Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture

by Ariel Levy

  On the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of Nancy Friday’s groundbreaking collection of women’s sexual fantasies, My Secret Garden, there was a panel discussion called “Sex and What Women Want Now” at the 92nd Street YMHA in New York City. The event was moderated by Friday’s husband, Norman Pearlstein, the editor-in-chief of Time, Inc.; and besides Friday herself, the other panelists included Candace Bushnell, the author of the book Sex and the City, on which the HBO series was based; Candida Royalle; and Faye Wattleton, president of the Center for the Advancement of Women (and formerly the first African-American head of Planned Parenthood). The tone of their conversation was sassy and flip.

  “I always tell people, if you have this marvelous sexual fantasy, think twice before you tell your partner,” said Friday, who had a devilish cosmetic glow that evening with her red lips, red nails, and reddish-hued eye shadow. “If you care this much about them, you should know if they really want to hear that your great fantasy is to have three men take you at one time!”

  “All I can say is I hope you can, because when you do it really bonds you,” said Royalle.

  “That’s the person you should marry!” said the recently married Bushnell. “In terms of my fantasies, they always have little stories and, like, dialogue. There’s actually not that much sex, but there’s a lot of dialogue.”

  “Foreplay!” shrieked a woman from the audience.

  “I put the partner in the fantasy,” offered Royalle, “but I might have him doing something different, or…or in funny hats.”

  “Doesn’t everyone here agree that it doesn’t really matter?” Friday asked. “If it takes you where you want to go, if it helps you reach orgasm, does it matter who you’re thinking about?”

  Wattleton said, “I’d rather like to know that he’s thinking about me when he’s having an orgasm.”

  “Oh, Faye, you’re kidding yourself,” said Friday with a snort.

  Wattleton used a long-nailed finger to flip her dyed blonde hair out of her face and said, “Or maybe I just think I’m that good.”

  Pearlstein said, “Faye, the Center for the Advancement of Women just interviewed over three thousand women about gender roles. I was interested that in your study, you asked a question about women’s feelings about having a man in their lives, and you asked how important is it to have a man to do the following: be your companion, give you love and affection, to have a family with, to give you physical protection, to do physically demanding work around the house, to support you financially, to make major household decisions. But you didn’t ask ‘to have sex with,’ and I’m curious why.”

  Wattleton smiled, as if it were no big deal, and said, “Maybe our very own questionnaire reflects the limitations of how far we have gone.”

  About a year later, Wattleton was a talking head on an HBO documentary called Thinking XXX, about the making of photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s book XXX: 30 Porn-Star Portraits. She declared, “The fantasy of the porn star is the ultimate fantasy because it’s a sexual fantasy. I think that’s why it’s so disturbing to people, because it really does defy our capacity to control it.”

  I find it interesting that a person who didn’t ask a single question about sex in the “first comprehensive study ever conducted of women’s opinions across the board” (as her publicist billed it) feels qualified to make a pronouncement on our “ultimate fantasy.” (I am also baffled by the explanation that what qualifies the “fantasy of the porn star” as the “ultimate fantasy” is that it is a “sexual fantasy.” There are lots of sexual fantasies; they can’t all be the ultimate.) But mostly I am disturbed, to use Wattleton’s word, by the assertion—from a career feminist—that the only problem with the cultural dominance of the porn-star fantasy is that it defies control.

  Porn stars are quite firmly under various controls. Most obviously, they are under corporate control. The adult entertainment industry is valued at between $8 billion and $15 billion, and the bulk of the profits go to the mainstream corporate hosts of whatever service is being provided—Time Warner makes money off of pay-per-view porn, as do hotel giants like Marriott and Hilton; phone companies profit from explicit chat lines; and so on. Any porn star will tell you she doesn’t get a fair share of the money her body makes. Of course, lots of people who make popular culture don’t feel they get a big enough piece of the pie, from the cast of Friends (who famously demanded $1 million, per actor, per episode, because, after all, without them there was no show) on down to me (I write the articles; without me the pages of the magazine would be blank!). But the stakes are very different for a porn star than for an actor or a journalist, because porn stars are selling something more than a skill: They are giving up the most private part of their being for public consumption.

