Raunch Culture ... Really?
• Gender Studies
Female Chauvinist Pigs arrives in Britain and - in at least one instance - gets a saner reception:
Ariel Levy has been taken in by exactly this second form of nostalgia, and exploits it in Female Chauvinist Pigs – a brisk essay, partly sewn together from her articles in New York magazine and elsewhere – in which she deplores the fashion among the younger generation for breast implants, thongs and scanty crop-tops, their “laddish” enthusiasm for pornography and striptease, as well as the “simplistic, plastic stereotypes of female sexuality” that pervade modern culture. What happened, she wonders, to the great days of women in dungarees?
As the generally favourable reception of this book in the United States shows, nostalgia is a very strong card to play. But it is also a cheap trick, which in this case offers as misleading an image of contemporary culture as it does of the so-called “feminist” past. New York may be different of course; but I do not get the impression (despite Levy’s claims) that women in Britian are practising lap dancing in huge numbers, or that they are flocking to strip clubs.