Late last year I spent two hours in a Fairfax meeting room with a modelling agent, a second-generation nightclub magnate, an advertising executive and a couple of journalists.
For reasons I have yet to fully comprehend, I had been enlisted to help define ‘Sydney’s Ten Sexiest People’ for a glossy Sydney Morning Herald supplement. The panel was equally comprised of men and women, and ranged in age from late-20s to mid-50s so there was a fair degree of debate about what, and who was really, really sexy. One person, however, was endorsed unanimously and enthusiastically by all ages and genders. She might not have been the youngest, or the most pneumatic of all nominees, but there was no debate. Veteran ABC presenter Geraldine Doogue was hailed as one of the ‘sexiest’ women in Sydney.
This experience (among others) leaves me a little sceptical about Ariel Levy’s central thesis in her book Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, which argues that contemporary culture has taken feminist calls for female sexual autonomy and has commodified them. The result, she says, is not a culture of independent sexual expression, but the mainstreaming of a new norm of female sexuality that says that the only way to be ‘sexy’ is to act like a pornographic ‘fembot’. Raunch culture, personified by young women in skimpy clothes with Playboy logos plastered across their chests, has taken over.
Participation is all but mandatory, according to Levy, and ‘sexiness’ is only recognised in women who conform to the pornstar image. Media outlets in Australia have responded enthusiastically to Levy, and her book.
Her recent promotional tour was covered by everyone from Channel Seven’s Sunrise to the ‘quality’ broadsheets. This isn’t surprising, given sex is always good for a story. Nor is it surprising that most reporters chose a very particular angle on this story, which could be summarised as ‘The sexual revolution has Gone Too Far, says (good-looking) yank wowser’. After all, extended descriptions of drunken college students ‘gone wild’ always entertain an audience. Especially when topped and tailed with assertions that all this amateur exhibitionism is terribly demeaning and degrading. Despite local assertions to the contrary, Levy herself is ‘very sexual-revolution sympathetic’. She says:
I don’t think it’s gone ‘too far’, I think it’s gone off course. I don’t think the sexual revolution was supposed to be about ‘how do we all commodify ourselves, and make sex into something we can buy and sell?’
Although Levy, a long-time journalist, has no illusions about the promotional game she’s playing as a touring author, she’s frustrated when her book is interpreted as a call for a restriction of female sexual experimentation and expression.
As she puts it, the book is a call for more:
‘More variety, more open-mindedness. Less performance, and more pleasure. I don’t understand how that’s anything other than pro-sex.’
Part of the misunderstanding may stem from the fact that Levy has, in the main, chosen to document only the most commercialised aspects of contemporary public sex culture. The ‘Girls Gone Wild’ franchise is a case in point. Travelling camera crews approach inebriated college students in bars and parties, and encourage women to perform soft-porn displays, ranging from flashing, to faux girl-on-girl threesomes for the camera. The results are compiled into TV and video footage, and distributed widely. Those who resist are often goaded into a display by cheering male and female onlookers. The producers and distributors profit, the performer’s only reward is a T-shirt or baseball cap. Despite this there’s no shortage of would-be Girls Gone Wild.
Levy acknowledges that some women are genuinely exhibitionistic, and those women should not be shamed or condemned. ‘If exhibitionism is your thing, this is your moment’, she says. ‘The whole culture is here to make you feel supported.’ But the contemporary ethics of sexual experimentation and exhibitionism aren’t explored in Female Chauvinist Pigs.
Although Levy offers some history of feminist debates around sexual politics, she doesn’t include outstanding and controversial second-wave feminist ‘pornographers’, such as Betty Dodson in her discussion. Nor does she refer to the third-wavers like Tristan Taormino and the ‘riot-grrrls’ of the 1990s, for whom the re-appropriation of exaggerated girliness and soft-porn imagery was highly politicised.
This post-punk feminism adapted mainstream sexual imagery as part of a broader critique of the restriction of women’s rights to free expression. Loud, in-your-face expressions of sexuality, including burlesque performances and DIY porn production took off within feminist sub-cultures.
Overt displays of ‘girlishness’ and femininity were seen not as shameful bids for male approval, but as one means of publicly expressing youthful pride, and a sense of self-worth. I asked Levy why it is the ‘female chauvinist pigs’ she encounters in her book seem so hostile in their attitudes to the women they call ‘girly-girls’.
On one hand, her interviewees all seem to agree that the high-maintenance Pamela Anderson model of femininity is the pinnacle of sexual desirability. On the other, everyone insists that really, they’re not like ‘those girls’ at all. ‘Girly-girls are people to revile’, says Levy:
… although you want to sleep with them. We’re all still sexist. A lot of women, gay and straight, femme or butch, want to hear ‘you’re like a man’. Whether it’s in a relationship, or at work, we still want to hear we’re like a man. When no man wants to hear ‘you’re like a woman’. It’s still a misogynist, fucked-up culture.
I still have my doubts as to whether raunch culture is as all-pervasive as Levy suggests. Like Levy, I’ve seen plenty of young, and not-so-young women publicly experimenting with looking, or behaving in a blatantly sexual way. I’ve seen them condemned by feminists and non-feminists alike, and I have no doubt that many are not having much fun acting out sexual cliches.
As Levy puts it:
‘It’s an exhausting second job to try and embody this kind of sexiness if it’s not for real.’
But I don’t see the explosion of porno-chic as a derailing of feminism. Experiments are just that — experiments. By definition, they don’t work out for everyone who tries them. As far as I’m concerned, the sexual revolution is still a work-in-progress.
The following links from Kath Albury’s text are uncensored and could offend:
Betty Dodson: www.bettydodson.com
Tristan Taormino: www.puckerup.com
riot-grrrls: www.aurealm.com/bikinis.htm
burlesque: www.gurlesque.com
DIY porn: www.vegporn.com/info.html
For Ariel Levy’s ‘Female Chauvinist Pigs, Part One’ click here; and for ‘Part Two’ click here.
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