Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture

by Ariel Levy

  Raunch provides a special opportunity for a woman who wants to prove her mettle. It’s in fashion, and it is something that has traditionally appealed exclusively to men and actively offended women, so producing it or participating in it is a way both to flaunt your coolness and to mark yourself as different, tougher, looser, funnier—a new sort of loophole woman who is “not like other women,” who is instead “like a man.” Or, more precisely, like a Female Chauvinist Pig.

  Sherry, Anyssa, and Rachel are a trio of friends who share a taste for raunch: Maxim, porn, Howard Stern, Playboy, you name it. All three are in their late twenties and, on the night we met, they had recently returned to New York City from a post-collegiate spring break. Rachel, a registered nurse, a tough, compact girl with short red hair, had brought the others a memento: a postcard picturing a woman’s tumescent breasts against a background of blue sky with the words Breast wishes from Puerto Rico! scrawled in loopy cursive across the top.

  “When I first moved to New York, I couldn’t get over Robin Byrd,” said Rachel. She was talking about New York City’s local-access television sex queen. Byrd has been on cable since 1977, hosting a show in which male and female performers strip and plug their upcoming appearances in clubs or magazines or porn movies. The finale of each show is Byrd—herself a former adult film performer—going around and licking or fondling each of her guest’s breasts or genitals. “I wouldn’t go out till I watched Robin Byrd, and when I did go out, I would talk about Robin Byrd,” Rachel said. “Watching Robin Byrd doesn’t turn me on, though. It’s for humor.”

  “Yeah, it’s all comical to me,” Sherry agreed. Sherry had just completed her first day at a new job as an advertising account executive, and Rachel gave her a little congratulatory gift: a thick red pencil with a rubber Farrah Fawcett head smiling on one end.

  All three of them loved Charlie’s Angels growing up, but more recently they had become “obsessed” with Nevins’s show G-String Divas. “The other day we were on the subway and I wanted to dance on the pole in the middle,” said Anyssa. “I could never be a stripper myself, but I think it would be so sexually liberating.” Her looks were not holding her back. Anyssa was a Stradivarius…a built, beautiful young woman with milky skin and silky hair and a broad, lipsticked mouth. She aspired to be an actress, but in the meantime she was working at a bar near Union Square. “When I’m bartending, I don’t dress up though,” she said. “Because I have to deal with enough assholes as it is. In college, Sherry and I, by day we would wear these guy outfits, and then at night we’d get dressed up, and people would be like, Oh my God! It’s like a card…you pull out the hot card and let them look at you and it takes it to a whole different level.” Anyssa smiled. “And maybe you get to feel like a stripper does.”

  Everyone was quiet for a moment, savoring that possibility.

  I suggested there were reasons one might not want to feel like a stripper, that spinning greasily around a pole wearing a facial expression not found in nature is more a parody of female sexual power than an expression of it. That did not go over well.

  “I can’t feel bad for these women,” Sherry snapped. “I think they’re asking for it.”

  Sherry considered herself a feminist. “I’m very pro-woman,” she said. “I like to see women succeed, whether they’re using their minds to do it or using their tits.” But she didn’t mind seeing women fail, either, if they weren’t using both effectively. She liked the Howard Stern show, for example, because his is a realm in which fairness of a sort pervades: Women who are smart and funny like Sherry, or Stern’s sidekick, the FCP Robin Quivers, get to laugh along with the boys. (Quivers has always been the mitigating presence that saves Stern’s shows from being entirely frightening. His trademark shtick, getting female guests to take off their clothes so his staff can ogle or mock them, would seem a lot creepier if Quivers—a smart, articulate, fully clothed black woman—wasn’t there to reassure the viewer or listener that there was a way out, an alternate role for a woman on the show. But then, Quivers is pretty much the only one who gets that option—the other women Stern invites into his universe are either hot or crazy or, his favorite, both.) The women who are pathetic enough to go on national television and strip down to their underwear in the hopes that Howard will buy them a boob job are punished with humiliation. Sherry and her friends found something about this routine reassuring. They seemed satisfied by what they experienced as justice being meted out; it was like the pleasure some people get watching the police throw the bad guys against the hood of their cars on Cops.

