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Thursday, September 22, 2005

Where did feminism lose its way?

Author asks how women who fought for liberation can now buy into sexual stereotypes.

By Colette Bancroft / St. Petersburg Times

Author Ariel Levy takes a look at perceptions of feminism in two very different generations and the rise of raunch culture. Comment on this story Send this story to a friend Get Home Delivery

They're the faces of feminism in the 21st century: "Girls Gone Wild" flashers, porn star Jenna Jameson and the "Sex and the City" supershoppers.

If that sentence made your head explode, you're on the same page as Ariel Levy, author of "Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture." If it made perfect sense, you may find yourself in her pages.

In "Female Chauvinist Pigs" (Free Press, $25), Levy takes a sharp-eyed look at perceptions of feminism in two very different generations. She asks whether Brazilian waxes really are more empowering than unshaven legs, and, more important, whether the recent resurgence of sexual stereotypes means women are strong enough to transcend them -- or are just giving up.

In a phone interview from her home in Manhattan, as she begins a round of radio and TV interviews and a book tour, Levy says, "There's more to female empowerment than sexual freedom."

She is not some old-school scold. A columnist for New York magazine and Slate, she's a smart, witty observer of American culture and, at 30, "fluent in raunch."

Raised by parents who were student activists in the 1960s and educated at the zenith of political correctness in the '90s, Levy says she "pretty much took for granted that everything feminism said was true," including the idea that seeing women as sex objects is discriminatory and damaging.

But, as she writes in "Female Chauvinist Pigs," in the last few years she noticed her female friends going to clubs to see female strippers, digging on Howard Stern and "The Man Show," and explaining that it was all "liberating and rebellious."

The trend rubbed off on her. A graduate of Wesleyan University, where "You could pretty much be kicked out for saying 'girl' instead of 'woman,'" she found herself calling women "chicks" and wearing thongs.

"My best friend from college was really into this stuff," Levy says. "This is a really smart woman, someone I saw as an enlightened person, but she became completely fascinated with porn stars.

"It was so incredibly weird. In the last five years or so, there are just these fake boobs everywhere."

Levy started asking herself how a generation of women who fought for liberation and equality in the '60s and '70s was followed by a generation that thinks empowerment means buying into cartoonish sexual stereotypes.

The result is her first book. In "Female Chauvinist Pigs," she spends a few days with a crew shooting a "Girls Gone Wild" video in Miami (where one 19-year-old masturbates for the camera and then points out that she's a virgin), interviews Playboy CEO Christie Hefner and X-rated filmmaker Candida Royalle, and attends a bawdy Manhattan party thrown by "hypersexual sorority" Cake.

She analyzes "Sex and the City" and the writing of cultural critic Camille Paglia. She delves into the lesbian "boi" subculture, in which young women adopt not only an exaggerated male appearance and mannerisms but also "male" promiscuity. She rails about the dubious effectiveness of abstinence education. She considers powerful female executives like HBO's Sheila Nevins who make documentaries about sex workers. She interviews middle school girls who perform oral sex on boys they barely know.

She talks to a woman who is one of the executive producers of "The Man Show": "There's a side to boydom that's fun," Jen Heftler declared. "They get to fart, they get to be loud -- and I think now we're saying we can fart and curse and go to strip clubs and smoke cigars just as easily and just as well."

Levy wonders why women would want to.

Partly it's just the rebellion of the daughters of the baby boomers: "No one wants to be like her mother," she says in the interview.

Levy also sees raunch culture as rooted in the history of feminism. "People my age think of the '60s as one big happy soup" of social change, she says, but there were many rifts between and within feminism and the antiwar and civil rights movements, among others.

That was particularly true of feminism and sexual liberation: "Feminism became fractured over how to represent sex and how to have sex," she says. Although the feminism of the '60s and '70s initially had a strong component of sexual liberation, antipornography activists came to occupy one extreme, "sex-positive feminists" the other.

"Feminism didn't resolve everything," Levy says. "Trying to gain your freedom from the people you want to sleep with is complicated."

Raunch culture doesn't just signify that feminism is far from winning all its battles. It's also an expression of the failure of sexual liberation.

"People are always saying, 'Oh, our culture is so oversexualized.' No, it's not. We're so uptight it's unbelievable," Levy says.

Instead of the freewheeling "everyone is beautiful" sexual openness of the '60s, the culture is once again pervaded by exaggerated sexual stereotypes, a time-honored way of not dealing with the sexual natures of real people.

One sign of that, Levy writes in her book, is the reborn popularity of strippers: "We have to ask ourselves why we are so focused on silent girly-girls in G-strings faking lust. . . . We are still so uneasy with the vicissitudes of sex we need to surround ourselves with caricatures of female hotness to safely conjure up the concept 'sexy.' "

She finds it curious that strippers, along with centerfolds and porn actors like Jameson, have returned as icons of female sexuality. "These aren't the people getting the most pleasure from sex," she says. "They're the people getting the most money to pretend."

Jameson's autobiography, "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star," spent six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Despite its self-help-style title, Levy says, the book is a "harrowing account of sexual trauma" in which Jameson describes being gang-raped and left for dead as a teen and, as a sex worker, using her body as a weapon and being unable to watch her own films.

"And you're going to teach me how to make love?" Levy says. "It doesn't sound like much fun."

The same is true of watching porn, she writes: "No matter how much porn you watch . . . you still won't know how these things feel.

"I don't see why we should regard porn as a way to enjoy 'sexuality in all its explicitness' any more than we would consider looking at a chart of the food pyramid to be a feast."

Cookie-cutter images of hot girls pervade the culture for children as well as for adults. One of the female porn fans Levy interviews said she was drawn to such women because they are "like live Barbie dolls."

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