Over at Nerve.com, Kara Jesella reviews Ariel Levy’s book Female Chauvinist Pigs.
“Something is going on with this country when the only way to tell the hipster girls dry-humping one another on lastnightsparty.com from the sorority girls parading around in wet T-shirts at MTV’s Spring Break is by counting their tattoos (hint: the first group has more). Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (Free Press), thirty-year-old Ariel Levy posits that as pornography has permeated American society, a new and pervasive genre of woman has arisen: the Female Chauvinist Pig.
Anxious to be perceived as hot, and reluctant to feel left out of what Levy calls ‘the frat party of pop culture,’ FCPs eagerly make sex objects out of other women and themselves, claiming that watching Drew Barrymore whirl around a pole in the Charlie’s Angels sequel and posing for Playboy is ’empowering.’ Levy thinks they’re kidding themselves, mistaking sexual power for real power and, worse, believing that mimicking the sexuality of strippers, Playmates, and porn stars — women who are paid to simulate real women’s sexuality — is power in the first place.”