Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture

by Ariel Levy

  Despite what can fairly be called a campaign of begging on my part, Kramer and Gallagher refused to answer questions about why they can’t achieve their “female-directed sexual revolution” without the constant presence of taut, waxed strippers. They were evasive, I think, on the subject of girls on display because they can’t quite figure out what else to do. And it is a tough one—how do you publicly express the concept “sexy” without falling back on the old hot-chicks-in-panties formula? It’s a challenge that requires imagination and creativity that they do not possess. They haven’t yet found a way to enact the redefinition they are advocating, so they are wishing for feminist justification where none exists. The truth is that the new conception of raunch culture as a path to liberation rather than oppression is a convenient (and lucrative) fantasy with nothing to back it up.

  Or, as Susan Brownmiller put it when I asked her what she made of all this, “You think you’re being brave, you think you’re being sexy, you think you’re transcending feminism. But that’s bullshit.”

  On August 26, 1970, tens of thousands of women went on “strike” from their homes and families and jobs to march down Fifth Avenue on the fiftieth anniversary of women’s suffrage. The action was Betty Friedan’s brainchild, and she’d announced the idea of a “Women’s Strike for Equality” in an infamous two-hour speech at NOW’s fourth national conference—just minutes after she was voted off the board of the organization she’d started back in 1966. “They kicked Betty upstairs; everybody had had it with her at that point,” remembers Jacqui Ceballos, a former president of New York NOW and, at various other times in her seventy-eight years, a student of astrology, a television actress, and the founder of the first opera house in Bogotá, Colombia. “She had created some really very bad vibes with her position on lesbians and she had alienated everybody.” (Friedan notoriously called lesbian feminists a “lavender menace.”) “Oh, if I can tell you how they humiliated Betty Friedan! One time they sent her down to get coffee. Yes, ma’am! So she’s going to have this big strike and march. And I’m telling you, she had no one to work with. No one! But I went to Betty and I said, ‘I’ll help you.’ I got the Socialist Worker’s Party in on it and everyone was nervous about those women, but let me tell you: They were organizers!”

  In an inspired publicity stunt, Ceballos and her comrades took over the Statue of Liberty. “Put a sign on her saying WOMEN OF THE WORLD UNITE! MARCH ON AUGUST 26! I always get excited thinking about it because it was really something. We’d already had women go and case the statue and they knew everything: They knew what the weather was going to be like and they knew the wind angle and they knew how to hang up these two huge banners. So we got ’em up and then the guards were banging around at the entrance of the statue, but the mayor John Lindsay called and said, Let the women be! Oh, it was a huge event.”

  The committee organizing the march also held a traditional press conference to enlist supporters. “We invited the whole press and Bella Abzug and we invited Gloria Steinem because she had been making feminist remarks, and then Betty didn’t show! She was stuck in traffic,” Ceballos says. “The press was getting antsy and I realized we were going to lose them if something didn’t happen, so I jumped up and started saying things that were in my head—saying we were going to do all these things that I had no idea if we were going to do. I told everyone that fifty thousand women would march and then I had to get ’em. There must have been no news that summer, because, I’m telling you, it went around the world. It was scary as hell! I remember running around Manhattan with Jill Ward,” Mother Courage’s cofounder, “putting flyers about the coming march everywhere we could find a place. At one point we were driving up Park Avenue at rush hour, stopped at a red light, and in the car next to us the couple was obviously arguing, and the woman was crying. Jill jumped out of her driver’s seat, tapped on the window, and gave the woman a flyer.

  “All day long before the march at five o’clock we had actions,” Ceballos continues. “We went to restaurants that were for men only; we did a prayer service. They say we had no sense of humor, but it was hilarious: We put out the NOW York Times and had a wedding announcement with a picture of the groom, and we gave out awards to the Biggest Male Chauvinist and all that kind of thing. Everyone in town was waiting for us. By the time the march came, after doing actions all day, I turned the corner onto Fifth Avenue and there were thousands of women. I couldn’t see the end of the line. It was not a march like the early suffragists. We were dancing and singing and running and there were thousands of people watching us. After our march, Kate Millett said, ‘We are a movement now.’ And that’s how I felt: We are no longer a group of crazy radicals, we’re a political movement. At that point, even my mother got involved.”

