How Far We've Got to Go

After Dawn made her post on the premature sexual expression of girls, I wanted to alert Skirt! readers to a phenomenal book I read recently: Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs (Free Press 2005), a bloodcurdling exploration of our society’s current acceptance, celebration, and encouragement of female raunch.

I remember years ago seeing a brief segment of an MTV special, in which female college students joyfully jumped onstage at some Spring Break beach party and gyrated and flashed for the cameras and a sea of drunk boys. One young woman spoke proudly into the microphone about how she had invented the “triple-kiss,” in which she and a friend tongue-kissed a boy at the same time, and demonstrated on a few lucky coeds.

How can these young women behave in such a way, for the entire world to see? It used to be, I thought, that we did stupid things in our youth and hoped that time would lessen the sting of our mistakes. Now young people, particularly women, want to be immortalized and serialized in their (drunken) thoughtless behavior.

In Levy’s book, she speaks of young women flashing, masturbating, and fondling one another for the cameras, in exchange for Girls Gone Wild baseball caps, of dozens of men harassing two bikini-clad sunbathers to “Show your tits!” and “Show your ass!” until they complied for Girls Gone Wild cameramen and the men’s cell phone cameras, and also of several female leaders, particularly in the male-dominated entertainment industry, feeling the need to behave like men to prove their power (pg. 95):

Women who’ve wanted to be perceived as powerful have long found it more efficient to identify with men than to try and elevate the entire female sex to their level. …Raunch provides a special opportunity for a woman who wants to prove her mettle. It’s in fashion, and it is something that has traditionally appealed exclusively to men and actively offended women, so producing it or participating in it is a way both to flaunt your coolness and to mark yourself as different, tougher, looser, funnier—a new sort of loophole woman who is “not like other women,” who is instead “like a man.” Or more precisely, like a Female Chauvinist Pig.

It’s nothing new that women have been made to compete with one another in a patriarchal society, but it scares me that women now find such pleasure in disgracing their sexuality for a few moments in the spotlight, all the while claiming their sexual, feminine empowerment. (And don’t they see that the few moments in the spotlight are, as always, controlled by the male definition of female sexuality?)

In her book, Levy interviews several young, scantily clad, “sexually empowered” women and also several feminist leaders from the 1960s-70s. She quotes Erica Jong, author of the 1973 erotic novel Fear of Flying, as saying, “Let’s not kid ourselves that this is liberation. The women who buy the idea that flaunting your breasts in sequins is power—I mean, I’m for all that stuff—but let’s not get so into the tits and ass that we don’t notice how far we haven’t come. Let’s not confuse that with real power. I don’t like to see women fooled.”

How do we stop the madness?