// essays //
Fall 2005
Paris Hilton, Ariel Levy, and Me: Flirting with Female Chauvinism
Blythe Sheldon
About two years ago, offices were momentarily enticed by the three-minute clip of Paris Hilton's night-vision sex scandal. It was my second or third week interning at a downtown art magazine. Only minutes before we huddled around an iBook, editors had been discussing the appeal of the upcoming cover photo featuring a model with her head thrown back and mouth, agape. We then watched the clip of Paris, which was visually akin to a reverse negative — something that would not have seemed out of place in our magazine's fashion spreads. In the clip's final scene, the atmosphere turns to an acid green. Paris' raccoon eyes stare blankly at the camera, as she performs oral sex on her then boyfriend, Rick Soloman.
The hip and haute men around me commented, "Why is she holding it like that?" "Unimpressed."
Ariel Levy's recent wake up call to the Paris Hiltons of the world, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, highlights the identity conundrum women find themselves in. By appropriating the tropes of oftentimes misogynist popular culture, while at the same time considering themselves "empowered," a growing number of women are reducing themselves to sex objects. While many regard this appropriation as an extension of feminism, such behavior seems to subvert the movement's earlier efforts. What is often termed "second wave" or "equity" feminism coincided with the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and continued to last through the 1980s. It primarily sought to raise awareness of the inequalities that existed between men and women, and win equal access to jobs, salaries, and education. The behavior of female chauvinist pigs, of wearing Manolo Blahnik stilettos to assert shapely legs and an expansive bank account, or commenting on Paris' prowess . in other words, appropriating an overtly masculine sensibility . is not the freedom that Gloria Steinem had in mind. What it amounts to is mutual objectification on the part of men and women. The second wave sought equality for women, but such equality has become perverted.
A curious phenomenon occurred along with the Hilton sex tape: major news outlets were paying attention to a celebrity who did not deserve the attention. Journalists criticized the sex tape as if it were a film, "Not even the hint of a plot," scoffed the New York Observer; "unimaginative," shrugged Frank Rich in the New York Times.1 What, in fact, had she done? Media columnist Cynthia Cotts pointed out in the Village Voice, the only difference between Paris Hilton's unauthorized video and other female celebrities that have had nude photos surface on the internet is that Paris' career is not based upon artistic merit of any kind. Instead, she has made significant contributions to the celebrity party circuit by raising the bar on what passes for ridiculous.miniskirts sans panties. Paris does not seem to enjoy sex, but she can look sexy. Most importantly, she knows how to work it, and "working it" implies playing into and perpetuating the culture of hotness. Levy argues that a conscious effort to mobilize one's sexuality does not necessarily amount to liberation. She writes, "There is a widespread assumption that simply because my generation of women has the good fortune to live in a world touched by the feminist movement, that means everything we do is magically imbued with its agenda. It doesn't work that way. .Raunchy' and .liberated' are not synonyms."2
Female chauvinist pigs flash the paparazzi (or anyone else willing to watch) and use explicit language because they think their sexuality affords them power. Levy cites porn queen Jenna Jameson's comment, "Sexuality became a tool for so much more than just connecting with a boy I was attracted to. I realized it could serve any purpose I need. It was a weapon I could exploit mercilessly."3 Levy relates that Jameson was sexually abused multiple times, and that she tends to describe her sexual encounters as "dissociated exchanges of power." She connects Jameson's past trauma, which weakened her, and the attempt to overcome it by taking on an active role that she finds emboldening. But is it really? Jameson's immediate link between sex and power seems to imply a victory over dissatisfaction with even greater dissatisfaction. Levy points out Jameson's comment that to this day, she cannot bear to watch her own scenes. They still conjure up painful memories. Jameson views all sex as a means, not as an end. While the end result of power is one of many motivations for sex, pleasure and romance are glaringly absent from Jameson's explanation. Similarly, porn and fashion magazines intersect in the way in which they appeal to desire but stop short of satisfaction. They focus on superficial sexual attractiveness.
