Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture

by Ariel Levy

  Though there’s a way in which she finds these affairs edifying and exciting, Annie said there’s also a way in which they can feel “pathetic.” “Sometimes, having this kind of sex, this shopping kind of sex, is based in insecurities for me…am-I-attractive insecurities.” Sometimes, what she really wants isn’t sex but proof that she is as desirable, as sexual, as female as the Barbie dolls she played with as a child or the porn stars she toyed with as an adult. “It’s just interesting to me that I choose to explore sex and sexuality by being willing to have a number of mediocre experiences.”

  Meg, who is a very successful, very busy lawyer, has been given a nickname by her friends: Sharky. The moniker doesn’t refer to her sharklike determination to win her cases or her competitive prowess as a triathlete, but to her remarkable energy as a sexual opportunist. “I hooked up with this guy in Vegas, and it was like I went on a shark attack,” she said. “I pretended I was someone else: sweet and innocent…Oh, I never do this! I’ve never been so turned on in my life! And it worked. But I wasn’t that into him. I think he waxed his whole body.”

  Meg has strawberry blonde hair and a pretty smile. She sat on the edge of the patio at the Standard Hotel in West Hollywood, dangling her manicured toes in the cool blue of the pool. “I would admit to being a slut, but I’d prefer other people didn’t call me that,” she said, laughing. “I don’t get turned on by monogamy, I get turned on by novelty and the challenge of a new man. Well, I’ve sort of thought there’s this challenge, but I’ve sort of created it: Men will fuck anyone.”

  Meg said that she badly wanted to “find a husband. I definitely want to get married, but I worry about how I am going to be in a many-yeared marriage and still get turned on—I’m not turned on after six months.” Actually, it didn’t sound like she was turned on after six minutes. Meg described her hookups as “usually drunk, usually antiseptic. I think men are turned off by my aggressiveness.” But what about for her? Why weren’t the experiences sensual for her? “Well, it’s not like I love sex; it’s not like I’m so into it. It’s more like I’m into getting what I want. I guess it’s more like I feel like I won.”

  To say that Lynn Frailey is aggressive is sort of like saying Bill Clinton is charismatic…It isn’t a personality trait of hers so much as a force around which her personality is organized. “The great thing about Miami is that everyone drives so slow it’s really easy to cut them off,” she said, mashing her foot down on the gas pedal to speed in front of a line of cars. She had moved to Miami only four days before we met, but she seemed to be settling into her new life there, as an events producer, with ease. Frailey has a sweet face, like an illustration from a children’s book, and that night it was framed by two brown pigtails. Both of her middle toes are tattooed with stars. She wore cargo pants and a T-shirt over a thermal underwear top, and looked much younger than thirty-two.

  She pulled into the parking lot of an Irish dive bar that felt out of place among the flesh-and-salsa clubs that line Ocean Drive and Collins Avenue. Frailey, originally from Dallas, Texas, ordered Bud in a bottle at the bar. “Most of my friends are guys…I just think they’re easier,” she said. “Girls are just, like, girly. I don’t wear makeup and I don’t blow out my hair. I’m just not into the whole, Oh my God, did you see the new pair of shoes they have on sale? It’s not that I have anything against all that stuff, it’s just that it’s not a topic of conversation for me. When I’m with my girlfriends talking about guys I’m like How big was his dick? Not that I’m always that crude, but if I’m going to talk about sex, it’s just, Did he go down on you, not, Are you going to marry him?”

  Frailey’s parents split when she was twenty-six after a marriage of adventure and religion. Her family moved around and spent many years in Morocco, where her parents were missionaries. “My father would preach Sunday mornings in Rabat and then the whole family would load up into the van and we would drive to Tangier, where he would do evening service,” she said. “We also had a Christian bookstore in Fez.”

  Despite her devout upbringing and her distaste for girly-girls, Frailey is a big fan of strip clubs. When she lived in San Francisco, she worked at a bar in the financial district, and one stockbroker in particular kept asking her out. “I was like No, I don’t date guys who wear suits. He was like That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” So they went out for a drink. “I decided I would test this guy,” she said. They were at a bar in an area called the Tenderloin, right near the Mitchell Brothers strip club. “It’s this world-famous titty bar,” said Frailey, excitedly. “It’s not even just a titty bar, it’s full touch, full nudity, full everything. I love titty bars. I don’t know why…I’m not attracted to the girls, but I like the bored looks on their faces while they’re dancing. They always have those really tacky high-heeled white patent leather pumps on and then they’re just staring up at the ceiling. So I’m dragging him from room to room like Check it out! They’re fucking! They’re having sex! I thought it was hilarious. The guys were kind of desperate looking? And they’re just drooling as the girls are going by.” Frailey and her date were kicked out of the club that night for making out. “We had sex in the cab on the way home. After that I thought maybe he was kind of okay. So I dated him for three and a half years.”

  Frailey described the ensuing relationship as “pretty miserable.” Despite their bold beginning, they were not a passionate couple. “He’s a good-looking guy, but he had gotten really chunky and we didn’t have sex for the last year,” Frailey said. “That’s another thing that I do and I don’t know why: If I stop being really attracted to someone, then I can’t have sex with them.”

