February 23, 2012
Author Ariel Levy spoke to a packed Filius Events Barn Tuesday night about her 2005 book Female Chauvinist Pigs. The topic of the book, and of Tuesday’s talk, is the phenomenon of a hypersexual “raunch culture” that Levy identifies as having arisen as “an antidote to the humorlessness of the politically correct language from the ’80s” and subsequently penetrated popular culture, media, entertainment and even, to a certain degree, politics and academia.
Levy’s audience remained rapt and engaged throughout her talk and subsequent Q & A session, and for good reason. As members of a post-feminist generation (which, Levy stressed, does not mean that we have surpassed the problems faced by feminists of the past) attending college during the height of the “hookup culture,” Hamilton students are part of the group most affected by Levy’s talk and the group to which Levy herself belongs.
We have all grown up in a media-centered world in which sexual promiscuity is hardly shocking. From advertisements featuring near-nude models to TV shows whose drama revolves around hookups and casual sex, we are exposed on a daily basis to material that, just a few decades ago, wouldn’t have made it past censors. In this culture so obsessed and imbued with sex, Levy identified a striking disparity between sexified media and pop culture and healthy attitudes towards actual, real-life sex. The fact that middle and high-school girls regularly sport attire emblazoned with Playboy bunnies, yet have next to no idea of how to conduct themselves in an intimate relationship is a serious dilemma that proves how our raunch culture, according to Levy, ultimately boils sex down to “something much less complicated and much less interesting than it is.”
Levy points out that we have become so used to and so reliant on this culture that many women, and even girls, turn to objectification of their own bodies as a means of expressing power or sexual freedom. During her time spent shadowing a camera crew for the infamous Girls Gone Wild franchise, Levy encountered female after female (many of whom were strong, intelligent and often college students) who are not only willing but eager to strip down so that their bodies may be filmed for the enjoyment of thousands of ogling preteen boys. As one young woman explained, “If a woman’s got a pretty body and she likes her body, let her show it off!”
Yet Levy argued that there is something seriously flawed about this supposed self-confidence in body and sexuality. When girls are showing off their bodies for Girls Gone Wild, or in strip clubs, college-campus “sex parties” or any of the many other environments explored by Levy during her research, they are not showing off their bodies for themselves or their own enjoyment. Rather, they are conforming to a system which has disguised female sexual objectification as liberation by reiterating time and time again that sex is the only way to get attention. As evidence of this exploitation, Levy pointed out that little care is ever paid to the pleasure or satisfaction of women in this cultural model. The porn stars who Levy studies are, in fact, paid to fake arousal. And the “sexy” women seen most often in the media are not realistic females but rather “cartoonish images of female sexuality.” In a culture fascinated with such hyper-sexualization, we are automatically programmed to see woman as the object, tangible and commodified, and not as a powerful, willful or even real being. Ultimately, according to Levy, it doesn’t matter whether women “choose” to exploit their own sexuality, since they are doing it within a culture that suppresses any power they might derive from such expression.
Perhaps the most significant lesson to take away from Levy’s talk is that we have a long way to go in terms of sexual equality. “So many of the goals of the Women’s Movement haven’t been achieved,” she noted. Levy gave some sense of hope for this movement during her Q & A session when she talked about her job as a female journalist. “I tell a fun story and secretly indoctrinate it with feminism,” she joked. Although the reality that “people want to hear about [feminism] in a way they don’t expect” might be a sad one, Levy is taking the first steps in fixing the flaws of our raunch culture by getting people interested in questioning “raunch” norms. And the audience on Tuesday night was certainly interested.