Around the same time in which I interned for the fashion magazine, I briefly dated a boy who also reduced sex and relationships to business transactions. He worked at an investment bank and reveled in the affectations associated with wealth, whether it was hip-hop stars' excess or the simple fact he can afford to pay for my dinner. In August, after I hadn't been dating him for a year, he broke the silence to direct my attention to a John Pareles' article in the New York Times on the role of "thug love" in hip-hop. It begins:
Thug love is a lot more complicated than old-fashioned romance. A man is supposed to be a street warrior first, a superstud second, a partner as a distant third. Even when he's making promises, his fidelity is reserved for his posse, not his lover. A woman is supposed to be ultra-sexy and ready to give her all for her man, but also practical, selective and psychologically bulletproof.4Call me a "hater," but the modern day phenomenon of "thug love" seems to reproduce archaic gender roles and, like Jameson's comment, neglect pleasure. This new kind of romance sounds deplorably unromantic. Pareles' mockery of "thug love" and my (skinny, white) ex-boyfriend's vaguely unsettling, ironic identification with it raise questions of how hip-hop culture and racial stereotypes have informed the male response to female chauvinism. In a media-saturated culture dominated by porn stars and rappers, classic male chauvinism has greeted female chauvinism with even more chauvinism.
But Levy's book only points out these problems. She does not propose a way to account for our widespread sex obsession, or a solution to the uncoupling of sexuality and desire. As an example, the purportedly transgressive behavior of making out with girl friends in public for men has become normalized.from Britney Spears and Madonna, to the faux-lesbian Russian pop duo t.A.T.u., to whatever transpires Saturday nights at the West End. The omnipresence of such practices has created another dichotomy, where the only alternative to reducing oneself to raunchy behavior is to be uncomfortable or uptight about one's sexuality.5
Underlying Levy's dichotomy is the political assumption that equates sexual uptightness here with conservatism. She hints at it when she describes the "coolness" factor. Levy discusses Sheila Nevins, a twenty-six year veteran of HBO and president of documentary and family programming, who, when questioned about the late night "docu-soap" G-String Divas, replied, "You're talking fifties talk! Get with the program! I love the sex stuff, I love it!"6 She is a high-powered, smart woman . she "gets it," but can't get out of it. Nevins seems anachronistic as a middle-aged woman producing a trashy program that can be viewed as degrading to women, but the issue here is beyond appearances. There are implicit expectations among liberal-minded people that such progressiveness applies to all areas of their lives. At a time of HIV/AIDS and religious fundamentalism, when the majority of public school sex education programs that are granted federal funding are those which preach abstinence until marriage, and when the twice-failed "Marriage Protection Amendment" is trying to be moved to the Judiciary Committee, there is a fear among liberals that an unwillingness to condone everything lumped under the umbrella of "sex positivism" will be met with contempt.
I've definitely felt the weight of these expectations. My friend Tristan is practically my de-facto girlfriend. It is totally hot. We spent summer nights hidden away in dark bars, thinking and complaining about boys, involving boys, all sorts of plans being hatched over wine . and of course, us, alone at a table, looking as though we are on a date. She mentioned a two-month phase of bisexual ambiguity, which meant lesbian night at a bar down the street from her apartment. "I'd just make out with them," she explained. "Girls are such better kissers than guys. You have to try it."
My roommate was also going through a similar phase at the time. She had told me that she's just experimenting, that she really prefers men. I knew she occasionally made out with girls, but I was still a little surprised when, after an outing to a lesbian bar, she didn't come home the next morning. When she asked if I wanted to join her and the woman whom she was seeing at the same Lower East Side bar where they had first met, I figured this would be an excellent opportunity. It was a pressing matter, Cosmo-worthy: are girls better kissers than guys? The attention was flattering. The woman in the black tank top was very pretty, and though I was glad to hear that her approach to relationships can be summed up by Janis Joplin's "Get It While You Can," I just couldn't bring myself to make out with her, or any of the other women. I felt bad. Was I was a bad feminist? A liberal failure? "Just do it" was the response of my female friends, who have, of course, done it.
When it comes to sexuality, "Just do it," is not an appropriate explanation. As one friend put it, "I used to kiss lots of girls in high school. And really, I stopped doing it once I thought about how I was doing it to impress boys and not because I was bi." Now she would rather no physical contact than completely emotionless contact. Does having personal standards make one any less liberated?
At a time when feminism has become a term that can apply to the anti-sex of Andrea Dworkin as much as to the pro-sex of adult filmmaker Candida Royalle, it's hard to distinguish between apparent and genuine liberation. It is healthy to keep an open mind, but too much open-mindedness and your brain might fall out. In some sense, this is what has happened to female chauvinist pigs. Their desire to have fun and be sexually empowered is reasonable, but in co-opting male chauvinism, they misguidedly subvert the original feminist message. Liberation is not about performing meaningless blow-jobs for a camera. It is about respecting one's needs and desires. In the meantime, I'll keep table dancing, but still won't kiss the girls.
