Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture

by Ariel Levy

  They have this stupid, pathetic, completely-removed-from-reality view of things that they’ve gotten from these academics who are totally off the wall, totally removed. Whereas my views on sex are coming from the fact that I am a football fan and I am a rock fan. Rock and football are revealing something true and permanent and eternal about male energy and sexuality. They are revealing the fact that women, in fact, like the idea of flaunting, strutting, wild masculine energy. The people who criticize me, these establishment feminists, these white upper-middle-class feminists in New York, especially, who think of themselves as so literate, the kind of music they like, is, like Suzanne Vega—you know, women’s music.

  SPIN: Yuck.

  First off, one has to wonder if Paglia has ever heard of Patti Smith. Or Debbie Harry. Or Janis Joplin. Or Grace Jones. It seems as if she has temporarily forgotten even her idol, Madonna (the subject of two of Paglia’s essays in that same book). Aren’t these people women…who necessarily make women’s music? Do these women not flaunt and strut and effuse the wild energy with which Paglia is so enthralled? Are they uptight? Uncool?

  Reducing “women’s music” to something soft and neutered, something guaranteed to make her—female!—interviewer say “yuck,” is a manipulative little move. It’s a way for Paglia to separate herself from the human characteristics she finds most unattractive—weakness, effeteness, pusillanimity—and to make these things “permanently and eternally” female. (Which, by the way, Paglia is.)

  Paglia’s equation of all things aggressive, arrogant, adventurous, and libidinous with masculinity, and her relegation of everything whiney, wimpy, needy, and complacent to femininity, is, among other things, dopey. We have to wonder why a woman as crackling smart as Camille Paglia would be so unsophisticated in her conception of gender. We have to wonder why a woman as thoughtful as Sheila Nevins—a woman whose entire career is based on the intrepid exploration of complex stories—would have a knee-jerk reaction to a question that positioned her as a member of the female gender.

  Instead of trying to reform other people’s—or her own—perception of femininity, the Female Chauvinist Pig likes to position herself as something outside the normal bounds of womanhood. If defending her own little patch of turf requires denigrating other women—reducing them to “yuck” as Paglia does or airheads who prioritize manicures, or, Judith Regan’s favorite, “pussies”—so be it.

  It can be done very persuasively.

  Mary Wells Lawrence was one of the first women in this country to start her own advertising agencies, certainly the most successful, and the first woman CEO of a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. She stands out as one of the great giants of her industry, male or female. Wells Lawrence came up with the “I Love New York” campaign, which many people credit with resuscitating the city’s image during the seventies; she also invented the weirdly unforgettable “Plop Plop Fizz Fizz” Alka-Seltzer ads.

  One of her earliest successes was a colorful marketing strategy for Braniff Airlines in the sixties that eventually prompted a transformation of the look of American airports. Wells Lawrence bucked the bland, military style of the times and had every Braniff plane painted a bright color. Then she hired Emilio Pucci to design riotous costumes for the flight “hostesses.” One of her ads featured what she called the “air strip,” the process by which Braniff stewardesses paired down their Pucci flight uniforms little by little on the way to tropical destinations. Pucci “even made teeny-weeny bikinis for them, an inch of cloth,” Wells Lawrence wrote in her memoir, A Big Life (in Advertising). These ads, with their focus on pretty young women in escalating stages of undress, may have been what prompted Gloria Steinem to famously comment, “Mary Wells Uncle Tommed it to the top.”

  In her memoir, Wells Lawrence returned fire at Steinem. “What a silly woman,” she wrote. “I wanted a big life. I worked as a man worked. I didn’t preach it, I did it.”

  How scalding. How convincing. Who wouldn’t pick action over nagging, succeeding over hand-wringing? Who doesn’t want a big life?

  There’s just one thing: Even if you are a woman who achieves the ultimate and becomes like a man, you will still always be like a woman. And as long as womanhood is thought of as something to escape from, something less than manhood, you will be thought less of, too.

