I’ve felt kind of loopy since returning to New York. The traveling wasn’t so bad, nor was the unpacking. I attribute my state of mind, which ranges from lackadaisical to lethargic, on the weather and the season. I am dragging my feet at the start of another year - a year which could very well be the best year of my life. It’s really a shame.
So enough of that.
En route to Texas I read Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture by Ariel Levy. She is clearly after mine own heart, as she touched on so many subjects I have so passionately and curiously pondered in my own women’s studies. For example, the proliferation of Playboy and Hustler logos on tee shirts, underwear, and other merchandise worn by women. I remember how livid I was when I was home one holiday break and while doing laundry, saw my sister’s boy-cut underwear with that familiar bunny. Levy also writes about Sex and the City (UT Women’s Studies Symposium 2003 - holla!), Playboy, and the state of feminism today. She basically concludes that today many women embrace chauvinism by eating up the idea that being raunchy is being powerful, fun, and sexually liberated. If women aren’t raunchy, they’re often viewed as asexual and uptight. Oh, how my brain was rocked. I want to share the pearls I have plucked from this book and highly recommend it for a quick, consciousness-raising read.
“If the rise of raunch seems counterintuitive because we hear so much about being in a conservative moment, it actually makes perfect sense when we think about it. Raunch culture is not essentially progressive, it is essentially commercial.
“Sexuality is inherent, it is a fundamental part of being human, and it is a lot more complicated than we seem to be willing to admit. Different things are attractive to different people and sexual tastes run wide and wild. Yet somehow, we have accepted as fact the myth that sexiness needs to be divorced from the everyday experience of being ourselves.”
“To me ’sexy’ is based on the inexplicable overlap of character and chemicals that happens between people…the odd sense that you have something primal in common with another person whom you may love, or you may barely even like, that can only be expressed through the physical and psychological exchange that is sex. When I’m in the plastic ‘erotic’ world of high, hard tits and long nails and incessant pole dancing - whether I’m at a CAKE party, walking past a billboard of Jenna Jameson in Times Square, or dodging pillows at the Maxim Hot 100 - I don’t feel titillated or liberated or aroused. I feel bored, and kind of tense.”
“Women’s liberation and empowerment are terms feminists started using to talk about casting off the limitations imposed upon women and demanding equality. We have perverted these words. The freedom to be sexually provocative or promiscuous is not enough freedom… And we are not even free in the sexual arena. We have simply adopted a new norm, a new role to play: lusty, busty exhibitionist. There are other choices… If we believed that we were sexy and funny and competent and smart, we would not need to be like strippers or like men or like anyone other than our own specific, individual selves.”
I too find these issues fascinating, but, unlike Levy, I take issue with calling such folks feminists. They’re just simply not and it debases the word. They’re just women swept up in main stream culture eating up the increased autonomy it allows. The excerpts from her book that you’ve included, particularly the brilliant discussions of sexiness as inappropriately divorced from the everyday and true empowerment lying in the freedom to be sexy in our own unique, individually specific way, point to the end goal and suggest that “raunch” is merely our adolescent phase.
I think it’s important, too, to point out that men don’t have this freedom (to be their own unique sexual selves) either. Raunch, and hetero social norms, appeal to a base instinct in straight men, encourage a base response, and thereby discourage a broader one.