During my summer holiday I read an interesting book entitled “Female Chauvinist Pigs” written by Ariel Levy.
In this book the author, a journalist for the New Yorker magazine, examines the rise of what she, and others, have dubbed the “raunch culture”.
She however is trying to understand what makes women of today’s America willing, even enthusiastic, collaborators in their own degradation.
The author catalogues the various examples of this relentless reduction of women to caricatures derived from the porn industry and the strip clubs.
What is fascinating is how powerful ladies in the media and the corporations actively promote the behavior of women like drunken, sexually aroused yobs as a way for them to “be one of the guys”, a way for them to be funny and “with it” and cool.
The book is full of interviews with these women and the women who appear in the various shows popular on US satellite channels such as “Girls Gone Wild” where ordinary young women are encouraged to expose themselves lewdly in the street to the wild baying and cheering of ordinary young men. All this being, of course, captured on film and broadcast for the amusement of American men.
She tries to explain why the various biographies of porn stars and strippers now regularly top the best-sellers lists in the US. And why millions of American women practice “pole dancing” as a new form of aerobics.
The author questions why female Olympic athletes feel compelled to expose themselves in such magazine as “Playboy” while their male counterparts do not.
She also shows the numerous statistics of women undergoing plastic surgery to enhance various bits of themselves to conform to porn star dimensions.
What went wrong in the women’s movement? This is the question the author is trying to explain and she brings interesting history of the women’s movement in its heyday in the ‘60s and ‘70s and how their alliance with the sexual revolution movement led them to their current predicament.
This is a salutary book and a thoughtful one and one that women in this and other Muslim countries would do well to read, especially, with the enormous pressure being brought on us to conform to Western sexual mores.
I leave you with the image of the poor American woman gyrating around a metal pole stripping off various bits of her clothing to the baying of the assembled male compatriots — desperately seeking their approval and respect by showing them her private parts, while, they all laugh and laugh.
