Female Chauvinist Pigs

Female Chauvinist Pigs
Author: Ariel Levy 2005 200 pp
My rating: 3*
Started February 22 2009, Finished February 22 2009.

This flawed book probes an interesting subject: how the gains of the feminist movement have degenerated to widespread female complicity in raunch/porn culture. The book’s main shortcoming is that it feels like a loosely connected series of magazine articles (Levy writes for New York and The New Yorker) that don’t build on each other and some of which only tangentially bear on the topic. Nonetheless, the better chapters do provide insight into the phenomenon of the current generation of you-can-be-anything-you-want women routinely choosing to employ that freedom to objectify themselves in order to gain the attention of traditionally unenlightened males. The introductory section on the Girls Gone Wild videos and the chapter about an upscale prep school in the Bay Area are the standouts. Off topic (though non necessarily uninteresting chapters) include a discussion of first generation feminists and an overview of the eye-openingly bizarre lesbian scene in San Francisco its members classifying themselves as butch, femme, trans, boi, Fems etc.  

If Levy does arrive at a conclusion about her topic it is that this is still a man’s world.

Nitpicking:

Levy’s critique of Camille Paglia’s anti-feminist essay which infers women make wimpy music cites Madonna as a counter-example, projecting wild energy and cool, implying Madonna is the exemplar of the empowered, have it all woman. (109) But isn’t Madonna the progenitor of the FCP and as responsible for the syndrome as anyone and thus a peculiar choice for a feminist writer to use as to rebut the charges of an anti-feminist?
Levy seems to describe almost every subject’s appearance and assess her attractiveness, implying she has bought into the FCP values she objects to. This sense in reinforced by her use of frat type diction e.g. boobs, tits.
All subjects seem to come from the same part of the socio-economic spectrum: white and reasonably well off. One wonders how FCP values have affected other parts of society.

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We decided long ago that the Male Chauvinist Pig was an unenlightened rube, but the Female Chauvinist Pig (PCP) has risen to a kind of exalted status. She is post-feminist. She is funny. She gets it. … Why try to beat them when you can join them? (93)

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 instead is “like a man.” (96)

FCP s don’t bother to question the criteria on which women are judged, they are too busy judging other women themselves. (103)

These are not stories about girls getting what they want sexually, they are stories about girls gaining acclaim socially, for which their sexuality is a tool (145-6)

“There’s not really any sluts at my school, but if you walked in there on the your first day, you’d think my whole school was sluts.” (148)

… “girls hook up with other girls because they know the guys will like it,” she said. “They think, Then the guys are going to want to hook up with me and give me a lot of attention “ (150)

The chapter about teenagers, FCPs in Training, is eye opening. All the kids interviewed go to good private schools, but the girls at least all seem to be in the thrall of FCP culture and values. Where are the parents?

Japan and most western European countries have adolescent pregnancy rates of less than 400 per 1000. (Uber-progressive Holland shines with only 12 pregnancies per 1000.) The numbers go up in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, where there are between 40 and 69 teen pregnancies out of every 1000. But in the United States, we have more than 80 teen pregnancies per 1000. (161)