Female Chauvinist Pigs
Posted By jss on May 16, 2009
I’m reading, lately, Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, and am alternately deconstructing and enjoying it. I like her writing and reporting style. But pervasively, I think she overestimates the extent to which raunch is at the heart of American culture, even sexual culture. Raunch is more … an accoutrement, an activity, a slice of life, than it is a way of life for most women I know who might embrace it to some lesser or greater extent.
In other words, I think it doesn’t mean as much as she thinks it does. I don’t think pop/sexual culture is driven as much from the top — media, porn stars, etc. — as it is driven more locally by the basic human urge to be sexual, which manifests itself in more ways than even Shere Hite can fit in a book.
Ariel’s provocative and smart about it, though. FCP was published in 2006 and I’m glad I caught up to it.
And I loved her on the Colbert show:
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Ariel Levy | ||||
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"Into Temptation" is a usually-but-not-always safe-for-work forum about evolving social-sexual networks and how they have changed and are changing lives. It will also loosely chronicle the research, writing and publication, I hope in 2011, of a book by the same name.
I read this book, and posted about it a while ago
http://thebeautifulkind.com/2007/03/09/female-chauvinist-pigs/
HA Colbert’s shoes were a fun surprise!!!
Yay from the interview, Levy would like me! “Authentic expression of sexuality and liberation”