtrodden victims. She says that an estimated 65-90% of sex workers have experienced childhood sexual abuse and says that “all” of the experts she spoke to think that actual number is at the high end of the range. She frames this as though she has spoken to multiple experts and reviewed multiple studies, but she only references one expert and one study. I checked the references in the back just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. The one study she referenced found that ⅔ of sex workers have PTSD. The author, Melissa Farley, considers porn and stripping the same as full service sex work (p. 181). That was a red flag. You have to be both a bad scientist and ideologically driven in order to lump all sex work together like this. They are different populations of people who face different risks and have different experiences within sex work. For example, full service sex workers are criminalized in the US, while performing in porn and stripping are both legal. That alone creates a massive difference in the experiences of sex workers who are doing different types of work. The statistic that two-thirds of sex workers have PTSD seemed way too high, so I looked up the author on Wikipedia. As I expected, Melissa Farley is an anti-porn and anti-sex work activist. But the section labeled “Controversy” was the most interesting part. In 2003, Farley’s research assistant told the New Zealand government that Farley “fabricated and misrepresented data” that she used in reports about sex work in New Zealand. This book was published in 2005. Ariel Levy used the work of a woman who had already been accused of making shit up to further her ideological agenda as her only cited source for the prevalence of trauma in sex workers. But given what I’ve observed about Levy’s relationship to the truth, I guess she just recognized Farley as a kindred spirit.

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madeleinebay's review

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2.0

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