1 Cynthia Cotts. "Fame By Numbers: In Which Paris Is Constructed (and deconstructed)." Village Voice, 3-9 December 2003.
2 Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (New York: Free Press, 2005) 5.
3 Ibid., p.183.
4 Pareles, John. "Critics Choice: New CDs." The New York Times, 15 August 2005: E1+.
5 Levy 40.
The hip and haute men around me commented, "Why is she holding it like that?" "Unimpressed."
Ariel Levy's recent wake up call to the Paris Hiltons of the world, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, highlights the identity conundrum women find themselves in. By appropriating the tropes of oftentimes misogynist popular culture, while at the same time considering themselves "empowered," a growing number of women are reducing themselves to sex objects. While many regard this appropriation as an extension of feminism, such behavior seems to subvert the movement's earlier efforts. What is often termed "second wave" or "equity" feminism coincided with the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and continued to last through the 1980s. It primarily sought to raise awareness of the inequalities that existed between men and women, and win equal access to jobs, salaries, and education. The behavior of female chauvinist pigs, of wearing Manolo Blahnik stilettos to assert shapely legs and an expansive bank account, or commenting on Paris' prowess . in other words, appropriating an overtly masculine sensibility . is not the freedom that Gloria Steinem had in mind. What it amounts to is mutual objectification on the part of men and women. The second wave sought equality for women, but such equality has become perverted.
A curious phenomenon occurred along with the Hilton sex tape: major news outlets were paying attention to a celebrity who did not deserve the attention. Journalists criticized the sex tape as if it were a film, "Not even the hint of a plot," scoffed the New York Observer; "unimaginative," shrugged Frank Rich in the New York Times.1 What, in fact, had she done? Media columnist Cynthia Cotts pointed out in the Village Voice, the only difference between Paris Hilton's unauthorized video and other female celebrities that have had nude photos surface on the internet is that Paris' career is not based upon artistic merit of any kind. Instead, she has made significant contributions to the celebrity party circuit by raising the bar on what passes for ridiculous.miniskirts sans panties. Paris does not seem to enjoy sex, but she can look sexy. Most importantly, she knows how to work it, and "working it" implies playing into and perpetuating the culture of hotness. Levy argues that a conscious effort to mobilize one's sexuality does not necessarily amount to liberation. She writes, "There is a widespread assumption that simply because my generation of women has the good fortune to live in a world touched by the feminist movement, that means everything we do is magically imbued with its agenda. It doesn't work that way. .Raunchy' and .liberated' are not synonyms."2
Female chauvinist pigs flash the paparazzi (or anyone else willing to watch) and use explicit language because they think their sexuality affords them power. Levy cites porn queen Jenna Jameson's comment, "Sexuality became a tool for so much more than just connecting with a boy I was attracted to. I realized it could serve any purpose I need. It was a weapon I could exploit mercilessly."3 Levy relates that Jameson was sexually abused multiple times, and that she tends to describe her sexual encounters as "dissociated exchanges of power." She connects Jameson's past trauma, which weakened her, and the attempt to overcome it by taking on an active role that she finds emboldening. But is it really? Jameson's immediate link between sex and power seems to imply a victory over dissatisfaction with even greater dissatisfaction. Levy points out Jameson's comment that to this day, she cannot bear to watch her own scenes. They still conjure up painful memories. Jameson views all sex as a means, not as an end. While the end result of power is one of many motivations for sex, pleasure and romance are glaringly absent from Jameson's explanation. Similarly, porn and fashion magazines intersect in the way in which they appeal to desire but stop short of satisfaction. They focus on superficial sexual attractiveness.
Around the same time in which I interned for the fashion magazine, I briefly dated a boy who also reduced sex and relationships to business transactions. He worked at an investment bank and reveled in the affectations associated with wealth, whether it was hip-hop stars' excess or the simple fact he can afford to pay for my dinner. In August, after I hadn't been dating him for a year, he broke the silence to direct my attention to a John Pareles' article in the New York Times on the role of "thug love" in hip-hop. It begins:
Thug love is a lot more complicated than old-fashioned romance. A man is supposed to be a street warrior first, a superstud second, a partner as a distant third. Even when he's making promises, his fidelity is reserved for his posse, not his lover. A woman is supposed to be ultra-sexy and ready to give her all for her man, but also practical, selective and psychologically bulletproof.4Call me a "hater," but the modern day phenomenon of "thug love" seems to reproduce archaic gender roles and, like Jameson's comment, neglect pleasure. This new kind of romance sounds deplorably unromantic. Pareles' mockery of "thug love" and my (skinny, white) ex-boyfriend's vaguely unsettling, ironic identification with it raise questions of how hip-hop culture and racial stereotypes have informed the male response to female chauvinism. In a media-saturated culture dominated by porn stars and rappers, classic male chauvinism has greeted female chauvinism with even more chauvinism.
