Ariel Levy: “This bawdy world of boobs and gams shows how far we’ve left to go”

Ariel Levy in the 2/17/06 Guardian:

“A few years ago I noticed something strange was happening in my native US. I would turn on the television and find strippers in nipple-tassels explaining how best to lap-dance a man to orgasm. I would flip the channel and see babes in tight, tiny uniforms bouncing up and down on trampolines. Britney Spears was becoming increasingly popular and increasingly unclothed, and her undulating body ultimately became so familiar to me that I felt like we used to go out.

“In my own industry – magazines – a porny new genre called lad mags were hitting stands and becoming a huge success by delivering what Playboy had only occasionally managed to capture in the past: greased celebrities in little scraps of fabric humping the floor.

“Some odd things were happening in my social life too. People I knew (female people) liked going to strip clubs (female strippers). It was sexy and fun, they explained; it was liberating and rebellious. My best friend from college, who used to go to Take Back the Night marches on campus, had become captivated by porn stars. Only 30 years (roughly my lifetime) ago, our mothers were supposedly burning their bras and picketing Playboy, and suddenly we were getting implants and wearing the bunny logo as symbols of our liberation. How had the culture shifted so drastically in such a short period of time?

“What was even more surprising than the change itself were the responses I got when I started interviewing the men and – often – the women who edit magazines such as Maxim and produce reality television series about strippers. This new raunch culture didn’t mark the death of feminism; it was evidence that the feminist project had already been achieved. We’d “earned” the right to look at Playboy; we were “empowered” enough to get Brazilian bikini waxes. Women had come so far, I learned, that we no longer needed to worry about objectification or misogyny. Instead, it was time for us to join the frat party of pop culture where men had been enjoying themselves all along. If male chauvinist pigs were men who regarded women as pieces of meat, we would beat them at their own game and be female chauvinist pigs: women who make sex objects of other women and of ourselves.

“I tried to get with the programme, but I could never make the argument add up in my head. How is resurrecting every stereotype of female sexuality that feminism endeavoured to banish good for women? Why is labouring to look like Paris Hilton empowering? And how is imitating a stripper or a porn star – a woman whose job is to imitate arousal in the first place – going to render us sexually liberated?” ….

Read the whole thing here.