  There is a variety program on Comedy Central called The Man Show, which concludes each episode with a segment of bouncing women appropriately called “Girls on Trampolines.” The show’s original hosts Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Carolla have left; Kimmel now has his own network talk show, Jimmy Kimmel Live, on ABC, and both Kimmel and Carolla executive produce Crank Yankers for Comedy Central. But when I went to visit their set in L.A. in 2000, The Man Show was one of the top shows on cable, and it was getting a lot of attention for its brand of self-described “chauvinistic fun.” Thirty-eight percent of The Man Show’s viewers were female. It was co–executive produced by two women.

  Like Sheila Nevins, co–executive producer Jennifer Heftler was not who you’d expect to find as the wizard behind the curtain of a raunch operation. She was a big woman who wore batik and had a tattoo of a dragonfly on her wrist and another of a rose on her ankle. She described her program as “big, dumb, goofy fun.”

  “One of the perks to this job was that I wouldn’t have to prove myself anymore,” she said. “I could say, ‘I worked at The Man Show’ and no one would ever say, ‘Oh, that prissy little woman’ again.” Heftler felt her female viewers’ incentive for watching the program was very much like her own for making it. “It’s like a badge,” she said. “Women have always had to find ways to make guys comfortable with where we are, and this is just another way of doing that. If you can show you’re one of the guys, it’s good.”

  The night I went to a taping, there wasn’t enough space to fit all the guys who had lined up outside the studio, and a team of heavy-limbed boys in matching green T-shirts from Chico State were pumped to make it into the audience.

  Don, the bald audience fluffer, seemed to be looking directly at them when he yelled from the stage, “A few weeks ago we had trouble with guys touching the women here. You can’t just grab their asses—you don’t do that in real life, do you? [Beat.] Welllll…so do I!” The frat guys cheered, but not with the alarming gusto of the man in front of them, a scrawny computer technician who resembled one of the P’s in Peter, Paul and Mary. “To the women,” shouted Don, “today only, you’re an honorary man! Grab your dick!”

  Abby, a brunette in tight white jeans, was called up to the stage for her big chance to win a T-shirt. Honorary man status notwithstanding, she was asked to expose her breasts. Abby declined, but agreed brightly to kiss another girl instead. A pert redhead in her early twenties raced up from the audience to wrap her hands around Abby’s back and put her tongue in the stranger’s mouth. “Yeah! Yeah! You’re making me hard,” shrieked Peter/Paul. He was nearly hit in the head by the Chico Statesman behind him, who pumped his fist in the air in front of his crotch, semaphoring masturbation.

  Soon after, the stage doors opened and out poured the Juggies, nine dancing girls in coordinating pornographic nursery rhyme costumes: Little Red Riding Hood in spike-heeled patent leather thigh-highs, Bo Peep in a push-up bra so aggressive you could almost see her nipples, and, of course, Puss ’n Boots.

  They shimmied their way around the audience, and some did tricks on the poles like strippers. After the shouting died down, Adam Carolla and Jimmy Kimmel emerged from backstage, fresh as daisies in matching gingham shirts. “Who knows a good joke?” Carolla asked.

  “How do you piss your girlfriend off when you’re having sex?” a guy in the back volunteered. “Call her up and tell her.”

  Then they showed a pretaped spot about a mock clinic for wife evaluation, where a prospective bride was assessed based on her grasp of football and her aptitude for administering fellatio to pornographer Ron Jeremy.

  There’s a side to boydom that’s fun,” Jen Heftler declared. “They
get to fart, they get to be loud—and I think now we’re saying we can fart and curse and go to strip clubs and smoke cigars just as easily and just as well.” As for the Juggies, we are supposed to experience them as kitsch. “In the sixties, Dean Martin had his Golddiggers, and they were basically Juggies,” Heftler said, “but the audience wasn’t in on the joke. It was just pretty girls because that’s what a guy would have. Then it was, you can never have that, you can’t show a woman as a sex object, that’s terrible. Now we’re back to having it, but it’s kind of commenting on that as opposed to just being that. The girls are in on it, and the women watching it are in on it.”

  But after sitting in that audience, I have to wonder what exactly we are in on. That women are ditzy and jiggly? That men would like us to be?