  Sex workers are workers. They are having sex, just as strippers are stripping and centerfolds are posing, because they are paid to, not because they are in the mood to. The vast majority of women who enter the field do so because they are poor and have no more attractive alternative. (In fact, the vast majority of women in the field stay poor.) For the rest of us who are lucky or industrious enough to make a living doing other things, sex is supposed to be something we do for pleasure or as an expression of love. The best erotic role models, then, would seem to be the women who get the most pleasure out of sex, not the women who get the most money for it. Is a person who has sex or acts sexy because it’s her job to really living out our “ultimate fantasy”?

  It’s a cliché that bears repeating (and substantiating) that most women in the sex industry have been victims of sexual abuse. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to find reliable statistics on this subject for two reasons: Women in the sex industry are often reluctant to talk to researchers because of the stigma—and, sometimes, laws—against what they do; and, in many of the studies that do exist, the researchers themselves sound so irate it can be difficult to determine if they are biased extremists or if their outrage is simply the natural product of doing research in a field in which the findings are so frequently heartbreaking. Dr. Melissa Farley, a psychologist and researcher at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in San Francisco, says that the vast majority of women in the sex industry have experienced incest or other childhood sexual abuse. Estimates range from 65 to 90 percent, and she is inclined to believe the highest numbers, as are all the other experts I spoke with. Obviously, people who have suffered sexual trauma in the past can move on and enjoy their sex lives in the future. But there is something twisted about using a predominantly sexually traumatized group of people as our erotic role models. It’s like using a bunch of shark attack victims as our lifeguards.

  Farley directed a study with colleagues from Turkey and Africa called “Prostitution in Five Countries: Violence and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” which was presented to the American Psychological Association in 1998. Farley and her team interviewed 475 sex workers and, using the same criteria developed by scientists who study long-term health in the military, concluded that two-thirds suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). That number is twice as high as the percentage of Vietnam vets with PTSD. Farley’s team found that the severity of the symptoms—emotional numbness, recurrent nightmares, and flashbacks—was more extreme among the sex workers than it was among treatment-seeking veterans. About two-thirds of the prostitutes studied complained of serious medical problems (very few of which were related to sexually transmitted diseases).

  To Farley, there is no significant difference between prostitutes and porn stars. “Pornography is a specific form of prostitution, in which prostitution occurs and is documented. For its consumers, including the mainstream media, pornography is often their original experience of prostitution,” Farley writes in the preface to a collection of research articles she edited called Prostitution, Trafficking, and Traumatic Stress (2003). Farley, who also considers stripping to be a kind of prostitution, goes on to write, “prostitution today is a toxic cultural product, which is to say that all women are
socialized to objectify themselves in order to be desirable, to act like prostitutes, to act out the sexuality of prostitution.”

  If this seems extreme, keep in mind that we can learn some of the same things from a very different book by a very different author: How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, the memoir of the exalted spokeswoman of the sex industry, Jenna Jameson. Like Farley, Jameson suggests that the sex industry is fluid, in the sense that porn, stripping, and posing nude are, if not interchangeable, then at least interconnected. Appearing in Penthouse makes you a more appealing candidate to perform in an adult film; appearing in adult films means you can “headline” at strip clubs—“many strippers get into porn solely because they want to up their rates,” Jameson writes. Like Farley, Jameson thinks that women outside the sex industry have internalized its spirit and model their sexuality on porn. The title of Jameson’s book, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, indicates that hers is a sexuality worth imitating, and she is proud, she writes, that “more women come up to me with thoughtful praise than men.” Jameson tells us that “being in the industry can be a great experience” because “you can actually become a role model for women.”