  “Yeah, we’re all women, but are we supposed to band together?” said Anyssa. “Hell, no. I don’t trust women. Growing up, I hung out with all guys…these are the first girls I ever hung out with who had the same mentality as me and weren’t going to starve themselves and paint their nails every fucking second. I’ve never been a girly-girl, and I’ve never wanted to compete in that world. I just didn’t fit in.”

  Anyssa is not different from most FCPs: They want to be like men, and profess to disdain women who are overly focused on the appearance of femininity. But men seem to like those women, those girly-girls, or like to look at them, at least. So to really be like men, FCPs have to enjoy looking at those women, too. At the same time, they wouldn’t mind being looked at a little bit themselves. The task then is to simultaneously show that you are not the same as the girly-girls in the videos and the Victoria’s Secret catalogs, but that you approve of men’s appreciation for them, and that possibly you too have some of that same sexy energy and underwear underneath all your aggression and wit. A passion for raunch covers all the bases.

  Twenty-two-year-old Erin Eisenberg, a city arts administrator, and her little sister Shaina, a student at Baruch College, kept a stack of men’s magazines—Playboy, Maxim, FHM—on the floor of the bedroom they still shared in their parents’ apartment. “A lot of times I say, Oh, she looks good, or check out that ass, but sometimes I’m also like, This is so airbrushed, or Oh, her tits are fake or whatever,” said Erin. “I try not to be judgmental, but sometimes it’s there.”

  “I pick up Playboy because I want to see who’s on the cover,” said Shaina. “The other day Shannen Doherty was on one and I just wanted to see what her breasts looked like.”

  The magazines and raunch culture in general piqued their curiosity and provided them with inspiration. Erin said, “There’s countless times in my life where I know I’ve turned people on just by showing off.” By putting on a little performance, making out with another girl, for instance. “It moved into Oh, this turns guys on if you do it in public. Having had that experience in a real-life setting, it was almost as if I was on The Man Show or something like that. But those times, it wasn’t as sexy as in my fantasies.”

  Both Eisenberg sisters said they were “not easily offended,” and Erin felt she had “a higher tolerance for sexual harassment” than most women.

  “I went out with my friend a couple weeks ago and some guy touched her ass and she flipped out at him,” said Shaina. “I was just like, Dude, he slapped your ass. To me that would be no big deal—if anything, I’d be flattered.”

  “You have to understand, a man is a man; it doesn’t matter what position he’s in,” Erin said. “I have a lot of male friends. I feel conflicted being a woman, and I think I make up for it by trying to join the ranks of men. I don’t think I have a lot of feminine qualities.”

  “You’re not a girly-girl,” Shaina cut in. “Like, her priority is not, Am I gonna go get a manicure?”

  “Girly-girl” has become the term women use to describe exactly who they do not want to be: a prissy sissy. Girly-girls are people who “starve themselves and paint their nails every fucking second,” as Anyssa put it; people who have nothing better to think about than the way they look. But while the FCP shuns girly-girls from her social life, she is fixated on them for her entertainment. Nobody has to wax as much as a porn star, and most strippers wouldn’t be caught dead without a manicure. We
irdly, these are the women—the ultimate girly-girls—who FCPs spend their time thinking about.

  Like Sherry, Erin Eisenberg professed an interest in feminism, and she showed me her copy of The Feminine Mystique to prove it. “But I don’t try to espouse my ideas to everyone else,” she said. “I’d rather observe and analyze on my own, and then do something else—further myself in other ways rather than start a debate. I gain strength by not exerting that energy.”

  “Gaining strength” is the key. FCPs have relinquished any sense of themselves as a collective group with a linked fate. Simply by being female and getting ahead, by being that strong woman we hear so much about, you are doing all you need to do, or so the story goes.