  In the days when feminism was fun, women’s liberation was an adventure that involved stakeouts and bloodless coups and victory celebrations for the conquering heroines. The women’s movement introduced revolutionary ideas that caught on so thoroughly they now seem self-evident. That women don’t automatically have to be mothers or (even) wives. That women are entitled to their constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the law. That women ought to be eligible to attend top schools (Princeton and Yale did not begin admitting female students until 1969; Harvard shared some classes with the women of Radcliffe as early as 1943 but did not fully integrate until 1972; Columbia was all male for undergraduates until 1983). That women should not be discriminated against in the workplace. That there is such a thing as a clitoris.

  In the late sixties and seventies, even women who had no direct contact with the movement felt the ripple effects of feminist activism in one way or another. The ordinary women who weren’t celebrating Roe at Mother Courage or storming the Statue of Liberty were still seeing these events on television and reading about them in the paper. Women’s lib was a media sensation and a far-reaching grassroots effort. At the height of the movement there were women’s consciousness-raising groups in every major city in this country, spreading the message to the masses.

  Ultimately, in addition to the obvious freedoms feminism brought to non-movement women, it also affected their vocabularies and their wardrobes—their taste as well as their consciousness. As Brownmiller writes in In Our Time, “even the ‘Women’s Lib look’—the brazen disregard for makeup and bras and a preference for jeans and long, unkempt hair that affronted Middle America—was taken up by fashion trendies as a sexy statement.” In addition to being crucial and revolutionary, feminism was cool.

  In recent years, the term “feminism” has fallen further and further out of favor. According to a 2001 Gallup poll, only 25 percent of women considered themselves feminists, down a percentage point from the 1999 survey. Some of the concepts and the lexicon introduced by the women’s movement remain modish, however: We are still encouraged by fashion and media and Hollywood and each other to be “strong women.” “Liberation” and “empowerment” are still buzzwords, but they once referred to bucking the system, going on strike against submission, adopting a brazen, braless, unshaven, untrammeled approach to life. These terms have since been drained of meaning. Instead of hairy legs, we have waxed vaginas; the free-flying natural woman boobs of yore have been hoisted with push-up bras or “enhanced” into taut plastic orbs that stand perpetually at attention. What has moved into feminism’s place as the most pervasive phenomenon in American womanhood is an almost opposite style, attitude, and set of principles.

  Ceballos, who now runs a group called the Veteran Feminists of America out of her hometown, Lafayette, Louisiana, was also present in 1968 in Atlantic City when feminists protested the Miss America Pageant and the urban myth of bra-burners was born. “It was against the law to burn bras or anything else, but there was a ‘freedom trash can’ out on the boardwalk and we threw in anything we thought was oppressive to women,” she says. The basic protest went like so: “Women in our society are forced daily to compete for male approval, enslaved by ludicrous beauty standards that we our
selves are conditioned to take seriously and to accept!”

  “At that time, Miss America had to stand up and say her aspiration was to be a good wife and mother and then they would send her over to Vietnam. To excite the boys! Oh, it was just disgusting,” says Ceballos. “Some of the women broke into the actual pageant and they were arrested with the great Flo Kennedy.” (Kennedy, a lawyer, writer, and activist, started the Feminist Party to support black congresswoman Shirley Chisholm’s run for the presidency and served as legal defense for Valerie Solanis, the woman who shot Andy Warhol.) “Of course, this is the kind of news that gets around. That’s why we chose to do it!”

