Girls Gone Wild

By Emily Gordon

Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture
By Ariel Levy. Free Press, 224 pp., $25.

One afternoon last winter, I went by myself to see "Inside Deep Throat," the explicit documentary about the making of the classic porn movie, and found it hilarious and informative. Still, it bothered me that the filmmakers seemed to endorse the line that star Linda Lovelace, a subsequent anti-porn spokeswoman, was a loon to say she was ever abused by either the industry or anyone in it.

Afterward, I talked to two young hipster guys who'd gotten a kick out of the movie and also mocked Lovelace's change of heart. "But it's very well-documented," I began—and I could see the red alert in their eyes: Tiresome feminist harangue ahead! Pro-sexual expression crusader or uptight speechmaker? They were both roles I resented being shoehorned into.

This annoyingly familiar dilemma makes it somewhat difficult to address the theme of Ariel Levy's "Female Chauvinist Pigs." In a tone of deep disapproval, Levy outlines the ways in which women—by endorsing, imitating and producing the "raunch culture" of porn stars, strippers, exhibitionist celebrities like Paris Hilton, "Girls Gone Wild" flashers and other shameless hussies—are eroding the gains of the second-wave feminist movement under the banner of feminist choice-making, individuality and sexual freedom. Indeed, she argues briefly but persuasively, many young women have "relinquished any sense of themselves as a collective group with a linked fate."

American women are indeed barraged with images of their counterparts acting like Jessica Rabbit. Levy argues that regardless of whether these women are drunk, peer-pressured spring-breakers or former women's studies majors cheering on pole-dancing at New York's exclusive Cake parties and flamboyantly smooching their female friends, they're all making the opposite of an empowered statement.

She interviews both disapproving pioneer feminists and unsure-sounding younger women to prove the point. Levy's polar universe leaves no room for more ambiguous figures, such as the triumphantly unionized strippers in San Francisco or retro-burlesque dancers all over the country whose art form is genre-bendingly new and old at once. There are no quotes from articulate young feminists about how, for instance, porn (including the non-mainstream, female-centered variety) could be in any way entertaining, sexy or edifying.

One of Levy's major points is both vital and extremely well-illustrated. Adolescent girls are under tremendous pressure to adopt an image of sexual willingness and to prove it. Unlike women in their 20s or 30s, they're unlikely to have a media-savvy filter for the messages they absorb. As a result, they're in serious danger of being slandered at school and online, of sacrificing their youth to self-conscious nymphettishness, of getting pregnant and contracting STDs more often than girls in comparable countries, and of learning too late that sex is something they should actually enjoy. Her chapter on the confusing paradoxes of contemporary urban lesbian culture will also have relevance for younger lesbians unsure of where they fit in.

Unfortunately, "Female Chauvinist Pigs" as a whole lacks the requirements of really energizing feminist polemics—a smooth, engaging prose style; a bird's-eye view of class, race and geography; and a rallying cry for concrete solutions or alternatives. Most distractingly, Levy provides readers almost no sense of her own background with or relationship to these subjects, except in a few tantalizing statements (inevitably in parentheses).

On the penultimate page of the conclusion, she writes, "Our national love of porn and pole dancing is not the byproduct of a free and easy society with an earthy acceptance of sex. It is a desperate stab at freewheeling eroticism in a time and place characterized by intense anxiety." The complicated nature of that anxiety is worthy of a more focused look.