This is the first extended analysis I've seen which tries to make sense of what in the hell has been going on with the pornification of our culture over the last decade. It's something that has disturbed me for quite some time now, but it's difficult to raise the issue, even with other women. The winds of the zeitgeist have been blowing the doors of this particular line of enquiry firmly shut. As Ariel Levy herself has noted, "...nobody wants to be the frump at the back of the room anymore, the ghost of women past -- it's just not cool."
So why are so many young women now complicit in their own objectification? The answers suggested by Levy, in the excerpts from her book (available over at Amazon), are tantalizing. As is the writeup from Sunday's NYT Book Review:
Reading "Female Chauvinist Pigs," Ariel Levy's lively polemic, gave me an epiphany of sorts. Finally, a coherent interpretation of an array of phenomena I'd puzzled over in recent years: the way Paris Hilton's leaked sex tapes seemed only to enhance her career; the horrifying popularity of vaginoplasty, a surgical procedure designed to make female genitalia more sightly; and a spate of mainstream books about stripping and other sex work, some reviewed in these pages. Levy has a theory that makes sense of all this. Our popular culture, she argues, has embraced a model of female sexuality that comes straight from pornography and strip clubs, in which the woman's job is to excite and titillate - to perform for men. According to Levy, women have bought into this by altering their bodies surgically and cosmetically, and - more insidiously - by confusing sexual power with power, so that embracing this caricaturish form of sexuality becomes, in their minds, a perverse kind of feminism.I'm really looking forward to reading this book. But then again, I am a psycho feminazi from hell, so this is hardly surprising. Heh!
5 comments:
There might be a flip side to this: the pornification of women in popular culture is mirrored by the goofication of men; objects of desire vs. objects of ridicule; sluts and schmucks.
A hypothesis: if men have become more passive in light of social disapproval of sexually aggressive behaviour on their part, is the pornification of women a case of women simply picking up the slack in terms of sexual assertion? Is this in response to something, in other words?
Here's another piece by Ariel Levy (from the LA Times but reprinted in the Houston Chronicle).
Is this in response to something, in other words?
Hmmmm. It's a response, all right, but as for it being about women picking up some kind of slack...I dunno.
I see your point about the 'goofication' (nice new word, btw), but I don't really see this as the redressing of some sort of socio-sexual equilibrium. Quite the contrary - I think women's embrace of 'raunch culture' is increasing inequality, if anything.
All I know for sure is that I find it all extremely disquieting. I hope this book provokes LOADS of public debate. God knows it's needed.
The rise of paganism has brought with it, the intense mantra that sex is beautiful anytime, anywhere, and anyone who says differently (especially women who say differently), are prudes, cold fish and terribly misguided by christian culture. The female body is celebrated as a work of art, especially if it's attractively-proportioned and scantily clad. Any message to women that this type of lifestyle might lead to unwanted pregnancies, c-sections, sexually-transmitted diseases, abortions and possibly even the end of their lives, is frowned on heavily and mostly ignored, especially by men, who see the paganistic change regarding women's sexuality, as a free ride to paradise: wham bam thank you maam. They ride off in the sunset ten minutes later, and the woman is left to raise the offspring without a father or face the surgeon's knife in the abortion clinic. Apparently, this is a form of devolution, as such behaviors are more characteristic of the animal kingdom from which we were supposed to have evolved sufficiently enough not to mimic in every aspects of our lives.
I'm not sure I agree with your interpretation of 'paganistic' influences on women's sexuality, Anonymous. My own introduction to feminist spirituality came via Margot Adler's Drawing Down the Moon, which I highly recommend to you. Contrary to your interpretation, everything I know about 'paganism' and women's spirituality is completely empowering.
But thanks for your comments.
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