female chauvinist pigs

'I first noticed it several years ago. I would turn on television and find strippers in G-strings explaining how best to lap dance a man into 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 I felt like we used to go out.

Charlie’s Angel’s, the film remake of the quintessential jiggle show, opened at number one in 2000 and made $125 million in theatres nationally, reinvigorating the interest of men and women alike in leggy crime fighting. Its stars, who kept talking about ‘strong women’ and ‘empowerment’, were dressed in alternating soft-porn styles – as massage parlour geishas, dominatrixes, yodelling Heidis in alpine bustiers. (The summer sequel in 2003 – in which the Angel’s perilous mission required them to perform stripteases – pulled in another $100 million domestically). In my own industry, magazines, a porny new genre called the Lad Mag, which included titles such as Maxim, FHM and Stuff, was hitting the stands and becoming a huge success by delivering what Playboy had only occasionally managed to capture: greased celebrities in little scraps of fabric humping the floor.  

… this new raunch culture didn’t mark the death of feminism, they told me; 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, we no longer needed to worry about objectification and misogyny. Instead, it was time for us to join the frat party of pop culture, where men had been enjoying themselves all along.

When I asked female viewers and readers what they got out of raunch culture, I heard similar things about empowering miniskirts and feminist strippers, and so on, but I also heard something else. They wanted to be ‘one of the guys’; they hoped to be experienced ‘like a man.’ Going to strip clubs or talking about porn stars was a way of showing themselves and the men around them that they weren’t ‘prissy little women’ or ‘girly-girls.’ Besides, they told me, it was all in fun, all tongue-in-cheek, and for me to regard this bacchanal as problematic would be old-school and uncool.

I tried to get with the program, bit 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 Pamela Anderson empowering? And how is imitating a stripper or a porn star – a woman whose job it is to imitate arousal in the first place – going to render us sexually liberated?'

ariel levy

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susan brownmiller:

'further, "females more often than males reported 'disgust' and 'offense.'"

from whence comes this female disgust and offense? are females sexually backward or more conservative by nature? the gut distate that a majority of women feel when we look at pornography, a distaste that, incredibly, is no longer fashionable to admit, comes, i think, from the gut knowledge that we and our bodies are being stripped, exposed and contorted for the purpose of ridicule to boster that 'masculine esteem' which gets its kick and sense of power from viewing anonymous, panting play-things, adult toys, dehumanized onjects to be used, abused, broken and discarded. this, of course, is also the philosophy of rape.'

'by seeing the rapist always as a stranger, never as one of their own, and by viewing the female as a careless, dumb creature with an unfortunate tendency to stray, they exhorted, admonished and warned the female to hide herself from male eyes as much as possible. in short, they told her not to claim the privileges they reserved for themselves... the message they gave was to live a life of fear and to do it they appended the dire warning that the woman who did not follow the rules must be held responsible for her own violation.'

'but the irony, of course, is that while men successfully convinced eachother and us that women cry rape whith ease and glee, the reality is that victimized women have always been reluctant to report the crime and seek legal justice - because of the shame of public exposure, because of that complex double standard that makes a female feel culpable, even responsible, for any act of sexual aggression committed against her, because of possible retribution from the assailant, and because women have been presented with sufficiend evidence to come to the realistic conclusion that their accounts are recieved with harsh cynicism that forms the first line of male defense.'

'women have been excluded by tradition and design from all significant areas of law enforcement, from the police precinct, from the prosecutor's office, from the jury box and from the judge's bench, up to and including appellate and supreme court juristdictions, has creasted a doube handicap for rape victims seeking justice under the laws of a man's devise.'

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lighter fluid

Nancy Venable Raine describes finding the pair of underwear that she was wearing when she was raped, and her subsequent experience with anger:

"I stood up slowly, as if not to wake the forces that I had unwrapped, and went to the kitchen for a baking sheet, a can of lighter fluid, a box of long kitchen matches, and a soup spoon. I put the newspaper and its contents on the tray and slipped down the stairs and out the back hallway door. I carried everything outside to a corner of the garden near the pond where the ducks were gliding on the dark, still water. I placed the wood and the underpants on top of the newspaper, doused them with lighter fluid, and struck a match. I watched what happened.

Then I imagined the worst thing I have ever imagined: the man who had raped me burning up alive. I imagined his screams of agony, his hideous pain. I saw the fat under his dirty skin crackling in the flames. A terrible pleasure consumed me. "Die," I said, over and over.

Until this moment, I had not allowed myself to feel my hatred. Now my body felt huge and powerful. It felt good to be a monster, very good. My mind-all thoughts and feelings-seemed to vanish into the pleasure of the pain I gave him. His pain, my pleasure made a perfect desolation. I relished it...I thought I was fine now that I had killed my underpants."


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What felt [safe] was to tell her how furious I was that the rapist had driven me to a shrink. It was his fault I was falling apart. I told Helen that my rape was 'worse than death,' and that I felt the rapist had destroyed my life, that I could never rebuild it. 'Never, never,' I said. I hate him with my entire being. I wanted to see him dead. I wanted to kill him myself. I had never expressed my rage to another human being this directly. It was no longer deflected onto someone or something else in my life. It was the rapist I hated that night.

N. Raine

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“To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren't is to learn inequality in little ways all day long. So even if we agree that sexual imagery is in fact a language, it is clearly one that is already heavily edited to protect men's sexual--and hence social--confidence while undermining that of women.”

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One result of turning a blind eye to the horrors of the world, because you can stand only so much, is that you end up forgetting that each individual who is subjected to heinous suffering is your fellow, your equal, and that you could have been in their shoes, and that he or she could one day have become your friend.

Michel Fitoussi Stolen Lives: Twenty

Years in a Desert Jail

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women did not invent dust. the sticky residue that collects on the kettle does not come out of women's vaginas. it is not oestrogen that covers the dinner plates in tomato sauce, fishfinger crumbs and bits of mash. my uterus did not run upstairs and throw all of the kids' clothes on the floor and put jam on the banister. and it's not my tits that have skewed the global economy towards domestic work for women.

caitlin moran