This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.
This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.
Maoist Internationalist Movement

Female Chauvinist Pigs : Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture

Ariel Levy
Female Chauvinist Pigs : Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture
Freepress, New York, 2005, 240 pp. hc.
Reviewed by Prairie Fire of IRTR February 2006

Levy's book documents the rise of raunch culture and the roles some First World wimmin play in that culture. While the book documents something very real, it never overcomes the limits of bourgeois thought and bourgeois conceptions of wimmin in the United $tates. The book does not cover how its topic intersects with class and nation. Instead of following the data on raunch culture to the correct conclusion that First World imperialist-country wimmin are overall beneficiaries of patriarchy and have adopted the oppressive social role of men in that sense, Levy dogmatically implies that First World wimmin are all oppressed victims of patriarchy and all suffering from a kind of false consciousness.

Raunch culture is the pornified culture that came to the fore in the past few decades. It is sexual liberalism transformed through the commercialization of culture and the mass media into a culture obsessed with raunch. While sex plays a big role in raunch culture, Levy distinguishes raunch culture from sexual pleasure and the free-love culture of the 1960s; although, she does note that free love was an important part of laying the groundwork of raunch. While never giving any clear single definition of raunch culture, someone who has been alive in the United $tates in the past few decades could have a good idea of what Levy is getting at. Levy gives many examples of the pornified mass media-driven raunch culture. Examples range from Playboy to "Girls Gone Wild," from the stripper and porn star craze to Sex in the City, to Britney Spears, and so on and so forth. Raunch culture is not limited to heterosexual males. Female Chauvinist Pigs is about the wimmin who are increasingly a part of raunch culture and also looks at how the raunch culture crosses the boundaries of sexual orientation.

Levy sums up the Female Chauvinist Pig: "We decided long ago that the Male Chauvinist Pig was an unenlightened rube, but the Female Chauvinist Pig (FCP) has risen to a kind of exalted status. She is post-feminist. She is funny. She gets it. She doesn't mind the cartoonish stereotypes of female sexuality, and she doesn't mind a cartoonishly macho response to them. The FCP asks: Why throw your boyfriend's Playboy in a freedom trash can when you could be partying at the Mansion? Why worry about disgusting or degrading when you could be giving -- or getting -- a lap dance yourself? Why beat them when you can join them." (p. 93)

On the one hand, many First World wimmin go to great lengths to make themselves, especially their bodies, sexually appealing to men. Some line up to take off their tops or do sex acts for the camera. There are also spokespeople of raunch who declare that these things are signs or even acts of liberation. In a culture where attractive "sexually open-minded" wimmin are valued more than athletes and educators under some circumstances, as Levy observes, taking your top off could be an act of individual empowerment, albeit empowerment on the terms of patriarchy. However, we should agree with Levy and not consider individual empowerment through sexuality to be the same thing as liberation from patriarchy as the "pro-sex feminists" whom Levy writes against do.

Levy argues that some wimmin's promotion of the raunch culture is an attempt to elevate themselves in a hierarchy of masculine sexuality while degrading other wimmin. "So to really be like men, FCPs have to enjoy looking at those women, too. At the same time, they wouldn't mind being looked at a little bit themselves. The task here is to simultaneously show that you are not the same as the girly-girls in the videos and the Victoria's Secret cataloguers, but that you approve of men's appreciation of them, and the possibility you too have some of that same sexy energy and underwear underneath all your aggression and wit. A passion for raunch covers all the bases." (p. 99)

White U.$. wimmin in ever greater numbers have a hand in producing or encouraging raunch culture yet standing apart and above it, engaged in and consuming raunch culture like men. In a way, Howard Stern's world is a microcosm of this dynamic between different kinds of female chauvinist pigs. Howard Stern's female chauvinist pig sidekick Robin Quiversm, and her relation to the parade of bimbos on the show, are an example of this. Some of these savvy, powerful "female chauvinist pigs" include those who are running the sex industry, going to strip clubs, buying Playboy products, etc. They also include wimmin who become "one of the boys" at workplaces by adopting the male raunch culture directed toward bimbos. Levy compares these wimmin to Uncle Toms. They gain real power; in some cases, they literally are the bosses in the sex industry, but their price of admission, Levy implies, is that they partake in the oppression of other First World wimmin, others like them or those lower on the gender hierarchy.

This is really where Levy's book, and the Uncle Tom comparison, doesn't fit. Levy seems pretty clear that she thinks those at the bottom of the raunch culture hierarchy -- the Hooters waitresses of the world -- are oppressed and have some mistaken ideas about empowerment. Levy even mentions Gloria Steinem's exposé, "A Bunny's Tale," on the supposed exploitation of Playboy Bunnies. However, Levy also seems to think that those wimmin at the top of the raunch culture hierarchy are also oppressed in some sense. That she compares them to Uncle Toms is very revealing. However, Tom never owned the plantation, whereas Christie Hefner is running the Playboy empire. Hefner is socially a man. Social conditions and relationships determine Hefner's social gender position, not her biology.