  Carrie Gerlach, then an executive at Sony Pictures in Los Angeles, wrote in an e-mail in 2001:

  My best mentors and teachers have always been men. Why? Because I have great legs, great tits, and a huge smile that God gave to me. Because I want to make my first million before the age of thirty-five. So of course I am a female chauvinist pig. Do you think those male mentors wanted me telling them how to better their careers, marketing departments, increase demographics? Hell no. They wanted to play in my secret garden. But I applied the Chanel war paint, pried the door open with Gucci heels, worked, struggled and climbed the ladder. And made a difference!!! And I did it all in a short Prada suit.

  Gerlach made no bones about wanting to “climb the ladder” so she could enjoy life’s ultimate riches, namely Prada, Gucci, and Chanel. The ends justify the means, and the means are “great legs” and “great tits.”

  “Everyone wants to make money,” said Erin Eisenberg, the daughter of a pair of erstwhile hippies. (“My dad claims he was a socialist,” she said skeptically.) Where her parents had misgivings about the system, Erin has doubts only about its lower rungs. Gone is the sixties-style concern (and lip service) about society as a whole. FCPs don’t bother to question the criteria on which women are judged, they are too busy judging other women themselves.

  “Who doesn’t want to be looked at as a sex symbol?” said Shaina. “I always tell people, if I had a twenty-three-inch waist and a great body, I would pose in Playboy. You know all those guys are sitting there staring at you, awe-ing at you. That must be power.”

  If we are to look for a precedent for this constellation of ideas and behaviors, we can find it in an unlikely place…a novel written before the Civil War. Published in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold more copies than any book besides the Bible in the nineteenth century, and it is still widely considered to be the most historically significant novel ever written by an American author. Since it was first published, Stowe’s book has been credited with having an enormous impact on the way Americans conceive of race. During Stowe’s tour of Great Britain in 1853, the minister sent to greet her congratulated her by saying “that the voice which most effectively kindles enthusiasm in millions is the still small voice which comes forth from the sanctuary of a woman’s breast.” (Stowe proudly relayed his words in her travel book Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands.) These sentiments were echoed ten years later by Abraham Lincoln, who famously called Stowe the “little lady who made this big war” when he met her just after he issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

  While Stowe inarguably advanced the cause of abolition (and intensified the tensions over slavery that helped ignite the Civil War), she has also been blamed for exacerbating “the wrongheadedness, distortions and wishful thinkings about Negroes in general and American Negroes in particular that still plague us today,” as the critic J. C. Furnas wrote in 1956. Stowe created various characters who “transcend” their race—which is to say that instead of acting “like a man” (or trying to), they “act white.” One of Stowe’s protagonists is a slave character, George Harris, who is light-skinned enough to pass as “a Spanish gentleman.” But it is not just the skin Stowe gave him that allows George to move through her fictive society and her reader’s imagination distinct from other slaves. In “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” an essay on Uncle Tom’s Cabin published in the Partisan Review in 1949, James Baldwin wrote that Stowe crafted George “in all other respects as white as she can make” him; Stowe created George “a race apart” from Tom and his fellow slaves.

  The converse strategy for coping with race in Stowe’s text is the one that has become notorious, and it is, of course, the one exhibited by Uncle Tom. Tom, remember, is a creation of Stowe’s who so thoroughly accepts his oppression as a slave, he renders the standard appurtenances of enslavement unnecessary. When a slave trader transports him for sale, Tom can be left unshackled; there is no chance he will run away because he has so completely internalized the system of which he is a victim. He believes that he really is property, so to run away would be to rob his owner, a crime he wouldn’t dream of committing.

  Consequently, Tom is thought of by his masters—and by Stowe herself—as “steady,” “honest,” “sensible,” and “pious.” Not only does Tom submit to the system that oppresses him, he actively strives for the love of his oppressor, and loves him in return. George Shelby, the man Tom has served since his birth, is too ashamed to say good-bye to Tom after he literally sells him down the river, thus separating Tom from his wife, children, and home, and condemning him to a bleak and lethally brutal future. Yet Tom’s wistful parting words as he is carted off to the auction block are, “Give my love to Mas’r George.”