  One of the reporters covering the protest was Lindsy Van Gelder from the New York Post, who compared the trashing of bras to the burning of draft cards, and ever since people have mentally connected feminists with an imaginary lingerie inferno. “We weren’t allowed to burn bras or anything else,” says Ceballos, “but I did throw out my son’s Playboy. And I said, ‘Women! Use your brains, not your bodies!’ ”

  Three

  Female

  Chauvinist Pigs

  On the first warm day of spring 2000, the organization New York Women in Film & Television threw a brunch to honor Sheila Nevins, a twenty-six-year veteran of HBO and their president of documentary and family programming. It was held in a grand, street-level room off Park Avenue, in which they’d assembled an impressive selection of stylish women, seasonal berries, and high-end teas. Through the windows you could see the passing streams of yellow taxis sparkling in the midtown sunlight.

  But the vibe was more Lifetime Intimate Portrait than Sex and the City. “I was growing up in a society where women were quiet so I got to listen,” Nevins reflected from the podium, where she sat lovely and serene in a pale pink shawl. “I like to laugh, I like to cry, the rest is paperwork.”

  Nevins is a big deal. She was once profiled as one of the “25 Smartest Women in America” along with Tina Brown, Susan Sontag, and Donna Brazile in Mirabella. Crain’s has called Nevins “a revered player.” Under her stewardship, HBO programs and documentary films have won seventy-one Emmy awards, thirteen Oscars, and twenty-two George Foster Peabody awards, including Nevins’s own personal Peabody. In 2000, Nevins was inducted into the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame, and she has received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the International Documentary Association and the Banff Television Festival. In 2002, Nevins was named the National Foundation for Jewish Culture’s “Woman of Inspiration.” She is an elegant blonde with a husband and a son and a glamorous, lucrative career that even involves an intimidating level of gravitas: She has overseen the making of films about the Holocaust, cancer, and war orphans.

  At that breezy spring breakfast, all the women wore glazed, reverential expressions as they picked at their melon wedges and admired Nevins’s sharp wit, keen intellect, and zebra-printed slides. “Who opened your career doors for you?” one wanted to know.

  “Me,” Nevins replied.

  A tweedy gentleman with a bow tie started his question with, “I’m just the token guy…”

  Nevins gave a little snort and said, “You’re all tokens,” and everyone had a good laugh.

  But then a curly-haired woman in the back brought up G-String Divas, a late-night “docu-soap” Nevins executive produced, which treated audiences to extended showings of T & A sandwiched between interviews with strippers about tricks of the trade and their real-life sexual practices. “Why would a woman—a middle-aged woman with a child—make a show about strippers?” the woman asked. Everyone was stunned.

  Nevins whipped around in her chair. “You’re talking fifties talk! Get with the program!” she barked. “I love the sex stuff, I love it! What’s the big deal?”

  In fact, there was something vaguely anachronistic about this woman compared to the rest with their blowouts and lip liner. She adjusted her eyeglasses, visibly shaken, but persisted. “Why is it still the case that if we’re going to have a series about women on television, it has to be about their bodies and their sexuality?”

  Nevins shook her head furiously. “Why is it that women will still go after women taking their clothes off and not after all the injustices in the workplace? I don’t get it! As if women taking off their clothes is disgusting and degrading. Not being able to feed your kids, that’s disgusting and degrading!”

  “But…”

  “Everyone has to bump and grind for what they want,” Nevins interrupted. “Their bodies are their instruments and if I had that body I’d play it like a Stradivarius!”

  “But…”

  “The women are beautiful and the men are fools! What’s the problem?”

  “But you’re not really answering my question.”

  Of course not. Because part of the answer is that nobody wants to be the frump at the back of the room anymore, the ghost of women past. It’s just not cool. What is cool is for women to take a guy’s-eye view of pop culture in general and live, nude girls in particular. You’re worried about strippers? Nevins seemed on the verge of hollering at her inquisitor, Honey, they could teach you a thing or two about where it’s at! Nevins was threatening something she clearly considered far worse than being objectified: being out of touch.

