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| Female Chauvinist Pigs? |
Female Chauvinist Pigs?
Women's, not men's consumption of commercial sex products (strippers, sex, pornography etc) has been the topic of the most heartfelt emails we've received from readers this year so we've decided to look at the rise in this cultural phenomenon for this month's newsletter by profiling the soon to be release of Ariel Levy's book - Female Chauvinist Pigs.
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Quotes ...
"Ariel Levy has given us an important, lively, shocking investigative report about how and why--in an age of HIV/AID S and religious fundamentalism--U.S. commercialism has mainstreamed pornography, popularized raunch images (and practices), and revived female "bimbo" roles. This is a call to arms for women and girls who are being sold pseudo empowerment, phony liberation, and fake rebellion--instead of the real thing: freedom. A must-read for young women--and everyone else." --Robin Morgan
"all the things that feminism once reviled-Playboy, strippers, wet T-shirt contests-are currently being embraced by young women as supposed symbols of personal empowerment and sexual liberation. The new Female Chauvinist Pigs are definitely funny. But is the joke on them?" - Ariel Levy
"It's a way of flaunting your femininity -- that's what you think. You think you're being brave, you think you're being sexy, you think you're transcending feminism. But that's bull*bleep*." - Susan Brownmiller
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Articles ...
To most of the girls I've met (at Cardio Striptease classes in Los Angeles, at CAKE parties in Manhattan, at shopping malls outside of Chicago), bawdy and liberated are synonymous. Girls Gone Wild is only an extreme example of what’s happening in our culture all the time in more subtle ways. Another cameraman, Puck, a very handsome, surprisingly polite 24-year-old, is loading equipment into the car when two stunning young women who are already very close to naked approach him. They notice his Girls Gone WildT-shirt and hat and ask him if they can come along with him if they promise to make out with each other later, possibly even in a shower. Alas, there is no room for them in the car, but the crew is unfazed: This happens all the time. "It's amazing," says Leist. "People flash for the brand. Debbie got naked for a hat."
http://slate.msn.com/id/2097485/entry/2097496/
Because part of the answer is that nob! Nobody wants to be the frump at the back of the room anymore, the ghost of women past -- it’s just not cool. What is cool is for women to take a guy's-eye view of pop culture in general and naked ladies in particular. This is an amped-up, horny moment in our culture, and "getting with the program" requires a boys-will-be-boys attitude. Better yet, act like a frat boy in a Wonder bra yourself. Don’t worry, everyone's doing it. The Female Chauvinist Pig is not a lesbian. But she couldn't have existed before Lesbian Chic magically reconfigured the American conception of lesbian from bull dyke with crew cut to Sharon Stone with ice pick, and made it okay -- sexy! racy! -- for women to ogle strippers or porn stars or Alyssa Milano on the cover of Maxim. The Female Chauvinist Pig doesn't want men to disappear, far from it. She wants to sleep with them and be like them. By the way, you couldn't have had Female Chauvinist Pigs before the women’s movement, either -- it's hard to attain that porky sw! agger when you can’t get a job. But whereas the nineties "do me" femini st was a distinctly female, sex-loving, hard-rocking badass, the Female Chauvinist Pig is just mimicking manliness. The she-wolf has had her moment; even Courtney Love has gotten rid of her combat boots and half her nose. So we've adapted. Women are not about to stand around the sidelines in the frat house of popular culture. If girl rock is going to be about Britney and Christina now, then damn it, we're going to talk about their tushes and learn the words to "Oops! . . . I Did It Again." Because women in America don’t want to be excluded from anything -- not the board meeting or the cigar that follows it or, lately, even the trip to the strip club that follows that. What we want is to be where it's at, and right now that happens to be a pretty trashy place.
http://www.nymag.com/page.cfm?page_id=4297
My argument is that women have forgotten that sexual power is only one, very limited, version of power and that this spring-break variety of thongs-and-implants exhibitionism is just one, ! very limited version of sexuality. Is it the one that arouses us-or, even, men-the most? To find out we would have to stop using the same unimaginative erotic shorthand-Strippers! Hooters! Playboy! Maxim! Brazilian Waxes! Boobies!!-to signify sexiness. But what if I'm just uptight? What if this is actually fun and these girls get a genuine kick out of being porn stars for 15 minutes? What makes me so sure that all this is subtly insidious and not just a giant national kegparty?
http://slate.msn.com/id/2097485/entry/2097739/
With the possible exception of the Shakers, it is difficult to think of an American movement that has failed more spectacularly than anti-pornography feminism. In the late seventies, when a prominent faction of the women’s-liberation movement-including Brownmiller, Dworkin, Audre Lorde,Robin Morgan, Grace Paley, Adrienne Rich, and Gloria Steinem-turned their attention to fighting pornography, porn was still something marginalized, as opposed to what it is now: a sou! rce of inspiration for all of popular culture. If the anti-porn crusade was a losing battle, it was also a costly one: It divided, some would say destroyed, the women's movement. The term’s-positive feminist" was coined by women who wanted to distance themselves from the anti-porn faction. Of course, all feminists thought they were being "sex-positive" and fighting for freedom, but when it comes tosex, freedom means different things to different people. Screaming fights became a regular element of feminist conferences in the eighties, and perhaps the single most divisive issue was the Dworkin-MacKinnon ordinance.
http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/people/features/11907/index1.html
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Raunch culture
Posted on: 2006-11-05 04:28:34
By: Anonymous
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I remember reading in Hectate a few years back that it is odd how some women embrace main stream pornography when it is not through the female gaze. Most pornography is taken from the camera angle of the dominating male; this is deliberate as it assumes the audience are heterosexual men, and adds to the fantasy that they are engaging in these acts. The attraction of heterosexual women to this audience is odd as it does not signify their experience in bed (ie, the camera angle looking at the man, or the angle of a woman experiencing intercourse from her eye level) rather from a heterosexual men's perspective. Does this then raise an argument of women enjoying the men's abusing this power upon other women? Is there an argument that some women's fantastical engagement from this material lies in feeling not only themselves, but infact other women dominated also?
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Re: Raunch culture
Posted on: 2008-03-04 08:12:39
By: Anonymous
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A lot of feminism revolves around examining everyday things that people enjoy such as movies, beauty culture, advertisements etc. Why should porn be exempt from such scrutiny?
It is not shocking that many women enjoy sex. Of course they do. Analyzing sexism in pornography and the sex trades isn't about telling women they should hate sex, or their bodies or anything of the sort.
It's about examining the opression of women by men.
Personally I think you're the bigot.
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