Female Chauvinist Pigs was created to attack the most egregious form of post-feminism behaviour displayed by women today: Raunch Culture. While biased, Ariel Levy’s book is successful because it focuses on the overt, unavoidable, and nonnegotiable facts of today’s female chauvinist pig, “The Female Chauvinist Pig has risen to a kind of exalted status. She is post-feminist. She is funny. She gets it…Why worry about disgusting or degrading when you could be giving – or getting – a lap dance yourself? Why try to beat them when you can join them?” (Levy, 93). Levy’s bullying tactic is lucrative, so far as it shames women into acknowledging their own indulgence in these activities. Yet while Levy insinuates her moral superiority to these new “feminists” by concentrating on the ubiquity of porn stars and Girls Gone Wild, she fails to see the less visible and far more dangerous by-products of post-feminism.
These by-products refer to the menacing ideas today’s girls and women are taught to believe about beauty. Both the media’s projections of this “ideal” beauty and society’s subsequent embrace of it are the culprits in America’s attack on body image, “In almost 40,000 media messages a year, youthful Americas are being told that, unless you look like supermodels and rock stars, you’re not good enough for anyone to love. This is a message that too many people are buying,” (America The Beautiful, 2009). It is precisely this message and its repercussions that Levy has ignored in the name of stopping lap dances and strip teases. Although Levy’s concern is genuine and crucial for the image of feminism, “ ‘Raunchy’ and ‘liberated’ are not synonyms. It is worth asking ourselves if this bawdy world of boobs and gams we have resurrected reflects how far we’ve come, or how far we have left” (Levy, p. 5), she is focusing her efforts on the effect, not cause, of such behaviour.
In contrast with Female Chauvinist Pigs, Dove’s Campaign For Real Beauty and The Self-Esteem Fund are provocative initiatives that are single-handedly challenging our notions of beauty. By demonstrating the media’s role in distorting our perceptions of beauty, Dove attacks the Female Chauvinist Pig at her source. With tag lines like “Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does” and “Every girl deserves to feel beautiful just the way she is” (Unilever, 2010), Dove acknowledges that women are not responsible for creating this problem, they are the victims of it. Naomi Wolf , author of The Beauty Myth, confirmed this idea when she concluded, “Girls are still understood more clearly as victims of culture and sexuality than as cultural and sexual creators,” (Wolf, 1991).
In this particular Dove campaign known as Evolution, Dove fights the notion that you have to be caught flashing a camera in order to be considered a member of Raunch Culture. Instead, Dove considers the mundane, daily regimen of makeup and diets to be the real culprit. Take eating disorders, for example. Time Magazine reports a staggering statistic that, “80% of all children have been on a diet by the time that they have reached the fourth grade,” (The Alliance for Eating Disorders Awareness, 2005). While this is the age at which these unhealthy behaviours begin, their intensity and destruction only progresses with age, “According to a recent study, over 1/2 the females between the ages of 18-25 would prefer to be run over by a truck then be fat, and 2/3 surveyed would rather be mean or stupid” (The Alliance for Eating Disorders Awareness, 2005).
While Levy is quick to criticize those women with flawless bodies who feel strong and empowered enough to flaunt them, she ignores the fact that their perfect bodies are a direct product of the pressures they have been under their whole lives. The bombshells recruited for Girls Gone Wild might not exist if society had not valued their desired “assets” to begin with. Levy acknowledges this obsession with the “ideal body” in her reference to the newest form of cosmetic surgery: vaginoplasty, “The surgeries are not intended to enhance sexual pleasure. They are designed exclusively to render a vagina “attractive”, (Levy, 23). Yet here again, Levy focuses on the overt, the absurd, the demonstrative…but what about all the botox injections, tummy tucks, and face lifts? Reconstructing one’s vagina should not be considered any more outrageous than altering one’s face.
It is not that Levy would disagree with the efforts of Dove; I do not doubt that she would applaud them. The fact that these “subtle” actions are off her radar, however, is dangerous. Unless all women listen to Dove’s campaign and begin to see themselves as unique, beautiful creatures just the way they are, Levy does not stand a chance of stopping women from entering Raunch Culture. Raunch Culture should not be seen as feminism’s enemy, but rather as the ultimate symptom in America’s pursuit of beauty. Levy’s misinterpretation of post-feminism raunch is especially poignant as it highlights the trouble a feminist has in recognizing the Female Chauvinist Pig at work, let alone your average bystander.
Works Cited:
America the Beautiful: Is America Obsessed with Beauty? http://americathebeautifuldoc.com/. Accessed February 3, 2010.
Dove: Campaign for Real Beauty, http://www.dove.us/#/us_landing.aspx/. Accessed February 3, 2010.
Levy, Ariel. Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. Free Press, 2006.
Selections from Manifiesta (Naomi Wolf).
The Alliance for Eating Disorders Awareness, http://www.eatingdisorderinfo.org/. Accessed February 3, 2010.
I remember watching these youtube videos in high school. I certainly applaud Dove's campaign to bring awareness of what "true" beauty is to society. I think that Hilary brings up an extremely key point in her post: Levy does not look at how society fuels Raunch Culture; instead, she appears to focus more on the individual. As we saw in Johnson's article, though, there is certainly a dual-play between both individual and societal forces that perpetuates these behaviors. Finally, I agree with Hilary's contention that the Dove campaign would be off of Levy's radar. One of Levy's flaws is that she focuses on the extremes, rather than the middle ground.
ReplyDelete