  “Listen,” Heftler countered, “our generation has gone past the point where The Man Show is going to cause a guy to walk into a doctor’s office and say, ‘Oh, my God! A woman doctor!’ ”

  Her co–executive producer, Lisa Page, a sweet, quiet woman, said, “It doesn’t need to threaten us anymore.”

  The night after the taping, I had dinner with Carolla, Kimmel, and The Man Show’s cocreator and executive producer, Daniel Kellison, at the restaurant inside the W Hotel in Westwood. I asked them why they supposed 38 percent of their viewers were women.

  “We did a little research,” said Carolla, “and it turns out 38 percent of all women have a sense of humor.”

  I laughed. I wanted to be one of those women. The women at the W were like another species: lush curves bursting off of impossibly thin frames and miles of hairless, sand-colored skin as far as the eye could see.

  “It’s a whole power thing that you take advantage of and career women take advantage of,” Kellison offered. “If you read Gear or watch our show or Howard Stern or whatever, you have an overview of a cultural phenomenon, you have power. You take responsibility for your life and you don’t walk around thinking, I’m a victim of the press! I’m a victim of pop culture! So you can laugh at girls on trampolines.” He smiled warmly. “You get it.”

  For a moment I allowed myself to feel vaguely triumphant.

  Kimmel sucked an oyster out of its shell and then snickered. “At TCA,” the annual Television Critics Association conference in Pasadena, “this woman asked, ‘How does having a big-breasted woman in the Juggy dance squad differ from having black women in the darkie dance squad?’ I said, ‘First of all, that’s the stupidest question I’ve ever heard.’ ”

  “Then Adam said, ‘Let me put your mind at ease: If we ever decide to put together a retarded dance squad, you’ll be the first one in it,’ ” said Kellison, and all three of them laughed.

  “What kind of women do you hang out with?” I asked them.

  Kimmel looked at me like I was insane. “For the most part,” he said, “women don’t even want to hang out with their friends.”

  And there it is. The reason that being Robin Quivers or Jen Heftler or me, for that moment when I got it, is an ego boost but not a solution. It can be fun to feel exceptional—to be the loophole woman, to have a whole power thing, to be an honorary man. But if you are the exception that proves the rule, and the rule is that women are inferior, you haven’t made any progress.

  Four

  From Womyn

  to Bois

  If you were to put the last five or so years in a time capsule, womanwise, it would look like a period of explosive sexual exhibitionism, opportunism, and role redefinition. These were the years of Sex and the City, Brazilian bikini waxes, burlesque revival, thongs—the years when women learned how to score, or at least the years when popular culture spotlighted that behavior as empowering and cool. Lesbians are women too, and this trend has hit the young gay women’s world—“the scene”—with discernible impact. In the scene, the New York to San Francisco back-and-forth migratory ladies’ pipeline, sex is taken so lightly there is a new term for it: “playing.” In the scene, people say things like, “I played with her,” and they go on “playdates.”

  This freewheeling nonchalance about sex is evident on the Internet. Craig’s List, a site that started in 1995 as an e-mail newsletter founder Craig Newmark sent to his friends in the San Francisco Bay area about local happenings, is now a Web site used by millions of people looking to buy things, sell things, and meet each other across the country, and the women-seeking-women section of Craig’s List is the scene’s favored cyber pickup joint. A typical posting reads: “Looking for something noncommittal? Hi! I am a fun, cute girl, white, with short red-blond hair. Looking for someone who wants to exchange pictures and hook up…right away!” It was listed under the heading, “Playdate?”

  The sense of esurient sexual opportunism doesn’t abate offline. You can feel it at the girl bars in San Francisco; at the Lexington Club, someone has written “SF rocks. I get more pussy than I know what to do with,” on the bathroom wall. You can feel it in New York, where on a cold fall night at a lesbian bar called Meow Mix, a girl in a newsboy cap and a white T-shirt with rolled-up sleeves said to her friend, “Some femme…just some fucking femme. I met her at a party three weeks ago and I fucked her and that was cool. But now she’s like, e-mailing me and I’m just like, chill out, bitch!” Her chest was smooth and flat: She’d either had top surgery—a double mastectomy—or, more likely, she bound her breasts down to achieve the look. She thrust her forearm in front of her face as if she were rapping as she spoke: “Some of these chicks, it’s like you top them once and then they’re all up in your face. It’s like, did I get you off? Yes. Am I your new best friend? No. You know what I’m saying, bro?”

