Free Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy Page A

attempt at continuing the work of the women’s movement. “Whether it’s volunteering at a women’s shelter, attending an all women’s college or a speak-out for Take Back the Night, or dancing at a strip club,” write Baumgardner and Richards, “whenever women are gathered together there is great potential for individual women, and even the location itself, to become radicalized.” They don’t explain what “radicalized” means to them, so we are left to wonder if it is their way of saying “enlightened” or “sexually charged” or if to them those are the same things. In this new formulation of raunch feminism, stripping is as valuable to elevating womankind as gaining an education or supporting rape victims. Throwing a party where women grind against each other in their underwear while fully-clothed men watch them is suddenly part of the same project as marching on Washington for reproductive rights. According to Baumgardner and Richards, “watching TV shows (Xena! Buffy!) can…contain feminism in action”—just as CAKE bills their parties as “feminism in action.” Based on these examples, it would seem raunch feminism in action is pretty easy to achieve: The basic requirements are hot girls and small garments.
    I had occasion to talk to Erica Jong, one of the most famous sex-positive feminists—“one of the most interviewed people in the world,” as she’s put it—on the thirtieth anniversary of her novel Fear of Flying. “I was standing in the shower the other day, picking up my shampoo,” she said. “It’s called ‘Dumb Blonde.’ I thought, Thirty years ago you could not have sold this. I think we have lost consciousness of the way our culture demeans women.” She was quick to tell me that she “wouldn’t pass a law against the product or call the PC police.” But, she said, “let’s not kid ourselves that this is liberation. The women who buy the idea that flaunting your breasts in sequins is power—I mean, I’m for all that stuff—but let’s not get so into the tits and ass that we don’t notice how far we haven’t come. Let’s not confuse that with real power. I don’t like to see women fooled.”
    Nouvelle raunch feminists are not concocting this illogic all by themselves. Some of it they learned in school. A fervid interest in raunchy representations of sex and a particular brand of women’s studies are both faddish in academia now, and the two are frequently presented side by side, as if they formed a seamless, comprehensible totality. I went to Wesleyan University at the height of the “politically correct” craze in the nineties. Wesleyan was the kind of school that had coed showers, on principle. There were no “fresh men,” only “frosh.” There were no required courses, but there was a required role-play as part of frosh orientation in which we had to stand up and say “I’m a homosexual” and “I’m an Asian-American,” so that we would understand what it felt like to be part of an oppressed group. It didn’t make a lot of sense, but such was the way of PC.
    I remember a meeting we once had, as members of the English majors committee, with the department faculty: We were there to tell them about a survey we’d given out to English majors, the majority of whom said they wanted at least one classics course to be offered at our college. We all bought the party line that such a class should never be required because that would suggest that Dead White Men were more important than female and nonwhite writers. But we figured it couldn’t do any harm for them to offer one canonical literature course for those of us who wanted to grasp the references in the contemporary Latin American poetry we were reading in every other class. It seemed like a pretty reasonable request to me. After I made my pitch for it, the woman who was head of the department at that time looked at me icily and said, “I would never teach at a school that offered a course like