  Yet, like Farley, Jameson presents life in the industry as marked by violence and violation: She tells us she was beaten unconscious with a rock, gang-raped, and left for dead on a dirt road during her sophomore year of high school; she was life-threateningly addicted to drugs before she was twenty; she was beaten by her boyfriend and sexually assaulted by his friend. She also writes, “To this day, I still can’t watch my own sex scenes.”

  Of course, Jameson comes to a very different conclusion than Farley. She writes, “Though watching porn may seem degrading to some women, the fact is that it’s one of the few jobs for women where you can get to a certain level, look around, and feel so powerful, not just in the work environment but as a sexual being. So, fuck Gloria Steinem.” One has to wonder how she puts it together this way. If she feels so powerful as a sexual being, why can’t she watch her own sex scenes? If her work environment is so satisfying, why does she say that if she had a daughter, she would lock her in the house before she’d let her get involved in the sex industry? Why does she refer to her vagina as a “ding-ding”? I’m not sure any of this is Gloria Steinem’s fault.

  Jameson, like most employees of the sex industry, is not sexually uninhibited, she is sexually damaged. She has had the grim misfortune to be repeatedly and severely traumatized, which she tells us plainly enough. Non-coincidentally, she tends to describe her sexual encounters as carnivorous, dissociated exchanges of power. “Sexuality became a tool for so much more than just connecting with a boy I was attracted to,” she writes. “I realized it could serve any purpose I needed. It was a weapon I could exploit mercilessly.” Not once in that description of her sexuality does she use the word pleasure. What Jameson is describing is the true enactment of sex as a commodity, a currency to be exchanged for other things. It is only one of the millions of ways there are to have sex, and from her assessment, it doesn’t sound like a particularly fun one. It doesn’t sound hot or wild or out of control, it sounds like a relentless routine. It sounds like a job.

  Contrary to what Faye Wattleton said, it is opening our minds to the possibility—the reality—that lust and sexiness and pleasure are smoldering away everywhere, always, in an infinite number of ways which in fact “really does defy our capacity to control it.” If we were to acknowledge that sexuality is personal and unique, it would become unwieldy. Making sexiness into something simple, quantifiable makes it easier to explain and to market. If you remove the human factor from sex and make it about stuff—big fake boobs, bleached blonde hair, long nails, poles, thongs—then you can sell it. Suddenly, sex requires shopping; you need plastic surgery, peroxide, a manicure, a mall. What is really out of commercial control is that you still can’t bottle attraction.

  In that same HBO documentary, Thinking XXX, Wattleton went on to say, “We all think that we somehow come here fully equipped to enjoy sexuality in all of its explicitness, but you know we really do need a lot of instruction. Just like we need to be taught how to eat properly, how to dress properly—every aspect of our lives we take lessons and we educate ourselves.”

  Somehow, people have been figuring out how to have sex since the beginning of time. It is not something we need to be taught and sold, because we have our own desires to guide us. Wattleton’s analogy is a good one though, because really, you can’t teach someone how to eat or how to dress, either. You can teach someone how to use a knife and fork. You can teach someone not to wear white after Labor Day. But ultimately, the pleasure we glean from eating or dressing up or having sex isn’t derived from learning rules or techniques, it’s based on identifying and satisfying tastes. Cravings.

  My father taught me that chopped liver is a delicacy—part of our cultural heritage, something to be savored on festive occasions. To me it will always be smelly cement. But I have always liked anchovies, which not everybody does. I like wearing green, because it suits my skin tone and my self-image. Likewise, certain themes have run through my sexual fantasies since I was very young, just as they now run through my bed. Nobody had to teach me how to want these things, or how to get them.

