popular thinking

I'M NOT A FEMALE CHAUVINIST PIG: That said, I thought Ariel Levy did a great job of pointing out how young women have embraced the "raunch culture," but wish she had answered the next question: Why did they embrace raunch? When I met with Levy a couple of weeks ago for a walk and chat in Boston's North End, she said that she merely wanted to start the discussion. "I don't have some big public works program," Levy told me. She said she just hoped to show how, in a most literal sense, the Emperor had no clothes in this form of 21st-century feminism. She sure did that. She also got a lot of people talking. Not all of them like what Levy wrote. I think raising the question is important enough. But I hope that as Levy goes on her book tour, she advances the discussion to explore how raunch became so mainstream, and what the culture and the media can do to temper it.

Paris Hilton went from heiress to sex-tape infamy to TV fame, commercial pitchwoman and now to a topless photo on the cover of Vanity Fair, claiming to be sexy but not sexual.
Jenna Jameson turned her career in porn into a best-selling memoir.
These are not good things, argues Ariel Levy, the New York magazine writer and author of Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture.
"People whose job it is to fake lust shouldn't be held up as our sexual role models,'' Levy told the Herald during her book-tour visit to Boston.
Yet Levy cited lots of evidence that today's young women have embraced stripper and porn-star culture.
Preteen girls buy thong underwear, their sisters give lap dances and oral sex to boys at high school parties, while young women compete for one bachelor on "harem-style'' TV shows. Girls Gone Wild, after several years, has become mainstream enough for headline writers to use the phrase.
When Levy followed the Girls Gone Wild camera crew on spring break, she found plenty of women willing to doff their tops, all for a T-shirt and the promise that their nudity might be seen by millions of people.
What happened to feminism?
"I don't think there was a single moment,'' Levy said. "A lot of this has to do with rebellion. Nobody wants to turn into her mother.''
Mothers of today's teens and 20-somethings grew up during serious feminist times, fighting for the right to attend top colleges and hold top jobs in the 1960s and '70s.
Levy said young women who adopt strippers and porn actresses as role models thinking it is a continuation of the women's movement don't realize that they're merely advancing the objectification of women.
Rachel Kramer Bussel, who writes the Lusty Lady sex column for The Village Voice, said "being raunchy is a quick and easy way for young women to get attention, and I'm sure many of them, especially the younger ones, don't necessarily get the full implications of their actions.''
But not everything about so-called raunch is bad, Bussel said.
"When I was little, my friends and I were dressing up as Madonna,'' she said. "We were singing 'Like a Virgin' and we loved Madonna, not necessarily because we wanted to be total sexpots, but because there was an allure to that imagery, that there was something fun and exciting about it. I think that's what a lot of young women are tapping into, and that part is not necessarily a bad thing. But how that message is taken and what women are told their bodies are good for can warp that very joyous feeling into something more sinister.''
The key, she said, is for parents to explain the positive and negative aspects of sexuality.
Levy's book is not the only one to point out how American attitudes toward sex and sexuality have changed in the past 20 years. Some authors and critics argue that culture is rebelling against Republican politics or sex-education policies that encourage abstinence.
Alecia Oleyourryk, editor of Boink - the sex magazine by and for Boston University students - said she believes Americans have become more European in dealing with topics that were once taboo and that women are taking more control of their own sexuality.
The third issue of Boink, published last week, displays naked men and women in both straight and gay settings.
"I think that women are recognizing what's been going on for a while, things that were misogynistic, owning them and letting them empower them in some way,'' Oleyourryk said.
On the other hand, she also acknowledged that repetitive imagery of women as objects in music videos and late-night shows - from Girls Gone Wild to The Man Show to The Howard Stern Show - might have altered expectations for girls.
"Nobody is shocked by something they are used to,'' she said.

Related: Raunch on the rise: Porn-star culture spurs young girls to sex it up, author says (Boston Herald)

Read Slate's three-day discussion about Levy's book and other tomes that talk about the pornification of America.

Related: Ariel Levy's official author page.

Here is the expanded e-mail dialogue between myself and Bussel...
Q: 1) Why do you think young women (not all, I know, but a good many) have embraced the raunch culture? 2) Is that a bad thing?

A: I think in part it’s a desire for attention. Being“raunchy” is a quick and easy way for young women to get attention, and I’m sure many of them, especially the younger ones, don’t necessarily get the full implications of their actions. I also think young men are just as shafted by the idea that they’re supposed to be “on” all the time – that they have to act in certain macho ways to get ahead. Whether it’s good or bad really depends. Certainly, there are extreme cases, but I think it’s not so simple to just say it’s all terrible. I don’t think the impulse to want to be looked at is terrible, but certainly girls and young women are becoming sexualized and sexually active at increasingly younger ages and the main problem is that they don’t necessarily know what it means or how their own pleasure fits in. I think everyone has some part of them that wants to be “raunchy” and that it can build one’s self-esteem, to play out that part of ourselves. Look at Britney Spears – she want from saying she’d be a virgin till she got married, to being all sexed out, and is now a mom. I’m not saying Britney should be anyone’s role model, just that people are more complex than one singular image. When I was little, my friends and I were dressing up as Madonna. We were singing “Like a Virgin” and we loved Madonna, not necessarily because we wanted to be total sexpots, but because there was an allure to that imagery, there was something fun and exciting about it. I think that’s what a lot of young women are tapping into, and that part is not necessarily a bad thing, but how that message is taken and what women are told their bodies are good for, can warp that very joyous feeling into something more sinister.

Q: 3) If so, how can society find some middle ground? Or 3a) Is this just a generational shift, which will likely shift back with the next round of kids?

A: I think parents definitely need to step up to theplate and be honest with kids. We can’t lie to them and say sex (or drugs) are pure evil, because the taboo is always going to be a strong pull. I think we need to show them the good and bad sides, the ways that being “sexy” is different than being sexually active, the ways to appreciate their bodies and themselves that do justice to all of who they are. I don’t know if it’s a generational shift or not, or what will happen, but in terms of finding a middle ground, perhaps women have been so bold in (re)claiming our sexual power because we haven’t really had the chance to before. Maybe some of this is an over-the-top way of making it known that women are sexual, too, and that once that’s recognized, it’ll be a little more balanced. I don’t think it’s fair or helpful, though, to simply characterize women who are publicly sexual as “chauvinist pigs.” I don’t think it’s necessarily the same, whether as an experience or in what it means, for a woman to get a lap dance. Women aren’t simply claiming “men’s space” or power, but are often transforming it with their own reactions, and with new eyes; we may look at the same images but feel totally differently. I don’t think the answer is to try to make women less publicly sexual, but to recognize that we are sexual AND so many other things. We shouldn’t have to be totally asexual to achieve power, and we shouldn’t be thought of as “less” (smart, strong, important) because we dare to stake a claim to our sexuality. I think there needs to be balance in how women are looked at, by men and by women, so that we don’t simply jump to these simplistic definitions and binaries.