Author undresses ‘raunch culture’

On Wednesday, April 28, Dana Auditorium filled to capacity as students gathered to hear from Ariel Levy, author of Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture.

Levy is savvy, witty and brazen, and her powerful message about the prevalence of raunch culture in America captured the audience’s humor and attention.

“Raunch culture” is a term Levy coined to indicate the widespread saturation of porn, sex and “broad, silly caricatures of female sexuality” in our media, politics and entertainment. As the new millennium dawned, Levy noticed that every time she turned on the television, a stripper-themed show was on the air.

Women wore the playboy bunny emblem without a second thought. Porn stars had risen to celebrity status and Jenna Jameson’ memoir topped bestseller lists for weeks. And so in January 2001 Levy published “Me Tarzan, You Jane” in New York Magazine. Her article, which became fodder for her 2004 book, identified raunch culture and its biggest devotee: the Female Chauvinist Pig.

In her lecture, Levy defined the Female Chauvinist pig as a woman “who makes sex objects of other women and of herself.” Her book, however, offers a deeper — and more provocative — description: “We decided long ago that the Male Chauvinist Pig was an unenlightened rube, but the Female Chauvinist Pig has risen to a kind of exalted status. She is post-feminist. She is funny. She gets it. She doesn’t mind cartoonish stereotypes of female sexuality and she doesn’t mind a cartoonishly macho response to them.”

These Female Chauvinist Pigs seek to assume a stereotypically male attitude towards sex buying into a depiction of female sexuality that is simplistic and one-dimensional.

“We’re not talking about women being partners in sexual wildness,” Levy said in her lecture.

“Women are erotic ornaments. There’s an emphasis on performance, not on pleasure.”

Problematic, too, is raunch culture’s proponents’ use of feminist language to assert that they are “continuing the work of the women’s movement,” that “exhibitionism is empowerment.” As a result, raunch culture is not only “a litmus test for female uptightness,” but also a means by which women believe they can gain power.

“There’s a way in which a certain lewdness, a certain crass, casual manner that has at is core a me-Tarzan-you-Jane mentality can make people feel equal” writes Levy.

“It makes us feel that way because we are all Tarzan now, or at least we are all pretending to be.”

The lecture proved both a summary of Levy’s book and a humorous, pithy explanation of what it’s like to be on, say, the set of Girls Gone Wild for research. Levy’s magnetism worked to garner audience enthusiasm and agreement.

“I thought she was total firecracker and hilarious,” said Bianca Giaever, ’12.5.

“It was nice to have someone snappy telling it like it is.” Mukui Mbindyo ’11 agreed. “She really articulated what it means to be a feminist in 2010,” said Mbidyo.

“She talked about how far feminism has come and the areas that still need to be addressed.”

Levy is enormously culturally aware without resorting to heavy-handed intellectualism or theory. She tracked second-wave feminism’s varied attitudes toward sex and sexuality and its present cultural repercussions.

Idyllic Middlebury is by no means absent from Levy’s critique. Raunch culture reigns on the weekends, and it is perhaps empowering to get drunk and tastefully dolled up in the wee hours of J-term to simulate sex, threesomes and granola-drenched revelry for a student-produced music video.

In light of the misogyny that creeps up higher education’s ivory towers, Samantha Hernandez, ’11, deemed student receptiveness to Levy’s talk “encouraging.”

After the lecture, Chellis House overflowed with students eager to hear more from Levy who, for her part, seemed to find Middlebury students’ enthusiasm kind of strange.

“This is so weird,” she mused as a sea of upturned, eager faces clustered around her chair and waited for her to address their queries.

“It’s so awkward and formal — I feel like Mother Goose.”

Levy fielded questions ranging from her feelings on feminist blogs to her experience as a female journalist to the future of the journalism industry. She even commented on the MiddKid Rap video which, to her jaded eye, pales in comparison to porn or spring break: “It didn’t exactly shock me.”

And she admitted to not having a solution to the problems inherent in raunch culture.

“I feel like my job as a journalist or as a writer is [to say] okay, here are things in the culture that I notice and [provide] an analysis. I don’t have prescriptions. I really don’t.”

In Female Chauvinist Pigs Levy does, however, proffer some valuable advice: “If we are really going to be sexually liberated, we need to make room for a range of options as wide as the variety of human desire. We need to allow ourselves the freedom to figure out what we internally want from sex instead of mimicking whatever popular culture holds up to us as sexy. That would be sexual liberation.”