But Levy's book only points out these problems. She does not propose a way to account for our widespread sex obsession, or a solution to the uncoupling of sexuality and desire. As an example, the purportedly transgressive behavior of making out with girl friends in public for men has become normalized.from Britney Spears and Madonna, to the faux-lesbian Russian pop duo t.A.T.u., to whatever transpires Saturday nights at the West End. The omnipresence of such practices has created another dichotomy, where the only alternative to reducing oneself to raunchy behavior is to be uncomfortable or uptight about one's sexuality.5
Underlying Levy's dichotomy is the political assumption that equates sexual uptightness here with conservatism. She hints at it when she describes the "coolness" factor. Levy discusses Sheila Nevins, a twenty-six year veteran of HBO and president of documentary and family programming, who, when questioned about the late night "docu-soap" G-String Divas, replied, "You're talking fifties talk! Get with the program! I love the sex stuff, I love it!"6 She is a high-powered, smart woman . she "gets it," but can't get out of it. Nevins seems anachronistic as a middle-aged woman producing a trashy program that can be viewed as degrading to women, but the issue here is beyond appearances. There are implicit expectations among liberal-minded people that such progressiveness applies to all areas of their lives. At a time of HIV/AIDS and religious fundamentalism, when the majority of public school sex education programs that are granted federal funding are those which preach abstinence until marriage, and when the twice-failed "Marriage Protection Amendment" is trying to be moved to the Judiciary Committee, there is a fear among liberals that an unwillingness to condone everything lumped under the umbrella of "sex positivism" will be met with contempt.
I've definitely felt the weight of these expectations. My friend Tristan is practically my de-facto girlfriend. It is totally hot. We spent summer nights hidden away in dark bars, thinking and complaining about boys, involving boys, all sorts of plans being hatched over wine . and of course, us, alone at a table, looking as though we are on a date. She mentioned a two-month phase of bisexual ambiguity, which meant lesbian night at a bar down the street from her apartment. "I'd just make out with them," she explained. "Girls are such better kissers than guys. You have to try it."
My roommate was also going through a similar phase at the time. She had told me that she's just experimenting, that she really prefers men. I knew she occasionally made out with girls, but I was still a little surprised when, after an outing to a lesbian bar, she didn't come home the next morning. When she asked if I wanted to join her and the woman whom she was seeing at the same Lower East Side bar where they had first met, I figured this would be an excellent opportunity. It was a pressing matter, Cosmo-worthy: are girls better kissers than guys? The attention was flattering. The woman in the black tank top was very pretty, and though I was glad to hear that her approach to relationships can be summed up by Janis Joplin's "Get It While You Can," I just couldn't bring myself to make out with her, or any of the other women. I felt bad. Was I was a bad feminist? A liberal failure? "Just do it" was the response of my female friends, who have, of course, done it.
When it comes to sexuality, "Just do it," is not an appropriate explanation. As one friend put it, "I used to kiss lots of girls in high school. And really, I stopped doing it once I thought about how I was doing it to impress boys and not because I was bi." Now she would rather no physical contact than completely emotionless contact. Does having personal standards make one any less liberated?
At a time when feminism has become a term that can apply to the anti-sex of Andrea Dworkin as much as to the pro-sex of adult filmmaker Candida Royalle, it's hard to distinguish between apparent and genuine liberation. It is healthy to keep an open mind, but too much open-mindedness and your brain might fall out. In some sense, this is what has happened to female chauvinist pigs. Their desire to have fun and be sexually empowered is reasonable, but in co-opting male chauvinism, they misguidedly subvert the original feminist message. Liberation is not about performing meaningless blow-jobs for a camera. It is about respecting one's needs and desires. In the meantime, I'll keep table dancing, but still won't kiss the girls.
1 Cynthia Cotts. "Fame By Numbers: In Which Paris Is Constructed (and deconstructed)." Village Voice, 3-9 December 2003.
2 Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (New York: Free Press, 2005) 5.
3 Ibid., p.183.
4 Pareles, John. "Critics Choice: New CDs." The New York Times, 15 August 2005: E1+.
5 Levy 40.
Blythe Sheldon is a Columbia senior majoring in anthropology. She only dates feminists.