"Tomming, then, is conforming to someone else's -- someone more powerful's -- distorted notion of what you represent. In so doing, you may be getting ahead in some way -- getting paid to dance in blackface in a Tom show, or gaining favor with Mas'r as Stowe's hero did in literature -- but you are simultaneously reifying the system that traps you." (p. 106) This passage says a lot about Levy's view. Despite all the evidence she herself presents, Levy just assumes that First World wimmin do represent something else deep down and are being deceived. First World wimmin are decieved in some ways, particularly when it comes to their relatively less powerful position compared with the men: they are not being decieved about the fact that they benfit from the system.

Levy's conclusions are not entirely clear. She feels that raunch culture is ultimately not empowering for the individuals involved, nor a way to fight patriarchy. While she is correct that it is no way to fight patriarchy, to claim that it isn't empowering is not altogether true. In some cases it clearly is empowering, especially for those wimmin who own or make huge profits off the raunch and sex industry. And we should not forget that the raunch industry in the First World is only made possible by the super-exploitation of Third World workers. Peversely, some pseudo-feminists see the rise of raunch culture in Third World cities after an increase in wimmin's paid work as a sign of wimmin's empowerment. Their intuition is right that raunch culture is a sign of the gender privilege -- for First World wimmin -- but for Third World wimmin the raunch culture and its controlling effect on wimmin's resistance to imperialism and the global patriarchy could mean having a shorter life.

Levy describes looking at porno magazines:

"[T]hey gave me a big stack of magazines to flip through and the only variety I saw was the kind of variety you get when you look at a wall of Barbie Dolls. Some have darker hair (but most are blond), some have an ethnic- or professional themed costume, but they all look very distinctly poured from the same mold." (p. 43)

Globally, First World wimmin adopting the bimbo role can be empowered, because, through raunch culture, they are granted a near monopoly on what society considers to be desirable. Raunch culture is setting the standards for desirability globally, but mainly First Worlders have the wealth and ability to meet these standards while still retaining any leisure time and control over their lives. Whereas, a Third-Worlder is less desirable by the standards of raunch, except when she is a slave in the sex industry. Also, lighter-skinned wimmin benefit more from raunch as it now exists than darker-skinned wimmin because raunch culture has contributed to making the European body type the pinnacle of physical attraction. Therefore, lighter-skinned wimmin have access to more and a higher quality of leisure time, in terms of dating opportunities, for example, than darker-skinned wimmin who are considered generally less desirable by raunch. This further increases the national oppression by the Euro-Amerikan nation and white supremacy. Issues such as these, related to Nation and class, are absent from Levy's work.

Levy is clearly in the bourgeois "feminist" camp and thinks that all the wimmin of the First World raunch culture are suffering from a false consciousness regarding their relation to raunch and patriarchy. She is holding out for a First World liberation from patriarchy while not overthrowing imperialism. So, she is confused when First World wimmin take empowerment the same way men do, on patriarchy's terms. Like men in the First World, First World wimmin are gender oppressors, though they generally have less power than the men; it is no surprise that many of them begin to take on the sexual psychology and raunch culture of males.

This passage sums up Levy's perspective: "Even if you are a woman who achieves the ultimate and becomes like a man, you will still always be a woman. And as long as womanhood is thought of as something to escape from, something less than manhood, you will be thought less of, too." (p. 112) For Levy, oppression is a thought.

At bottom, Levy advocates a bourgeois position that gender interest must be tied to biological sex, and that ending wimmin's oppression just means equality between sexes in each country. While making some observations worthy of a revolutionary-feminist investigation, Levy avoids the conclusion that within the system of gender oppression, most First Worlders are gender oppressors, be they male or female. Most First World adults share the same sexual and leisure culture, psychology, and outlook, but Levy still sees wimmin globally as being basically the same in terms of gender interests, except that some of them do not realize that and suffer from false consciousness. Levy implies that a female chauvinist pig is similar to an Uncle Tom because she is a persyn "who deliberately upholds the stereotypes assigned to his or her marginalized group in the interest of getting ahead with the dominant group." (p. 105) Levy just assumes that these gender aristocrats in the First World are oppressed by patriarchy. Levy writes, "FCPs have relinquished any sense of themselves as a collective group with a linked fate" (p. 101), as though female chauvinist pigs do have a collective fate with all wimmin. In reality, the fate of female chauvinist pigs is not linked as a group with the majority of the world's wimmin in the Third World. Their fate is more linked with the fate of First World men.

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