  Her friend nodded and kept her eyes on the blonde go-go dancer in tiny white shorts undulating on a tabletop near the bar. “Bois like us,” she replied, “we’ve got to stick together.”

  There was a point at which lesbianism seemed as much like a fringe political party as it did a sexual identity. What better way to declare “a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle” than to be a woman without a man, a woman with other women? “Lesbianism is a women’s liberation plot,” was how the group Radicalesbians put it when they commandeered the mike at NOW’s Second Congress to Unite Women in 1970. The first installment of The Furies, a publication put out by a lesbian feminist collective of the same name in 1972, proclaimed, “Lesbianism is not a matter of sexual preference, but rather one of political choice which every woman must make if she is to become woman-identified and thereby end male supremacy.” Lesbianism was the ultimate in dismantling the dominant paradigm, resisting the heteropatriarchy, and all the rest of it, and sex seemed kind of secondary.

  But in the scene, what you like and what you do and who you do it to are who you are. Sexual preferences and practices are labeled with a great deal of precision. Within the scene, “lesbian” is an almost empty term and “identifying” requires considerably more specificity and reduction, as in: “I’m a femme” (a traditionally feminine-looking gay woman), or “I’m a butch top” (a masculine-identified, sexually dominant gay woman), or most recently and frequently, “I’m a boi.”

  It is tempting to pronounce the syllable “bwah,” as in “framboise,” but actually you just say it “boy,” the way in years past you pronounced womyn “woman.” Throwing a y in woman was a linguistic attempt, however goofy, to overthrow the patriarchy, to identify the female gender as something independent, self-sustaining, and reformed. Being a boi is not about that. Boihood has nothing to do with goddesses or sisterhood or herbal tea, and everything to do with being young, hip, sex positive, a little masculine, and ready to rock. Even in an entirely female universe, there are plenty of women who want to be like a man.

  But bois want to be like a very young man. It’s no coincidence that the word is “boi” and not some version of “man.” Men have to deal with responsibilities, wives, careers, car insurance. Bois just get to have fun and, if they’re lucky, sex. “I never really wanted to grow up, which is what a lot of the boi identity is about,�
� said Lissa Doty, who is thirty-seven but looked more like twenty-four when we met for a beer in San Francisco at the Lexington Club, which everyone calls the Lex. She wore a baggy T-shirt and jeans and had gelled her bleached hair into a stiff fin, like the raised spine of a Komodo dragon. “I want to go out and have a good time! I want to be able to go out to the bar at night and go to parties and go to the amusement park and play. That sense of play—that’s a big difference from being a butch. To me, butch is like adult. If you’re a butch, you’re a grown-up: You’re the man of the house.” Doty is smart, well read, and well educated, and was working as a courier for FedEx because, she said, “I want to have a job where at the end of the day I walk away and I don’t have to think about it.”

  Doty liked to play, and she also liked to play. “It used to be if you flirted with somebody, that was it: You were set for life; U-Haul’s waiting out back,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s the whole boi thing or if it’s a little sexual revolution that’s happened where you can go home and have a one-night stand, just like the gay boys. Before, things were more serious: If you flirted with somebody, you better be getting her number and buying that house and getting those dogs. Otherwise, lesbian community is coming down on you. Now, it’s more…playful.”

  That sense of play, of youthful irreverence, informs the boi approach to sex and to life. “I think non-monogamy is a part of it,” said Sienna, a graceful boi in her mid-twenties with close-cropped kinky hair and a face that flashed back and forth between beautiful and handsome depending on her expression. “To me, a boi is someone who doesn’t have so much to prove. Bois are kind of dirty. Sexually dirty, but also we’re not in the clean, pressed, buttoned-up world…we’re like little urchins. A lot of us are artists.”