  Think about the underlying logic of that statement: She doesn’t know why she doesn’t want to have sex with someone she’s not really attracted to. To her, this is a puzzle rather than a question answered. What Frailey is articulating is our baseline assumption that sex is something you should always automatically take when you can get it, something akin to, say, money. The more money, the more sex, the better, because these are things you accumulate to increase your status, your wealth of experience. “I want to get more notches on my belt,” as Annie put it; “I want to get to a hundred.”

  The description all three women offered of their physical experiences sounded less than smoldering. Annie called “this shopping kind of sex” “not that sexual,” and characterized her hookups as frequently “mediocre” and “pretty fucking lame.” Meg said that “it worked” when she convinced a guy that she’d never been so turned on in her life, but what had she “won”? The dubious privilege of having “antiseptic” sex with someone she was “not that into.” (She would have succeeded according to He’s Just Not That Into You because she accurately determined that a man was interested in her. But it never occurred to her that the quality of her experience would be compromised because she was just not that into him.)

  Going to a strip club is a similar kind of notch-in-the-belt experience to accumulate, one that will supposedly inspire sex and sexual wildness. But what is Frailey’s primary explanation for why she enjoys a “titty bar”? “The bored looks on their faces” when the dancers in “those really tacky high-heeled white patent leather pumps” are “just staring up at the ceiling.” That is not a description of arousal, it is a description of barely muffled contempt. Why would you take pleasure in seeing a person wear a compromising costume and watching the tedium of her life unfold? Because you felt she deserved it. Because it was somehow creepily satisfying to see her detached impersonation of wanting, and to see the men’s “desperate” response to it. Frailey said she found this “hilarious.”

  What is the joke?

  The entertainment value has to come from people playing out their roles—the “women are beautiful and the men are fools!” as Sheila Nevins put it—but these roles are beyond reductive. “Girls are just girly,” Frailey said. “Now I’m like a guy!” Annie felt, in a moment of sexual triumph. But who is this mythological guy we’re all trying to be like?
Why have we fallen sway to a kind of masculine mystique, determined that to be adventurous is to be like a man, and decided that the best thing we can possibly expect from women is hotness? Even as Annie and Meg and Lynn Frailey—three women—bravely head out into the night, they still deem this behavior to be like a man’s.

  Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, published in 1973, famously introduced Americans to the idea that a woman might desire a consequence-free “zipless fuck.” “I had to create the zipless fuck to rebel against my fifties upbringing,” she said. “I told my daughter the other day, ‘Your generation does it; my generation just talked about it.’ I look at my daughter and her friends in their twenties and they are reveling in their sexuality. They don’t feel guilty, and why should they? Men never did. Right now, they’re young and beautiful and full of energy and they don’t necessarily want to have a relationship, or even necessarily have a guy stay the whole night!

  “But I would be happier if my daughter and her friends were crashing through the glass ceiling instead of the sexual ceiling,” Jong continued. “Being able to have an orgasm with a man you don’t love or having Sex and the City on television, that is not liberation. If you start to think about women as if we’re all Carrie on Sex and the City, well, the problem is: You’re not going to elect Carrie to the Senate or to run your company. Let’s see the Senate fifty percent female; let’s see women in decision-making positions—that’s power. Sexual freedom can be a smoke-screen for how far we haven’t come.”

  Unfortunately, I think the situation is worse than that. Carrie’s character had friends, a job, and at least a few other interests besides men and sex. The women who are really being emulated and obsessed over in our culture right now—strippers, porn stars, pinups—aren’t even people. They are merely sexual personae, erotic dollies from the land of make-believe. In their performances, which is the only capacity in which we see these women we so fetishize, they don’t even speak. As far as we know, they have no ideas, no feelings, no political beliefs, no relationships, no past, no future, no humanity.

  Is this really the best we can do?

  Instead of advancing the causes of the women’s liberation movement or the sexual revolution, the obdurate prevalence of raunch in the mainstream has diluted the effect of both sex radicals and feminists, who’ve seen their movement’s images popularized while their ideals are forgotten. As Candida Royalle said, “We’ve become a heavily sexualized culture, but it’s consumerism and sex rolled into one. Revolutionary movements tend to be co-opted—swallowed up by the mainstream and turned into pop culture. It’s a way of neutralizing it, when you think about it…it makes it all safe and palatable, it shuts up the radicals. Once that happens, the real power is pretty much dissipated.”

  Conclusion

  The proposition that having the most simplistic, plastic stereotypes of female sexuality constantly reiterated throughout our culture somehow proves that we are sexually liberated and personally empowered has been offered to us, and we have accepted it. But if we think about it, we know this just doesn’t make any sense. It’s time to stop nodding and smiling uncomfortably as we ignore the crazy feeling in our heads and admit that the emperor has no clothes.

  Many women today, whether they are fourteen or forty, seem to have forgotten that sexual power is only one, very specific kind of power. And what’s more, looking like a stripper or a Hooters waitress or a Playboy bunny is only one, very specific kind of sexual expression. Is it the one that turns us—or men—on the most? We would have to stop endlessly reenacting this one raunchy script in order to find out.

