Early this month, after a federal court struck down Seattle's
17-year moratorium on new strip clubs, the leaders of the
notoriously liberal city—fearing an onslaught of new venues—opted
to make them as unsexy as possible.
In a vote
that made international headlines, the Seattle City Council passed
strict new rules for strip clubs. The Associated Press noted that
there would be no more lap dances, nor dollar bills placed in
G-strings:
“Under
these rules, dancers would have to stay 4 feet away from customers,
private rooms would be barred, customers couldn’t give money
directly to entertainers, and the minimum lighting would be
increased”—think parking-garage brightness.
 |
When she
describes the sordid scenes at a 'Girls Gone Wild' video shoot...
her attention to detail puts the reader in the picture. |
Female Chauvinist
Pigs, Ariel Levy's dissection of what she calls America's
"raunch culture," lists at $25—which I'd venture is about the same
as one of Seattle's newly sanitized, no-longer-lap dances. If you
live near the Emerald City and want to learn what emotions underlie
women's sexual expression, your money would be far better spent on
five minutes with a talkative "adult entertainer" than on Levy's
pretentious excuse for biting social commentary.
Compared
to a Seattle strip-club special, Female Chauvinist Pigs is
the literary equivalent of the apocryphal Mexican donkey show. Levy
promises bold insights into the psychological underpinnings of
women's deepest and kinkiest sexual desires, only to drop the
reader in a dead-end alley.
The Free
Press's promotion of the book relies heavily on the "wow" factor:
At last, a liberal young woman who dares challenge the fruits of
her peers' "sex-positive" feminism. The publisher is counting on an
audience too young to remember Levy's idol, Susan Brownmiller,
who—in fighting pornography—believed she was, in Levy's words,
"liberating women from degrading sexual stereotypes and a culture
of male domination and”—consequently—“making room for greater
female sexual pleasure."
In other
words, while Levy, like Brownmiller, believes pornography creates a
culture that permits and even encourages violence against women,
she has nothing against sexy photos of nekkid women. She writes
quite affectionately of Candida Royalle, the prolific producer of
female-friendly sex films. Levy's beef with pornography stems
solely from its embodiment of male fantasies. The idea that the
very nature of pornography—whether produced by women or not—demeans
human dignity, is never addressed, and indeed, it appears to have
no meaning to Levy.
|
Levy blames
conservatives for women's desire to assume male-created sexual
stereotypes. |
The author is a
contributing editor for New York magazine, and her
reporting shows a talent for wry observation. When she describes
the sordid scenes at a "Girls Gone Wild" video shoot or a New York
City sex party, her great attention to detail puts the reader in
the picture. These you-are-there sections are the book's strongest
points.
Unfortunately, Levy is determined to synthesize her anecdotes into
social criticism. To make that leap, she tries to widen her
net to address deeper social issues—and fails miserably. The
farther she stretches, the more her shoddy research shows
through.
The weak
spots are evident when the author looks for backing for her
philosophy—and when she doesn't find it, either makes it up, or
finds a straw man to knock down.
Early on,
Levy establishes her liberal credentials by arguing that the Left
doesn't have a lock on raunch culture: Conservative Middle America
made Paris Hilton a star. A fair point—but then she can't leave
well enough alone:
“The
values people vote for are not necessarily the same values they
live by. No region of the United States has a higher divorce rate
than the Bible Belt. (The divorce rate in these southern states is
nearly fifty percent above the national average.)”
The source
for Levy's statistics is a New York Times article which,
in turn, doesn't list its source. But the slightest research would
have turned up to question the
Times' statistics. As Maggie Gallagher noted in her
article debunking the
Times piece:
"In 2001, Massachusetts had a lower-than-average divorce rate (2.4
per 1,000 residents, compared to a national average of 4 per 1,000
residents). But it also had a lower-than-average marriage rate: 6.4
per 1,000 residents vs. 8.4 in the national average. Texas was the
exact opposite: a higher-than-average crude divorce rate and a
higher-than-average marriage rate."
|
That the
very nature of pornography demeans human dignity is never
addressed. |
When the conversation goes
further into the Planned Parenthood agenda, Levy goes into full
propaganda mode. "We are pouring an enormous amount of money into
abstinence-only education—that is, sexual education that promotes
virginity and discredits or disregards contraception—despite the
fact that not a single study has shown this approach works.”
Levy
doesn't give a source for her sweeping generalization—and, indeed,
no source exists. With apologies to Al Franken, Ariel Levy is
a skinny little liar.
A number
of studies show the effectiveness of abstinence education, and a
simple online search would have turned them up—like a study in the
April 2003 Adolescent and Family Health journal which
found that increased abstinence among teens was the major cause of
declining birth and pregnancy rates among single teenage girls. But
actual evidence would get in the way of Levy's true intent: to
blame conservatives for women's desire to assume male-created
sexual stereotypes.
"Our
national love of porn and pole dancing is not the byproduct of a
free and easy society with an earthy acceptance of sex," Levy
writes. Would that it were! No, "[i]t is a desperate stab at
freewheeling eroticism in a time and place characterized by intense
anxiety."
Hmmm. And
who do you think might be the cause of this anxiety?
Oh, I
don't know ... could it be....
BUSH?
"In 2004,
our forty-second president, George W...."
Ha! What
do I win?
Levy goes
on.... "proposed an amendment ... to forever ban gay marriage"...
blah blah blah...
Here we
go: "...If half this country feels so threatened by two people of
the same gender being in love and having sex (and, incidentally,
enjoying equal protection under the law), that they turn their
attention—during wartime—to blocking rights already denied to
homosexuals, then all the cardio striptease classes in the world
aren't going to render us sexually liberated."
Yes,
ladies, this is about sexual liberation—and the only things
preventing it are those nasty masculiheterodubyacentric fantasies
perpetuated by red-state raunch culture.
|
Marriage
never fits into Levy’s equation... it’s just a battering ram
against conservatives. |
That's why marriage
appears in Female Chauvinist Pigs only as a battering ram
against conservatives—to accuse them of divorcing too readily, or
to criticize them for allowing homosexuals to wed. The truth is,
marriage never fits into Levy's equation. Her book ends with an
answer to Freud's perennial question, referring to the things
"…Female Chauvinist Pigs want so desperately, the things women
deserve: freedom and power."
Which
brings us back to Seattle and a better use for your 25 bucks. If
you spoke with a female employee of the strip-club industry that
fuels America's raunch culture—something Levy never did—you'd find
that what they really want is the same thing women have wanted
since time immemorial: a loving husband. If they don't have one,
it's Levy's vaunted radical feminist movement—and not "our
forty-second president"—that's to blame.
Come to
think of it, Bush isn't No. 42. He's No. 43. Levy couldn't even get
that right.