  If you are too busy or too old or too short to make a Stradivarius of yourself, then the least you can do is appreciate that achievement in others, or so we are told. If you still suffer from the (hopelessly passé) conviction that valuing a woman on the sole basis of her hotness is, if not disgusting and degrading, then at least dehumanizing, if you still cling to the (pathetically deluded) hope that a more abundant enjoyment of the “sex stuff” could come from a reexamination of old assumptions, then you are clearly stuck in the past (and you’d better get a clue, but quick).

  If I told you that I’d met someone who executive produces a reality show about strippers, who becomes irritable and dismissive when faced with feminist debate, and who is a ferocious supporter of lap dances, you might reasonably assume I was talking about a man—the kind of man we used to call a Male Chauvinist Pig. But no. I’m talking about the Jewish Woman of Inspiration. I’m talking about an urbane, articulate, extremely successful woman who sits on a high perch in the middle of the mainstream, and I could be talking about any number of other women, because the ideas and emotions Nevins gave voice to are by no means uniquely her own: They are the status quo.

  We decided long ago that the Male Chauvinist Pig was an unenlightened rube, but the Female Chauvinist Pig (FCP) 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. The FCP asks: Why throw your boyfriend’s Playboy in a freedom trash can when you could be partying at the Mansion? Why worry about disgusting or degrading when you could be giving—or getting—a lap dance yourself? Why try to beat them when you can join them?

  There’s a way in which a certain lewdness, a certain crass, casual manner that has at its core a me-Tarzan-you-Jane mentality can make people feel equal. It makes us feel that way because we are all Tarzan now, or at least we are all pretending to be. For a woman like Nevins, who “grew up in a society where women were quiet” and still managed to open all her career doors herself, this is nothing new. She has been functioning—with enormous success—in a man’s world for decades. Somewhere along the line she had to figure out how to be one of the guys.

  Nevins is (still) what used to be known as a “loophole woman,” an exception in a male-dominated field whose presence supposedly proves its penetrability. (The phrase was coined by Caroline Bird in her book Born Female: The High Cost of Keeping Women Down, published in 1968.) Women in powerful positions in entertainment were a rare breed when Nevins started out, and they remain so today. In 2003, women held only 17 percent of the key roles—executive producers, producers, directors, writers, cinematographers, and editors—in making the top 250 domestic grossing films. (And progress is st
alled: The percentage of women working on top films hasn’t changed since 1998.) Meanwhile on television, men outnumbered women by approximately four to one in behind-the-scenes roles in the 2002–2003 prime-time season, which was also the case for the preceding four seasons. What the statistics indicate more clearly than the entertainment industry’s permeability is a woman like Nevins’s own vulnerability. To hang on to her position, she has to appear that much more confident, aggressive, and unconflicted about her choices—she has to do everything Fred Astaire does, backward, in heels.

  Women who’ve wanted to be perceived as powerful have long found it more efficient to identify with men than to try and elevate the entire female sex to their level. The writers Mary McCarthy and Elizabeth Hardwick were famously contemptuous of “women’s libbers,” for example, and were untroubled about striving to “write like a man.” Some of the most glamorous and intriguing women in our history have been compared to men, either by admirers or detractors. One of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay’s many lovers, the young editor John Bishop, wrote to her in a letter, “I think really that your desire works strangely like a man’s.” In an August 2001 article for Vanity Fair, Hillary Clinton’s biographer Gail Sheehy commented that “from behind, the silhouette of the freshman senator from New York looks like that of a man.” A high school classmate of Susan Sontag’s told her biographers Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock that young “Sue” maintained a “masculine kind of independence.” Judith Regan, the most feared and famous executive in publishing—and the woman who brought us Jenna Jameson’s best-selling memoir—is fond of bragging, “I have the biggest cock in the building!” at editorial meetings (and referring to her detractors as “pussies”). There is a certain kind of woman—talented, powerful, unrepentant—whom we’ve always found difficult to describe without some version of the phrase “like a man,” and plenty of those women have never had a problem with that. Not everyone cares that this doesn’t do much for the sisterhood.