  Wattleton is right that one way we discover that we like plums or cashmere or oral sex is by being exposed to them. But there is a problem with using porn as a tool for mind expansion. You can see almost any sexual act imaginable if you spend enough time on the Internet, but no matter how much porn you watch you will end up with a limited knowledge of your own sexuality because you still won’t know how these things feel. That will depend on who you do them with, what kind of mood you’re in when you do, whether you feel safe or scared (or scared in a good way) when you go about it, and so on. The idea that sex can be reduced to fixed components as it is in pornography—blow job, doggie style, money shot, girl-on-girl—is adolescent: first base, second base, all the way. It is ironic that we think of this as adult entertainment. I don’t see why we should regard porn as a way to enjoy “sexuality in all of its explicitness” any more than we consider looking at a chart of the food pyramid to be a feast.

  If Sex and the City was a show about women shopping for sex (and everything else) in a proud, new way, raunch culture, which the show alluded to—Carrie wore a Playboy rabbit head necklace, Samantha had a pendant shaped like the mud flap girl, all four protagonists went to a party at the Mansion and met Hef—is about women selling sex in a supposedly proud, new way. The two themes, women as consumers and women as things to be consumed, obviously share a common trait: Sex and money are concomitant.

  What happens when we put this model into practice? If we listen to our culture and make sex one element of a lifestyle of consumption like the characters on Sex and the City, and if we idealize women who sell sex—the women invoked by the charms the Sex and the City characters wore on their necks—then what do our own sex lives look like? To what end does treating sex as a commodity lead us?

  I literally have thoughts like, I’ve slept with thirty-five people…I want to get to a hundred,” says Annie, a beautiful twenty-nine-year-old with deep blue eyes and a pale, perfect complexion. “It’s such an underlying part of my MO that it’s baffling to me when people tell me it’s not part of theirs. My friend was saying that she had just been on a first date, and when she was kissing the guy good-night, it felt strange to be kissing someone who was, essentially, a stranger. I kept thinking how strange it would feel to me to kiss someone I really knew. Many of my experiences have been pretty fucking lame, but I’m willing to take that because I want more notches on my belt.”

  At one point, Annie was really into porn—not as a tool for arousal but as a form of entertainment, a kind of hobby. She bought books about porn stars, read about them on the Internet, even went to see the porn star Houston strip at a club in Manhattan. (She has a souvenir Polaroid of herself, a friend, and Houston in a grinning huddle.) She found porn stars and strippers and the “wom
en [who] have these ridiculous bodies with big orb boobs and long legs with fuck-me pumps” strangely compelling. “They’re plastic—literally plastic—like live Barbie dolls. I look at Pam Anderson and I’m like, I played with you as a child!” (Barbie dolls were themselves modeled after blonde German sex dolls called Bild Lilli.) “It’s fascinating because it’s beautiful women doing these crazy things, this demoralizing stuff. Like on Howard Stern, some guy will touch a woman with a pointer and say, ‘You need a tummy tuck.’ It’s humor masking a pretty woman–hating thing—which I’ve got a good amount of in me, I guess, because I take pleasure in it.”

  Annie’s fascination with raunch culture has been waning, though. “I used to feel like Howard was just this one funny, misogynistic guy who said what no one else had the guts to say, but now it’s so pervasive. It’s like it’s cool to be a stripper, it’s cool to be tarty.” An interest in these things used to seem like a way of resisting the status quo. Now it feels like a way of conforming.

  While Annie has become less intrigued by the selling of sex, she has grown more engaged in sex as a kind of shopping. She described her acquisition of notches as a feeding of the ego more than an adventure into the erotic. “The thing about when you start accumulating sex for its own sake is that the exercise of it is not that sexual.” But she said she finds these encounters rewarding in a different way. “It’s a way of trying to establish yourself as a kind of woman-man: I’m not some sad sack, I’m strong and independent and I’m a rolling stone that gathers no moss. There is something empowering about waking up next to a guy and thinking, I’ve got to go; what’s on the menu next? I used to get so hurt,” when it was the morning after the big night, and the adventure had not yielded an enduring bond. “Then, eventually, having a sense of humor and perspective about these things made it so I could wake up and get on with my life. When I felt that switch flip in my head, I thought, Yeah! Now I’m like a guy.”