  Stowe wanted Tom to serve as a heartbreaking and representative example of the “soft, impressible nature of his kindly race, ever yearning toward the simple and childlike.” In her book, this is simply the character’s character. But the concept of an Uncle Tom has taken on a meaning very different from the one Stowe intended. An Uncle Tom is a person who deliberately upholds the stereotypes assigned to his or her marginalized group in the interest of getting ahead with the dominant group.

  In a discussion of “Tom shows,” the staged adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that became wildly popular after the book’s publication (and remained so into the 1930s), author Mary C. Henderson describes a “theatrical industry called ‘Tomming,’ ” in which “Uncle Tom’s original character was almost totally obliterated in the worst and cheapest dramatizations. Somewhere in tents set among the cornfields he lost his dignity and his persona and became the servile, obedient, sycophantic black man who gave the term ‘Uncle Tom’ its terrible taint.”

  Tomming, then, is conforming to someone else’s—someone more powerful’s—distorted notion of what you represent. In so doing, you may be getting ahead in some way—getting paid to dance in black-face in a Tom show, or gaining favor with Mas’r as Stowe’s hero did in literature—but you are simultaneously reifying the system that traps you.

  The notions of “acting white,” as Stowe crafted George Harris to, and “acting black,” as she decided Uncle Tom did (thus expressing the “nature of his kindly race”), are both predicated on the assumption that there is a fixed, unchanging essence of whiteness and another of blackness which can then be imitated. James Baldwin wrote, “We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most endlessly betrayed.” The cage in which we “find ourselves bound, first without, then within,” is the “nature of our categorization.” We are defined and ultimately define ourselves, Baldwin argued, by the cultural meaning assigned to our broadest human details—blackness, whiteness, maleness, femaleness, and so on. In order to start Tomming, “acting black,” we would necessarily have to first believe that there was such a thing as blackness to enact. And likewise, if we are going to act “like a man,” there has to be an inherent manliness to which we can aspire.

  It would be crazy to suggest that being a woman today (black or white) is anything remotely like being a slave (male or female) in antebellum America. There is obviously no comparison. But there are parallels in the ways we can think about the limits of what can be gained by �
��acting like” an exalted group or reifying the stereotypes attributed to a subordinate group. These are the two strategies an FCP uses to deal with her femaleness: either acting like a cartoon man—who drools over strippers, says things like “check out that ass,” and brags about having the “biggest cock in the building”—or acting like a cartoon woman, who has big cartoon breasts, wears little cartoon outfits, and can only express her sexuality by spinning around a pole.

  In a broader sense, both of these strategies have existed historically and continue to because to a certain extent they are unavoidable. Does a marginalized person—a female producer going to a job interview at an all-male film company, a Chinese attorney striving to make partner at an old-boy, white-shoe law firm, a lesbian trying to fit in at a Big Ten keg party—need to act the way the people in charge expect in order to get what he or she wants? Without question. A certain amount of Tomming, of going along to get along, is part of life on planet Earth.

  But Americans gave up the idea—or tried to, or pretended to—that there are certain characteristics and qualities that are essentially black and essentially white a long time ago. At the very least we can say that it would be considered wildly offensive and thoroughly idiotic to articulate ideas like that now. Yet somehow we don’t think twice about wanting to be “like a man” or unlike a “girly-girl.” As if those ideas even mean anything. Like which man? Iggy Pop? Nathan Lane? Jesse Jackson? Jesse Helms? It is a staggeringly unsophisticated way to think about being a human being, but smart people do it all the time.

  The most obvious example in recent memory of someone intelligent espousing such ideas publicly is the scholar Camille Paglia. Paglia notoriously proclaimed that “if civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.” That may be too puerile a provocation to bother with, but Paglia’s more understated articulations of her beliefs about gender echo our still widely held cultural assumption that women are one way and men are another (and that there’s nothing wrong with saying so). In an interview with Spin magazine (which Paglia liked enough to reprint in her book Sex, Art, and American Culture), Paglia defended her controversial views on date rape and assessed her critics: