Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture - Hardcover

""Female Chauvinist Pigs" is smart, alarming, and extremely funny. With nuance and humor, Levy has written both a convincing expose of sex and desire in contemporary America and an important cultural history. I'm giving a copy to my mother. And my sons." --Cathleen Schine, author of "The Love Letter" and "She Is Me " "With "Female Chauvinist Pigs," Ariel Levy becomes feminism's newest and most provocative voice, brilliantly laying bare the contradictions and evasions and self-deceptions that pass for empowerment." --Malcolm Gladwell, author of "Blink" and "The Tipping Point" "Ariel Levy has given us an important, lively, shocking investigative report about how and why--in an age of HIV/AID S and religious fundamentalism--U.S. commercialism has mainstreamed pornography, popularized raunch images (and practices), and revived female "bimbo" roles. This is a call to arms for women and girls who are being sold pseudo empowerment, phony liberation, and fake rebellion--instead of the real thing: freedom. A must-read for young women--and everyone else." --Robin Morgan

If male chauvinist pigs of years past thought of women as pieces of meat, female chauvinist pigs of today are doing them one better, making sex objects of other women -and of themselves. With a wink and a nudge, they are welcoming back strippers, porn stars and Playboy Bunnies as the heroes of post-feminist culture. Taking off your bra used to mean liberation - now it's just the sign of another girl gone wild in her attempt to win favour from the boys. In "Female Chauvinist Pigs" journalist Ariel Levy asks the question: What's in it for us women? In her quest for the answer, Levy interviews the college women who flash for the cameras on MTV and teenage girls raised on Paris Hilton and thongs. She talks to the high-powered women who create 'raunch culture', the new oinking women warriors of the corporate and entertainment worlds. And she sits down with Second Wave feminists, such as Susan Brownmiller and Erica Jong, to find out where they think women are headed today. As she explores the phenomenon of the Female Chauvinist Pig, Levy explains that these new women believe they are expressing sexual liberation and female empowerment, when really they are only conforming to stereotypes cooked long ago. Terrifically witty and wickedly intelligent, "Female Chauvinist Pigs" stands firmly in the tradition of Susan Faludi's "Backlash" and Naomi Wolf's "The Beauty Myth". It is the first book of its kind to emerge in more than a dozen years - and it's not a moment too soon.