  We have to ask ourselves why we are so focused on silent girly-girls in G-strings faking lust. This is not a sign of progress, it’s a testament to what’s still missing from our understanding of human sexuality with all of its complexity and power. We are still so uneasy with the vicissitudes of sex we need to surround ourselves with caricatures of female hotness to safely conjure up the concept “sexy.” When you think about it, it’s kind of pathetic. Sex is one of the most interesting things we as humans have to play with, and we’ve reduced it to polyester underpants and implants. We are selling ourselves unbelievably short.

  Without a doubt there are some women who feel their most sexual with their vaginas waxed, their labia trimmed, their breasts enlarged, and their garments flossy and scant. I am happy for them. I wish them many blissful and lubricious loops around the pole. But there are many other women (and, yes, men) who feel constrained in this environment, who would be happier and feel hotter—more empowered, more sexually liberated, and all the rest of it—if they explored other avenues of expression and entertainment.

  This is not a book about the sex industry; it is a book about what we have decided the sex industry means…how we have held it up, cleaned it off, and distorted it. How we depend on it to mark us as an erotic and uninhibited culture at a moment when fear and repression are rampant. In 2004 our forty-second president, George W. Bush, the leader of the free world, proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to forever ban gay marriage—which was already illegal. In opinion polls, about 50 percent of this country said they thought Bush had the right idea. If half this country feels so threatened by two people of the same gender being in love and having sex (and, incidentally, enjoying equal protection under the law), that they turn their attention—during wartime—to blocking rights already denied to homosexuals, then all the cardio striptease classes in the world aren’t going to render us sexually liberated.

  As of 2005, federal funding was denied to all public school sex education programs except for those advocating abstinence until marriage. Consequently, a disturbing percentage of young people are equipped with nothing but G-strings and Jenna Jameson to guide them through the roiling sea of hormones they are entering, and all the attendant dangers of STDs and pregnancy that are its sharks. Our national love of porn and pole dancing is not the byproduct of a free and easy society with an earthy acceptance of sex. It is a desperate stab at freewheeling eroticism in a time and place characterized by intense anxiety. What are we afraid of? Everything…which includes sexual freedom and real female power.

  Women’s liberation and empowerment are terms feminists started using to talk about casting off the limitations imposed upon women and demanding equality. We have perverted these words. The freedom to be sexually provocative or promiscuous is not enough freedom; it is not the only “women’s issue” worth paying attention to. And we are not even free in the sexual arena. We have simply adopted a new norm, a new role to play: lusty, busty exhibitionist. There are other choices. 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.

  If we believed that we were sexy and funny and competent and smart, we would not need to be like strippers or like men or like anyone other than our own specific, individual selves. That won’t be easy, but ultimately it would be no more difficult than the kind of contortions FCPs are constantly performing in an effort to prove themselves. More importantly, the rewards would be the very things Female Chauvinist Pigs want so desperately, the things women deserve: freedom and power.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1 “When I was in porn”: Frank Rich, “Finally, Porn Does Prime Time,” New York Times, July 27, 2003.

  2 “embraced by young women”: Jennifer Harper, “Buy Playboy for the Articles—Really,” Washington Times, October 3, 2002.

  One. Raunch Culture

  An earlier version of the Girls Gone Wild section of this chapter first appeared as dispatches from Miami, Florida, on www.slate.com on March 22, 23, and 24, 2004.

  3 “a public execution”: www.girlsgonewild.com.

  4 “radical feminists, with our deeper understanding”: Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revoluti
on (Delta, 1999).

  5 “I believe that there is a porno-ization”: 60 Minutes Wednesday, CBS, January 5, 2005.

  6 “Strong, powerful women”: I interviewed Jeff Costa after I sat in on a Cardio Striptease class he taught on March 19, 2003, at a Crunch gym in Los Angeles.

  7 A contestant on The Bachelor: The fall 2004 season.

  8 “did this for nothing”: Larry King Live, CNN, May 1, 2004.

  9 Between 1992 and 2004, breast augmentation: American Society of Plastic Surgeons, www.plasticsurgery.org/ public_education/Statistical-Trends.cfm.

  10 “The younger girls think”: Alex Kuczynski, “A Lovelier You, with Off-the-Shelf Parts,” New York Times, May 2, 2004.

  11 “The hetero porno antics”: Simon Doonan, “Simon Says,” New York Observer, September 22, 2003.

  12 “If that’s not being part of the Establishment”: Alex Kuczynski, “The Sex-Worker Literati,” New York Times, November 4, 2001.

  13 “who hasn’t dreamed”: Libby Copeland, “Naughty Takes Off,” Washington Post, November 30, 2003.

  14 No region of the United States: Jim Holt, “A States’ Right Left?” New York Times Magazine, November 21, 2004.

  15 In fact, eight of the ten: Andrew Ward, “South Finds Families That Pray Together May Not Stay Together: Lawmakers Count the Cost of Embarrassingly High Divorce Rates,” Financial Times, January 24, 2005.

  16 “my boyfriends always tell me”: Vanessa Grigoriadis, “Princess Paris,” Rolling Stone, November 19, 2003.