Female Chauvinist Pigs - A Review

I finally got hold of a copy of Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy, loaned to me by an online friend (thanks Nancy!). And though I have quite a few criticisms of it, I thought it was an entertaining and important read. The central premise of the book is that the current prevalence of ‘raunch’ in our culture (i.e. porn-star memoirs on bestseller lists; stripping classes at gyms; Girls Gone Wild; g-strings marketed to preteens and their mums) is not ‘empowering’ or indicative of the success of the feminist project, but rather serves as proof of how far women still have to go.

I wanted to love this book, and for it to be stronger than it is. Its biggest problem is that it’s very uneven. The strongest chapters are the introductory chapter on ‘Raunch Culture’, the third chapter (which describes the nature of the ‘Female Chauvinist Pig’, who objectifies other women) and the final chapter, ‘Shopping for Sex’, which returns to the carefully-argued ground of the first and third chapters and ties them together neatly.

The second chapter, ‘The Future That Never Happened’, does its best to map the terrain of the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s and 70s, in an effort to show how we got from those heady days of radical activism, to our current quiescent, apolitical and hyper-sexual situation. This chapter only partly succeeds, mainly due to an apparent lack of broad, well-grounded research on Levy’s part. I don’t doubt her argument, and support her attempts to illustrate how far we have fallen away from the woman-centred position of the second-wave feminists, but this chapter would have been so much more convincing if she’d marshalled more evidence and examples. The only contemporary feminist of any prominence she interviewed for the book was Susan Brownmiller. Surely with a little more effort, she could have sampled a wider cross-section of opinion? I’m not a specialist in this area, but I was left wanting much more from this chapter in particular (probably because I was reading it as a historian). The argument was there, but it seemed rather hollow.

The fourth and fifth chapters are the weakest of the bunch, however. Chapter Four, ‘From Womyn to Bois’, attempts to illustrate the ways in which raunch culture has infiltrated the lesbian community, while the fifth chapter, ‘Pigs in Training’, takes the inquiry to teenage girls. The ‘Pigs in Training’ chapter seems to consist mainly of handwringing over the degree to which today’s teenage girls spend most of their time fixated on their physical appearance and how to make boys like them. But there is nothing new about this. While I’d agree that girls are becoming sexualised at a younger age than they were even a decade or two ago, I don’t think a strong enough connection was made with raunch culture generally. As for the ‘Womyn to Bois’ chapter, the example of the ‘bois’ (lesbians who ‘act like men’ in adopting cavalier, love-‘em-and-leave-‘em attitudes in their relationships with other women) also seems a weak basis from which to extrapolate. How widespread is this phenomenon? Has its impact been felt beyond the lesbian enclaves of New York and San Francisco? We never find out. The entire chapter smacks of an ‘add lesbians and stir’ approach.

Despite these serious shortcomings, I do think this book is very valuable. There’s no doubt that it has articulated, in a very clear and accessible way, just how pervasive and disturbing ‘raunch culture’ has become. As a statement of the zeitgeist, it is urgently overdue and therefore is to be welcomed. But Ariel Levy has only outlined the contours of the problem. Her central premise is sound, but I don’t think Levy has the expertise to extend her investigation beyond the limited world she herself has witnessed – as becomes obvious in the very thin chapters about lesbian ‘bois’ and teenage girls. I got the impression that, rather than allowing the evidence she uncovered to shape the argument, she undertook research that would support the point she wanted to make. I guess this isn’t surprising, since she’s a journalist by profession. But of course, I’m interested in a more academic approach.

What we need next are feminist theorists, familiar with the relevant research and with greater knowledge and experience, to pick up this line of inquiry and explore it in much greater depth. As it is, Female Chauvinist Pigs reads less like a coherent thesis, and more like a series of discrete magazine essays (which, in fact, it is – several of the chapters appeared as articles in various papers and magazines, including the LA Times, New York (1, 2) and Slate). But still, at least she’s shed light on the issue, and made me angry about it. And of course, change doesn’t happen until people are sufficiently pissed off. I can’t understand how my contemporaries have allowed themselves to sink so low as to embrace pole-dancing and Playboy, when our mothers’ and grandmothers’ generation worked so hard to bring us the rights we now take for granted. It’s embarrassing, and the fact that so many young women are blind to it is infuriating. As Susan Brownmiller says, in my favourite quote from the book, “’You think you’re being brave, you think you’re being sexy, you think you’re transcending feminism. But that’s bullshit.’”