Product Description

Today's young women seem to be outdoing the male chauvinist pigs of yesteryear, applauding the 'pornification' of other women, and themselves. This is a world where simulating sex for baying crowds of men on shows like Girls Gone Wild and going to lapdancing clubs - as patrons - is seen as a short cut to cool. Ariel Levy says the joke's on the women if they think this is progress. She tears apart the myth of this new brand of 'empowered woman' and refuses a culture-wide obligation for women to act and look like porn stars. This terrifically witty and wickedly intelligent book makes the case that the rise of raunch does not represent how far women have come - it proves only how far women have left to go.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9075 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-19
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Natasha Walter, The Guardian
'Female Chauvinist Pigs could not have been an easy book to write… Still, Ariel Levy pulls it off'

Synopsis
Today's young women seem to be outdoing the male chauvinist pigs of yesteryear, applauding the 'pornification' of other women, and themselves. This is a world where simulating sex for baying crowds of men on shows like Girls Gone Wild and going to lapdancing clubs - as patrons - is seen as a short cut to cool. Ariel Levy says the joke's on the women if they think this is progress. She tears apart the myth of this new brand of 'empowered woman' and refuses a culture-wide obligation for women to act and look like porn stars. This terrifically witty and wickedly intelligent book makes the case that the rise of raunch does not represent how far women have come - it proves only how far women have left to go.

Customer Reviews

An eye opener
I found this book incredibly illuminating. I have experienced, as a young person growing up, both my parents views on sex etc and my friends- both highly contrasting. This book has helped me to understand why nowadays somethings are accepted that would have been seen in a worse light years ago.
Levy writes in an easy to read prose (unlike me) and the book works in chapters linking together different ideas.
I definitely will be looking at this one again. Highly recommended!!

Sisters are doing it to themselves
Few things in life bug me more than twentysomething women sneering at feminism. Because they're usually doing it over a glass of wine in the pub, on their way home from work, and looking forward to a bit of strings-free 'how's your father' at the weekend. We ought to run some kind of boot camp where they can all go live as fifties housewives for a fortnight, and THEN decide if feminists were all dungaree-wearing, moustachioed lesbians who did nothing but sit about braiding their leg hair. Hello, girls? That job you've got, that pub you're sitting in, the university you went to, the contraception in your purse... in a world where feminism never happened, you'd be home every night baking apple pie and starching your husband's underpants.

But even more galling are the 'new feminists', or female chauvinist pigs as Ariel Levy calls them. Under the magic umbrella of feminism, any kind of behaviour (yes, really, ANY kind) can become 'empowering', that catch-all word that's somehow come to mean you can make shedloads of money out of it. This is the 'new' feminism, and anyone who doesn't actually think it's that cool for women to sell their bodies needs to get with the programme, grandma. Yes, that's right, it's actually 'feminism' in action on those 'music' videos and late-night TV 'programmes' that your boyfriend is probably sorta partial to. That's funny because it used to be degradation, but the adult industry has got one mother of a marketing programme going on. As Levy points out in this well-paced readable book, young women today are afflicted with Uncle Tom syndrome, joining their male friends in the strip clubs and sex shops, and idolising adult stars like Jenna Jameson. Levy reminds us that women like Jameson, glamorous as they might be, are actually prostitutes. No girl in a million years would want to emulate a crack-addled backstreet whore, but plenty of them want to live as brainless blow-up dolls for some reason. Men have once again sold us an image of ourselves, and we women are falling over each other (and maybe pushing and shoving a bit) to buy it.

Levy writes smoothly and well in a poppy, fairly lightweight style with some useful statistics (most sobering of all the high percentage of childhood abuse victims working in the adult industry, including Jameson herself). Your blood may boil at some points on reading this, but she's always level-headed and measured in her assessment of the situation. Levy herself is strikingly attractive (although admittedly not blonde, nor sporting mammary glands the size of basketballs) so the naysayers arguing that it's all sour grapes need to wake up and smell the... KY, or whatever. I have an 8 year old daughter and this is not the world I want her to grow up in. Buy this, read it, pass it around to your friends (male and female) and maybe get a bit of consciousness-raising going on like it's 1970 again. I hope Levy's working on a sequel though, because oops she somehow forgot to present a single, solitary idea about how to actually change any of this. So just read it as a straightforward, entertaining 'state of the nation' style book... and then maybe cancel that brazilian after all, if it's actually really painful and you're only doing it for your boyfriend's sake. One small step for womankind...

An excellent call for sanity
I found myself reading parts of this book aloud to friends - it is clever and funny on top of its razor-edge insight. Levy's language is simple but evocative, full of witty descriptions of products, behaviours and ideas that desperately deserve the mocking.

It doesn't contain a clear agenda for improvement, which is a mild disappointment. I hope that not too many readers end the book feeling powerless to be agents of change.