|
|
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture
By Ariel Levy
Simon & Schuster, 2005, £7-99
Reviewed by Sarah Mayo
FEMALE CHAUVINIST PIGS is a witty and fresh book
that is frankly long overdue. It examines ‘female chauvinist pigs’ (FCPs)
– US women who have embraced ‘raunch culture’. According to Levy, FCPs
are women who love porn, see Paris Hilton as a role model, and will wear
a Playboy bunny with pride. FCPs delight in making other women into sex
objects (and themselves too).
Bizarrely, this is usually put forward as proof of
women’s supposed new-found equality with men. Levy skilfully teases out
the absurdity of this argument when interviewing female television
producers, Playboy executives, students who strip off for shows like
Girls Gone Wild, etc, often using light humour to do so. However, in
Levy’s view: "The rise of raunch culture does not represent how far
women have come but how far they have to go".
Levy interviews predominantly middle-class women in
the corporate or academic world who actively promote ‘raunch’, as well
as those impacted by it, including private high-school students and
members of the San Francisco and New York lesbian communities. Female
business executives and media producers, like the largely female
executive board of Playboy corporation, have risen to the top and have
adopted a so-called ‘male outlook’. In reality, it’s the chauvinist view
of a traditionally male-dominated capitalist world. In Levy’s view, it
is partly a survival strategy, but also a means to ‘fit in’ and get
ahead. Tellingly, Judith Regan, the publisher responsible for ‘porn
star’ Jenna Jameson’s best-selling memoir, "is fond of bragging, ‘I have
the biggest cock in the building!’" In the business world, power is
framed in terms of owning a penis, apparently! Levy compares the
behaviour of FCPs with the concept of ‘Uncle Tomming’ in
African-American slave culture, and draws a certain parallel. To ‘Uncle
Tom’ is to imitate your master, toady up and be subservient to get ahead
with the dominant group.
We should add that these businesswomen can reconcile
themselves to selling women as commodities because they accept the logic
of capitalism: that everything can be reduced to a commodity for sale.
However, because women like Christine Hefner (Playboy CEO) cannot state
this openly, when interviewed she claims that her corporation’s motives
are a kind of altruistic bid for women to assert a positive sexual
identity. Hefner claims that things like the Playboy rabbit head,
"symbolises sexy fun, a bit of rebelliousness… It’s an obvious, ‘I’m
taking control of how I look and the statement I’m making’ as opposed to
‘I’m embarrassed about it’ or ‘I’m uncomfortable with it’." Yet Levy’s
analysis exposes the fundamental weakness of this argument. For Levy, in
no way are women dressed as stuffed animals (for example) about women
expressing their sexual desires and needs. Instead, Playboy models are
"expressing that they are sexy only if sexy means obliging and well
paid". Further, the reason why women buy the magazine and wear the bunny
symbol is because cultural pressure makes women feel that if they do not
they are somehow being "‘uncomfortable’ with and ‘embarrassed’ with your
sexuality. Raunch culture… isn’t an entertainment option, it’s a litmus
test of female uptightness".
Levy is very perceptive when analysing why raunch
culture has gone so mainstream in Bush’s America – on the surface an
apparently contradictory development, given the swing to the right. But
big business has embraced pornography and the wider sex trade as a
massive commercial opportunity. Levy observes that ‘porno chic’ is now
so mainstream that famous ‘porn stars’ (female) are shown naked on Time
Square alongside Disney adverts: "Raunch culture is not essentially
progressive, it is essentially commercial… [It] isn’t about opening our
minds to the possibilities and mysteries of sexuality. It’s about
endlessly reiterating one particular and particularly commercial
shorthand for sexiness".
Marxists can add that what figures like Bush and
so-called ‘progressives’, like pornographer Larry Flynt, have in common
is that both are Republicans and ruthless capitalists. Flynt might claim
to be against Christian morality, but he shares with Bush a bourgeois
morality which is, ultimately, the defence of private property and the
exploitation of the working class. It is a ‘morality’ that reduces
everything, including women, to their exchange value in the marketplace.
Right-wing Christians defend ‘the family’ and the traditional role of
the ‘virtuous wife’. (Historically it was important that women of the
ruling class were ‘virtuous’ to ensure property was passed to the
legitimate male heir.) The sex trade, on the other hand, promotes women
as sexually available but degraded – ‘dirty whores’ is the derogatory
term. These two traditional female roles represent different sides of
the same coin. Both are stereotypes: extremely limited, strictly
controlled and oppressive dictates of how women should (and should not)
behave. The mainstreaming of pornography, strip clubs, Girls Gone Wild
DVDs, etc, is anything but a rebellion against Christian (bourgeois)
morality. Rather, the commercialisation of raunch is an inevitable
consequence of these hypocritical capitalist vultures’ so-called
‘morality’.
The major weakness of Levy’s book is its total
absence of a class analysis. The history of the women’s movement, mainly
in relation to the 1960s and 1970s, is examined mainly through the eyes
of its middle class, academic, feminist leaders. Levy downplays or
simply ignores the role of working-class women fighting alongside
working-class men in the trade unions for social and economic change
(for example, on issues like equal pay, against domestic violence,
pornography in the workplace, etc). Yet the very negative impact of
raunch culture, combined with Bush’s abstinence-only education
programme, is examined when Levy interviews female private high-school
students who are obsessed with conforming to a ‘slutty’ appearance yet
show little knowledge or awareness of their right to enjoy sex, rather
than simply be sex objects. The consequences of this are much more
serious still for working-class teenage girls with much lower social and
economic opportunities.
Levy makes an important contribution when she
examines the splits which emerged between anti-sex trade feminists and
so-called ‘sex positive’ feminists who support pornography and
prostitution, etc. Levy is critical of both sides but, vitally, rejects
the scandalous falsehood (repeated by some on the left) that anyone who
opposes the sexual exploitation of women is somehow ‘anti-sex’ and
‘puritanical’. These accusations come from the keenest proponents of the
sex trade becoming socially acceptable, including many feminists, like
Camilla Paglia, and some anti-trafficking NGOs which act as a fig leaf
for naked big-business interests. The fact that some so-called feminists
accept this ideological offensive is a reflection of their theoretical
weakness and, ultimately, pro-capitalist outlook. However, this trend
was compounded by the very serious tactical mistakes made by anti-sex
trade feminists, like Andrea Dworkin, who made an alliance with
right-wing Christians and Republican senators in an attempt to ban
pornography. This tactical error, totally unpalatable to many socialists
and feminists, lay in the basic lack of confidence feminists, like
Dworkin, had in the working class to achieve social change. However, to
recognise this error in no way excuses the inherent betrayal of
so-called feminists defending the indefensible and proclaiming it
feminist.
Levy’s book is a welcome wake-up call to a new
generation of women to reject the ‘limiting conformity’ of raunch
culture. Levy calls for a society where women and men genuinely are free
to explore their sexual identity, to recognise human sexuality in all
its true complexity and variety. This could only be truly possible on
the basis of the end of capitalism and the creation of a socialist
society – based on a society run in the interests of the majority and
not the minority. Socialism would mean people would be instead valued
for what they contribute to society and be free to form relationships
free from abuse and based on genuine equality.
|